V
Imago Dei: Man is a Creature Ontologically Related to God; M. Behe: Irreducibly Complex Systems; C. Tresmontant: Human Beings as Substances/Psychic Entities/Persons; the Irrational Human Project of Self-creation
“So God created man [humankind] in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female, he created them” (Gen 1:27). In the short space of this essay, we cannot possibly deal with all the complexities and implications of this foundational biblical affirmation. We shall merely touch on a number of key aspects that seem especially pertinent in light of the foregoing reflections about the critical situation of humanity at the start of the twenty-first century.
This statement, without equivalent in any other culture, is understood within the Judeo-Christian context as the basic revelation from God of the truth about human beings. What is given as revelation must, of course, be considered and evaluated by reason, but reason must not overstep its limits by arbitrarily positing its superiority to revelation. Such a move will only lead reason into contradiction with itself when it rules out the possibility of revelation simply because it repudiates the possibility of certain knowledge being gained through metaphysical speculation. The two modes of knowing, or of knowing about, unmeasurable reality—divine revelation and human metaphysical speculation—are in no way equivalent. The exclusion by reason of the possibility of revelation is unreasonable and cannot be defended on rational grounds.
The core of the truth about man revealed here is that he (male and female) is a creature ontologically related to God. To say that a man or woman is, is to say that he or she is in relation to God. This is primary, ontological; qualitative descriptions of men and women made in the effort to articulate an adequate anthropology and that describe human beings as creatures having ontic qualities like rationality and freedom are secondary and properly follow this primordial affirmation. It is these qualities that make possible the expression of the relation of men to God, but the relation itself is prior.
Man is a creature. He is created. This is the first aspect of the doctrine of the imago Dei that we must examine. However the mystery of his evolution is to be understood, humankind, according to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, owes its existence to a Creator, a personal God, and not to chance, chance being understood here as the negation of an organizing intelligence. To posit chance as the ultimate source of all reality is to assert that the constituent elements necessary to the existence of beings have appeared randomly and come together over time and then produced living beings that have subsequently evolved through the mechanism of natural selection. The efficacy of natural selection as the operative force of evolution can, logically, have only two possible sources: a primordial organizing intelligence that has willed this to be the case, or chance. The assertion that chance must be the source of all form, order, and life in the universe, including the very process of natural selection operative in the evolution of living forms, begs the question of how natural selection itself came to be. Merely to assert that natural selection is the result of chance cannot even begin to address the obvious fact that natural selection has a teleological orientation that logically points to intentionality, not to chance.
The recent work of the biochemist Michael Behe seeks to show that irreducibly complex systems at the biochemical level—and, by extension, at higher levels—cannot have evolved gradually, by incremental mutations.26 The complexity of just one cell, without even mentioning biological structures involving more than one cell, involves webs of different, identifiable, immensely complex systems. An irreducibly complex system, Behe writes, is “a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”27
Behe argues that traditional Darwinian theory which, to use a commercial image, deals in wholesale and not in retail goods, cannot account adequately for such systems, where every single protein has a definable role to play that is adapted to that of every other protein, all the roles being necessary to the operation of the system. A system must have a “minimal function” to be a candidate for natural selection, and in the case of an irreducibly complex system, this requires that all the parts be present at once and able to perform at a level suitable to their purpose.28
Behe concludes, logically, that irreducibly complex systems point to intelligent design as their cause. I say “logically” because ultimately there is no other logical conclusion possible, though materialists will continue to make appeal to some causal third force, neither a Creator/Designer nor Chance-plus-Time but some unthinkable Other Process. Such prevarication shows well how subjectivist ideology, with its materialist presupposition, has taken captive sections of the scientific establishment. Behe himself, discreetly, does not go on to plead for a Creator as the Intelligent Designer behind the intelligent design, but his scientific work opens the way for metaphysicians and theologians to do so.
Behe’s thesis has been challenged scientifically, however. Michael Ruse, in his book entitled Darwin and Design, takes issue with Behe by citing a number of examples of complex processes that appear to have come about over time, incrementally, through the process of natural selection. Instancing the case of the Krebs cycle, whereby energy from food is converted into a form that can be used by cells, he makes the important point that intermediate stages, or subprocesses, of the cycle, which initially had no fitness functionality with respect to the complex final product, started off their existence doing something quite different and were subsequently coopted by the cells and put to a new use. Ruse insists that this re-deployment by natural selection of material that already exists is the answer to the problem of irreducibly complex systems and explains how it is possible for such systems to emerge progressively. No intelligent design, he affirms, is necessary to explain their existence; natural selection performs the operation.29
While Ruse’s argument is cogent and may indeed point to the evolutionary process that normally may make possible the emergence of irreducibly complex systems (though of course this is unproven), it still leaves unanswered the fundamental question of how the mechanism of natural selection itself emerged in the first place. Undoubtedly natural selection is evolution’s principle if not exclusive method, but to imagine that such an efficacious method simply happened and is itself the result of . . . natural selection (!), is metaphysically jejune.
Equally odd, even disingenuous, is the argument of the traditional Darwinian that what he is expecting to find by virtue of natural selection—and does find—is not design but the appearance of design. “The question,” writes Ruse, “is not whether design demands design. All can grant that. The question is whether design-like demands design, or if selection can do the job instead.”30 The same question is begged. Whether we are speaking of design or of the appearance of design, we are confronted by order that appears to arise, as far as we can determine at present, through the remarkably efficient mechanism of natural selection. But how did such an order-producing mechanism arise?
One thinker who has given much thought to the metaphysics involved in these issues is the Frenchman Claude Tresmontant, who observes that there are two kinds of metaphysics: a woolly, speculative type, arbitrary and imaginary, constructing castles in the air, which is what most scientists think metaphysics is and what most scientists who engage in speculation outside their field—usually on origins, cosmological and biological—do; and a responsible type, founded on the experimental sciences, which pushes the rational analysis of reality to its utmost limits.31
Tresmontant