any criticism or even questioning of their scientific theories as "unscientific."
Fr. Stanley Jaki, who is himself a scientist, says: "Most Darwinists, consider the scientific theory of evolution as a confirmation of the following: the process of evolution is utterly purposeless, there is only matter and motion; the universe is purely material and strictly uncreated; the human mind is a mere epiphenomenon of material processes." Given such suppositions, it is not so much that Darwinism confirms materialism, as that materialism leaves Darwinism as the only, or at least the best, explanation of evolution.
So we have Richard Dawkins, who holds the Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, assuring us that biology "is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose," but are in fact the unintended products of random minor changes in matter over very long periods of time. When it is objected that such changes, being small, leave few if any traces in the fossil record, he replies that "we know a lot more about animals and plants than Darwin did, and still not a single case is known to me of a complex organ that could not have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications."
That no one has shown that a complex organ could not have been formed by minor successive changes seems to be a weak argument. Lack of proof that something could not have occurred by a certain process is hardly a convincing reason for believing that it did occur in that way, especially when the evidence for it is lacking. This amounts to saying that unless you can prove to me that evolution could not have occurred by random variation and natural selection, I will take it as given that it did because, in the framework of scientific materialism, no other explanation is admissible. Incidentally, this also admits that the Darwinist idea of evolution via successive slight modifications is not an object of scientific observation but a hypothetical explanation.
Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, argues that "the fundamental insight of modern biology is that life is based on highly specific complex interactions of molecules." Many cellular systems, he explains, are "irreducibly complex." Many molecules, that is so say, must come together and interact in certain ways before the system can work properly, or indeed at all. The components of a cellular system are intelligible only as parts of a system, and the system does not work unless the components are all in place and functioning in the right way.
The failure of so many modern minds to see the significance of Behe's proposition is the result of a philosophical inheritance with roots in medieval nominalism. It held that the class names (nomina) by which we deal with the world are only names, mental constructs by which we group individual substances for reasons of intellectual convenience. The only real entities are the individual substances, not any common natures that unite them. There is therefore no intellectually discernible natural order in the universe. For a nominalist theologian like William of Ockham, such order as we encounter is dictated by a pure act of God's sovereign will, to which we owe obedience because it is God's will, not because of its inherent intelligibility.
Later generations carried this idea further and reduced the substances themselves to their component elements, either in the laboratory or by mental analysis, then put them together again in the laboratory or in the mind. The parts thus come to be seen as more real than the wholes they form, and the quest for understanding comes to resemble the way in which we understand a machine, by taking it apart and putting it together again. It is not a great step to regarding the several species on the earth as results of accidental changes, which enjoy such stability as they have because of their ability to survive. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, the appearance of each species as it emerges is unpredictable, because the evolutionary proce