The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design

Father Martin Hilbert, C.O. has written a remarkable book. His ‘The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design’, an argument for seeing God’s handiwork and providence in the order and beauty of creation, covers a lot of ground: evolution, genetics, anthropology, and, of course, philosophy and theology.

The overarching purpose of the book is to ally faith with reason, which is to say, to align what the Church has definitively taught, with what science has demonstrated, or at least claimed to do so. By ‘science’ here, we mean empirical science, an investigation of the world by the testing of hypotheses.

Of all the many books I have read on this theme, Father Hilbert’s is the boldest in confronting head-on some of the more controverted and controversial doctrines of our Faith, and their implications. There is Man’s unique place in creation, with a soul made in God’s image. There is also the doctrine of monogenesis – that we are all descended one from one Adam and one Eve, some of the implications of which have been muted in recent papal teaching. As well, Father Hilbert faces the evidence for (alleged) millions of years of human existence, and our – again alleged – evolution from more primitive hominids, who may, or may not, have been ‘human’. He makes a strong case against materialistic and atheistic Darwinism, and for the literal truth of creation.

But Father Hilbert also warns against too mystical and spiritual an interpretation, in the line of the Jesuit anthropologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose work is critiqued with precision.

As the Catechism says, God created everything for man, and Father Hilbert’s purpose is to remind us of that. Some Catholics demur from the notion of ‘intelligent design’, seeing therein a return to the ‘God of the gaps’, invoking some Deus ex machina to explain natural phenomena, a Malebranchian occasionalism which, as Father Stanley Jaki warned would mean the death of science as we know it.

Father Hilbert confronts this objection, that ‘the universe is permeated by gaps…by God’s design’, including the creation of human souls, free will, miracles. As Father puts it, science cannot ‘account for every aspect of reality’. On the contrary, the very revelation that God ‘has arranged all things by measure and number and weight’ has given us the very motive of scientific inquiry into those laws God has inscribed in creation. The Book of Wisdom goes on to say, ‘from the greatness and beauty of created things, comes a corresponding perception of their Creator’.

To deny the Creator leads to many blind alleys. As one cosmologist phrased it back in a 1985 interview, ‘it may be a very long time, if ever, before we can answer the question that everyone would like to know – the question of what caused creation’.

Hmm. What ‘caused creation’ is not a scientific question, but a metaphysical and religious one. True enough, science seeks cause and effect, and that there is a consistency to such in science is itself a quasi-miracle,. As Einstein put it, ‘the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is the fact that it is comprehensible’. And in his own pursuit of understanding the cosmos, he said I want to know God’s thoughts – the rest are mere details.

All of this points to evidence of some sort of ‘intelligent design’, God writing His laws into the very structure of His creation. Science brings us to the very limit of what may be understood by our limited minds, all that which is ‘comprehensible’. A worthy endeavour indeed, and one will learn much from a perusal of Father Hilbert’s magnum opus.

Father Hilbert shows himself a very competent scientist, with graduate degrees in engineering and in the history and philosophy of science. His book – the fruit of a lifetime of study and prayer and pondering – offers a very worthy and valuable resource on the harmony of science and revelation. As Pope John Paul II said in the opening lines of his encyclical on this theme, that faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. They are never contradictory, only complementary, each fulfilling the other, as we journey towards the fullness of truth, to which God calls us all.

Publisher: Discovery Institute Press

Published: November 25, 2024

ISBN: 978-1637120712

Pages: 346

Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Martin Hilbert migrated to Canada as a child, after the Soviet invasion. He has an MASc in electrical engineering and a PhD in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Toronto. Hilbert studied for the priesthood at St. Philip’s Seminary, where he now teaches a course in the philosophy of science. He is a priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Toronto.