Edward T. Oakes replies:

  I am sorry if Phillip E. Johnson feels I ridiculed his citation of the
Prologue to St. John's Gospel, which was not my intention. Rather, I
criticized his use of the Prologue to effect a transition from his earlier
disquisitions on Intelligent Design in chapters 1-6 of The Wedge of Truth
to his certain identification in chapter 7 of this putative Designer as the
Logos of God, an inference supposedly based on special revelation.

  This move I hold to be illegitimate. For such an identification would
force us to claim that the Logos of God directly attached the flagellum to
the first bacterium, that the Second Person of the Trinity explicitly
toggled a complex molecule to bring about the first act of
self-replication, and that the Deity immediately altered the architecture
of one species, say a tiger, to lead to another conspicuously different
species. For each and every one of these hypotheses (when they are not
downright preposterous) the scientific evidence is exactly zero, the logic
fallacious, and the theological implications grotesque.

  To speak for a moment of the general argument of the Intelligent Design
movement before getting specifically to Professor Johnson's latest book, I
would like to make the following point clear. I agree with the advocates of
Intelligent Design at least to this extent: that Darwinism cannot explain
chemical complexity. But this point should be noncontroversial. Darwinism
cannot explain chemical complexity for the very good reason that natural
selection requires a harsh environment brought about by overpopulation.
Obviously (as Charles Darwin himself conceded) such a situation cannot
obtain when we are speaking of the first complex molecule, the first moment
of self-replication, the first cellular life form, etc.

  Moreover, since, in my view, the value of Darwin's theory was primarily
heuristic and not probative (because he lacked the knowledge of genetics
necessary to give explanatory power and certain evidence to the theory),
there can be no question that biochemistry now represents the real frontier
of evolutionary theory. I once took a private vow to the Muse of Academia
never to use the term "paradigm shift," but I grant myself a dispensation
here: I do not dispute that classical Darwinism is under great strain, and
in fact seems to be mutating to a new paradigm (see Darwinism Evolving by
David Depew and Bruce Weber for a useful account of this mutation in
process).

  Now if I were as much under the grip of the "fallacy of the false
dilemma" as Robert C. Koons seems to think, I would indeed harp on these
strains as a sure sign that all those Christians were right all along who
have been battering away at Darwinism for the past one hundred and
forty-odd years. But in fact the ones who are trapped inside a false
dilemma are theists uncomfortable with Darwin. More to the point, just as
William Paley, in his perverse way, acted as a kind of accidental midwife
to Darwin's theory, so too I think the speculations of Michael J. Behe and
William A. Dembski (and others, many of whom belong to the Discovery
Institute) will lead not to a more robust theism but to a new impetus to
find adequate explanatory laws for chemical complexity.

  Now it well might happen that, for reasons of inherent limitations (such
as the fact that the earliest life forms leave no fossil record behind, or
the impossibility of replicating in a laboratory the amount of time
necessary to see chemicals work their way toward complexity), these laws
will remain forever beyond human ken. But I suspect that if those laws do
emerge it will be via some theory roughly along the lines of the
"complexity theory" of Stuart Kauffman and other members of his Santa Fe
Institute. And I know that it will not be via Intelligent Design theory,
since the First Cause of that theory must remain by definition beyond human
specification, as even advocates of Intelligent Design admit when they
concede that we really have no idea who this remarkably clever Designer
might be without dragging in special revelation at the last minute as
their Trinitas ex machina.

  True, Complexity Theory is not without its problems. Critics such as the
biochemist Robert Shapiro accuse the advocates of Complexity Theory of
spinning an elaborate tautological amplification of the obvious: things
are complex because the universe is complex. Perhaps so. At all events, I
would at least say that, pending the outcome of later research, one should adopt
a more becomingly demure attitude toward complexity. In other words, we
should not claim that cells, molecules, bacteria, etc. are so much
irreducibly complex as, so to say, awesomely complex. Certainly, the
Intelligent Design advocates have a point: if natural laws can be shown to
be inherently unable to explain complexity, then one may legitimately
claim for the entity in question an irreducible complexity.

  Unfortunately, that was Paley's logic too; and life-forms that he, with
an annoying self-assurance, so insouciantly assumed were irreducibly
complex soon proved to be eminently explainable in other terms.

  One reason for the vigor of my review is rooted in my conviction that
Paley did far more damage to nineteenth-century Christianity than
Friedrich Nietzsche ever managed to do to twentieth-century religion. Design is the
founding axiom of Deist religion; and as Darwin's own life attests,
nothing more rapidly congeals into atheism (or agnosticism) than Deism (see James
Turner's Without God, Without Creed for an account of this declension).

  This point leads me to the objection raised by Prof. Koons and Nancy R.
Pearcey. They claim that my criticism of Phillip Johnson entails an
identical critique of St. Thomas' Fifth Way of proving the existence of
God. Not so. True, Aquinas' Fifth Way is often called the Teleological
Argument, and since designing is one form of teleological activity, Paley
and Thomas are often--but erroneously--conflated here. Their differences,
however, are crucial, for the teleology referred to in the Fifth Way
refers to all aiming activity, from an archer hitting a bull's-eye to a river
flowing downstream or a rock rolling downhill.

  It might come as some surprise to readers of this reply to learn that
Thomas' argument in the Fifth Way amounts to no more than five or six
sentences in Latin (depending on the punctuation decisions of various
editors). So short is the argument that it bears quoting in full:

    The fifth way is based on the guidedness of nature. We see that things
    lacking awareness, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is
    evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as
    to obtain the best result [which was exactly Darwin's point, by the way].
    Whence it is evident that they truly tend to goals and do not merely hit
    them by accident. But nothing lacking awareness can tend to a goal except
    it be directed by someone with awareness and understanding; the arrow, for
    example, requires an archer. Everything in nature, therefore, is directed
    to its goal by someone with understanding, and this we call God. [emphasis
    added]

  I take it as granted on all sides that while the arrow is a man-made
object and thus irreducibly complex, Thomas is focusing not on its
manufacture but on its motion as an otherwise inert object. Thus Thomas
cannot even remotely have in mind the staggering intricacies of our
modern-day neo-teleologists (and as if he could deal with such complex
issues in a mere six sentences). For this reason I consider it rather a
misnomer to call Thomas' Fifth Way the "teleological" argument, if only
because so many people, including Prof. Koons and Ms. Pearcey, conflate
teleology with design, no doubt under Paley's malign influence. Perhaps
the argument should instead be called the Argument from Order, as many Thomist
commentators call it. For really, what the argument is referring to is the
orderedness of nature as a whole, and not the itty-bitty particularities
of cellular biology.

  Another advantage of this terminological clarity emerges in the analysis
of the famous Roman Catholic apologist Monsignor Ronald Knox, who pointed
out in his sermon "The Cross-Word of Creation" (published in his 1942
collection In Soft Garments) that order must not be confused with design.
In fact, all complexity, whether designed or not, whether irreducible or
not, must first emerge out of a prior environment of order. (How that
emergence might occur naturally is the burden of Complexity Theorists to
explain. But the Intelligent Designers cannot join in that search because
they have already shut off the debate with their unverifiable, or at least
yet-to-be-verified, assertions of irreducible complexity.) And that prior
orderedness is the precise focus of Thomas' Fifth Way. Which is why Msgr.
Knox can say: "I don't believe that St. Thomas meant to use the argument
from design when he gave his fifth proof. I don't think what impressed St.
Thomas was the fact that everything conspires together for a beneficent
purpose; what impressed him was the fact that things conspire together at
all."

  Albert Einstein famously said that "the most incomprehensible thing
about the universe is that it is so comprehensible." Thomas' Fifth Way addresses
exactly that sense of wonder. The word kosmos in ancient Greek actually
means "order" and not "universe," and in their mythology the Greeks
claimed that the cosmos emerged out of Chaos, which is simply a way of terminating
the wonderment in a non-explanation, indeed in a nonsensical
non-explanation. For Thomas' Fifth Way insists that it is metaphysically
impossible a priori for order to emerge out of chaos, which is why his
argument is sometimes also called the "cosmological" argument.

  But that he is not speaking of design is clear from his use of the term
"guidedness" [ex gubernatione] to describe the gist of his argument. Just
as the governor of a state is responsible for the smooth running of a
state's government without having to become personally involved in every
decision--without, in other words, feeling that his office obligates him
to serve as the traffic cop at every busy corner--so too the Cosmological
Argument contains no implication whatever that God has become the traffic
cop of cellular evolution.
  But for me the greatest difference between Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological
Argument and any and all arguments from design comes from what all the
advocates of design admit: that the candidate for the Intelligent Designer
could be, at least theoretically, just about any supra-human intelligent
manipulator of complex artifacts, from outer-space aliens to Al Gore's
Mama Gaia.

  Many readers have informed me, and in rather schoolmarmish tones to
boot, that I have missed the point by criticizing Phillip Johnson for the
vagueness of the identity of the Designer, since it is the job of special
revelation to identify the Unknown Designer. Not for Thomas Aquinas. As
Etienne Gilson says in The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas: "We
have, therefore, in the proof of finality, as in all the preceding proofs,
a sensible datum which looks for its sufficient reasons in God and finds
it in Him alone" (emphasis added). If we are clueless as to the identity of
the Designer until we get to special revelation, then we do not have a
Thomistic argument. Moreover, as Gilson further points out, all of
Aquinas' Five Ways require that one respect the hierarchy of causes and refuse to
identify, at any point along the line, the First Cause with one of the
secondary causes. This perhaps is the most glaring flaw in all arguments
from design trying to lead to the Creator God: they take the First Cause,
yank it out of place, and insert it into the stream of things. As Gilson
rightly says, "The whole series of intermediate causes [is] one sole
second cause, of which God is the first cause."

  David K. DeWolf accuses me of misusing the Robinson Crusoe analogy, but
I think he has misunderstood me. First of all, I only used the analogy to
describe the inadequacies of Intelligent Design, even if true. But as
should be obvious from my response here, I hold for other reasons that the
theory cannot be true. But I could also use the Robinson Crusoe story to
establish the falsity, and not just the inadequacies, of Intelligent
Design. Odd as it may sound, the arrangement of campfire stones is more
irreducibly complex than a cell. The circle of stones is genuinely
irreducibly complex because the arrangement automatically testifies not
just to complexity but also to manipulation for an immediate purpose,
which to my mind is lacking in the cell, staggeringly complex though of course
it is. Try as I might, I can see no signs of manipulation in the cell.
Although I gave his book How the Mind Works a severe drubbing in these
pages, I think Steven Pinker captured the essence of this issue quite well
when he made this observation:

   Natural selection is a falsifiable hypothesis about the origin of
design and imposes onerous empirical requirements. Remember how it works: from
competition among replicators. Anything that showed signs of design but
did not come from a long line of replicators could not be explained by--in
fact, would refute--the theory of natural selection: natural species that
lacked reproductive organs, insects growing like crystals out of rocks,
television sets on the moon, eyes spewing out of vents on the ocean floor, caves
shaped like hotel rooms down to the details of hangers and ice buckets.
Moreover, the beneficial functions all have to be in the ultimate service of
reproduction. An organ can be designed for seeing or eating or mating
or nursing, but it had better not be designed for the beauty of nature,
the harmony of the ecosystem, or instant self-destruction. Finally, the
beneficiary of the function has to be the replicator. Darwin pointed
out that if horses had evolved saddles, his theory would immediately be
falsified.

  To my mind, the most reliable indicator of irreducibility in a complex
arrangement is our instant recognition of its presence. In other words,
irreducibility tends to be noncontroversial. If Robinson Crusoe were to be
shipwrecked with a companion, you can be sure that they would not break
into a debate about Intelligent Design upon discovering a circle of
stones.
But conversely, Michael Behe cannot expect to show up at next year's
convention of the American Chemical Society and elicit automatic and
immediate agreement that the cell unambiguously displays signs of
manipulation for a purpose. Of course there are ambiguous cases that
require further investigation, as in the way crystals look chiseled and
polished, but prove not to have been once their chemical structure is
explained.

  For that reason--much as this assertion will stick in the craw of
Phillip Johnson--Richard Dawkins is right when he says that "biology is the study
of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed."
The truth of this principle, however, in no way justifies the metaphysical
implications that this doctrinaire atheist tries to squeeze out of it.
Tellingly, Dawkins makes the same mistake as his opponents in assuming
that when design loses its explanatory purchase on evolutionary biology, then
all arguments from order have thereby also been automatically dispatched.
He revealed as much when he once admitted that, had he lived in the
eighteenth century, he would have found William Paley more convincing than
David Hume. Imagine the shock when he realized how much Darwin had
demolished Paley's arguments. No wonder his atheism seems so rancid.

  Several readers also accuse me of denying the doctrine of general
revelation contained in the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans.
Again, not so. "General," after all, means "general." In other words, the
whole point of Paul's first chapter must be the sheer obviousness of God's
existence. All of my critics seem to approve of Cardinal Newman's
apologetics, and seek merely to claim that I have misunderstood him. But
one of Newman's points in The Idea of a University is that, among other
things, the Argument from Design is too hard to follow, and thus fails to
qualify as general revelation. Once more, this becomes another opportunity
to salute Newman's prescience. For he spoke long before William Dembski
began stringing out his texts with all those ones and zeros, and long
before Michael Behe began instructing the lay public in the intricacies of
bacterial flagella. If he were alive today, one can only imagine what
Newman might say upon being told that his ability to stem the tide of
atheism would depend on his mastery of information theory.

  Robert Ghelardi accuses me of reading more into Prof. Johnson's
"concessions" than is warranted. Admittedly, Johnson is a lawyer who has
furnished us in The Wedge of Truth an (at times effective) exercise in
forensics. As the Roman rhetorician Quintilian shrewdly observed, one of
the best strategies for assuaging the anxieties of an audience is what he
calls concessum non datum. Unfortunately, Johnson's own concession has
ended up selling the company store. In my review I was not referring so
much to his concession (quoted by Mr. Ghelardi) that if God does not exist
then natural selection is our best available candidate for how complex
forms came to be--although that quote certainly is as good an indication
as any of my contention that the design argument will only end up becoming a
breeding ground for atheism, a fetid terrarium for a whole new brood of
Richard Dawkinses (not a pleasant thought, that).

  Rather, I was referring, at least primarily, to Prof. Johnson's
concession of handing over microevolution to Darwinian natural selection
while reserving for the Second Person of the Trinity the role of
jump-starting evolution and of intervening now and again to create a new
Bauplan when God thought it necessary to move from elephant to tiger, or
whatever. Apparently, the finches can take care of themselves, but
conspicuously different species must certainly have had a Designer in
their background, who it seems must have devised them in his celestial studio.
  Now Prof. Johnson's concession of microevolution to materialist
Darwinism while cordoning off macroevolution as a redoubt of Intelligent Design is
either Creation "Science" on the installment plan, or (more likely) Deism
put under a stroboscope. If one must conceive of the universe as an
artifact (and how odd that materialist Darwinians and Intelligent
Designers both hold that life is a mechanical artifact), then the idea of a
Clockmaker God who winds it all up and then departs the scene has a
certain plausibility, I suppose. But the idea that God swooshed down from heaven
3.5 billion years ago to toggle some organic-soup chemicals into
self-replicating molecules and thereafter, as occasion warranted, had to
intervene to jump-start new species is, quite literally, incredible. Prof.
Johnson's God is not even the recessive Clockmaker God of the Deists.
Rather, his God is one who, with disconcerting inconsistency, intervenes
every now and again. As I say, Deism under a stroboscope.

  Keith Masson claims that because Prof. Johnson has not set for himself
the task of providing a solution to the problem of evil, I am in effect
taxing him for not doing what he had no intention of doing. I certainly
agree that nothing is more irritating to an author than to be judged for
failing to do what he never planned to do. Thus I do not lament the
author's failure to provide a well worked out theodicy. But as a
systematic theologian myself, I would insist that at a minimum a natural theology not
make the task of theodicy impossible, which is just what The Wedge of
Truth has done. For by the author's lights, God has left the finches on the
Galapagos Islands to fend for themselves, and will intervene but
occasionally, and only when absolutely necessary, to get a significantly
different species up and running.

  Besides making it impossible for humans to come to terms with tragedies
like birth defects, where the most minor genetic variation can later cause
catastrophic effects in the phenotype, Prof. Johnson's schema must raise
in every believer's mind the central dilemma that lurks in his strategy of
concessum non datum: if God was supposed to have intervened so directly
3.5 billion years ago to construct a well-designed cell, and if He is needed
to design new Bauplane at irregular intervals, why does He not intervene when
a fire breaks out in the cockpit of an airplane flying over the Atlantic?
Or when stray radiation from the sun affects the sequence of a DNA
molecule, later causing birth defects?

  In my opinion, the only possible approach for a Christian theologian in
dealing with the presence of evil is that of Thomas Aquinas, who holds,
pace David Hume, that an omnipotent and benevolent God can coexist with
evil in His finite creation, but only when the world is viewed both as a
totality and under the aegis of eschatology. In the passage immediately
following his six-sentence discussion of the Fifth Way, Aquinas explains
the connection: "As Augustine says, since God is the highest good, He
would not allow any evil to exist in His works unless His omnipotence and
goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil. This is part of the
infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of
it produce good."
  Admittedly, this is a difficult perspective to adopt for those whose
experience of tragedy prevents them from seeing the cosmos as a whole, and
under God's judgment. That situation is perfectly understandable. But the
argument from design prevents a global perspective from the outset and by
its very presuppositions, which is why Paley's last chapter in his Natural
Theology, which treats of this issue of evil, sounds so offensive to
modern ears, ears now acutely attuned to the cries coming out of the abattoir we
call the twentieth century.

  Which brings me to Phillip Johnson's criticism of the Pope. When I first
read his accusations of recent papal lapses into secularism and materialism
in his previous book, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, I thought the
charge too risible to merit refutation. For that reason, I greeted his
gentler treatment of the Pope in The Wedge of Truth with relief, which is
why I wished to compliment him in my review for his more sensible views.
Now I gather from his letter that he still harbors these same misgivings.

  But besides the sheer prima facie preposterousness of the charge that
John Paul II has been taken in by secularist and materialist arguments, my
main worry in Prof. Johnson's criticism of the Pope's letter on evolution
is the way he continues to stiffer under, well, the fallacy of the false
dilemma. If the inevitable consequence to acknowledging the truth of
evolution is secularism and materialism, then of course the Pope has made
an epochal blunder. But not only has the Holy Father showed no discernible
signs of doctrinal latitudinarianism since the time the letter was
published in October 1996, but the entire premise of Prof. Johnson's
criticism is wrong.

  For example, J. Budziszewski worries aloud that by assaulting
Intelligent Design I have deprived Christians in academia of a perfectly serviceable
argument. But besides the fact that Thomas Aquinas says that bad arguments
for God's existence do more harm than good, since they give unbelievers an
occasion to laugh (ST I, q. 46, art. 2, response), I would also claim that
apologetics is not that difficult. Why not start with perfectly obvious
features of our existence that cannot in principle be explained--or even
explained away--by naturalism? Just two or three well chosen lines from
the pen of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would be enough to
stop a materialist dead in his tracks: "What is good is also divine. Queer as
it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express
the Supernatural." "People keep forgetting to go right down to the
foundations.
They don't put the question marks down deep enough." "We feel that when
all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life
remain completely untouched." "It is not how things are in the world that
is mystical, but that it exists."

  In almost every regard except their theistic conclusions (or deistic, I
would maintain), advocates of Intelligent Design share the metaphysical
presuppositions of their opponents, and so it is no wonder that I am
greeted with dismay and charges of "mockery," "ridicule," and closet
treason to the cause of Christian apologetics for pointing out the glaring
flaws of their argument. For by their lights I am depriving theists of
their last remaining redoubt against the acid of modernist positivism. As
to that charge, I would merely reply with the retort of the medieval
logician: nego suppositum ("I deny the premise of the argument").

  Finally, Prof. Johnson praises me for my citation of Cardinal Newman's
deft description of secular intellectuals ("They persuade the world of
what is false by urging upon it what is true") and claims that his own work as
a Christian apologist does battle against this very legerdemain.
Unfortunately, his own work falls into that same trap. In fact, I would
hold that all of the current Intelligent Designers engage in that same
trick. This becomes especially evident when they give lectures to church
groups or other congregations of the already convinced and trot out
giant-sized Styrofoam mock-ups of mousetraps or other similar toys. In the
first part of their lecture they will first urge upon the audience the
blatantly obvious truth, which no one has ever denied, that contraptions
require assembly. But then in the next part of the lecture comes the
whopper: and therefore God is the Artificer of the universal artifact.

  Even when argued not so crudely as I have described it here, the
argument, in essence, hearkens back to Plato's famous passage in the
Timaeus where God is likened to the Demiurge (Carpenter) of the cosmos.
Perhaps because Cicero happened to translate that particular dialogue for
his aristocratic Roman public and thereby unintentionally made it one of
the few texts from Plato available to the Latin West in the early Middle
Ages, this image of God as Artificer proved to have a tenacious hold on
the medieval imagination. Only after long and arduous reflection was its
incompatibility with the Christian notion of God eventually established.
Still, it was an image so powerful and tenacious that it took the
Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages literally centuries to purge. Why revert
to it now?

  In conclusion, I thank Bob Puharic for his generous letter.