Interview with Fr. Oakes on evolution

Thanks to Susan for posting the link to Peter Steinfels's column on John Haught's work.  Similarly helpful, I thought, was this interview (in two parts, here and here) with Fr. Edward Oakes.  Fr. Oakes -- certainly not known for hostility to orthodox Christianity -- is quite critical of what he understands to be the "Intelligent Design" theory:

ID advocates seem regularly to confuse finality with design. Now because people only design things for a purpose, the two concepts are too often conflated.  But they are different.

I think the great medievalist Etienne Gilson got the distinction exactly right in his book "From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution." Here's what he says on pages 9 and 10 of the book:

"Aristotle conceives the [designing] artist as a particular case of nature [the realm of finality]. This is why, in his natural philosophy, art imitates nature, rather than nature imitating art. The contrary is imagined because -- every man being more or less an artist, an artisan, and a technician -- we know, more or less confusedly, yet with certitude, the manner in which art operates.

"But insofar as we are natural beings, we are the products of innumerable biological activities of which we know practically nothing, or very little. The manner in which nature operates escapes us. Her finality is spontaneous, not learned. …

"In nature the end, the 'telos,' works as every artist would wish to be able to work; in fact, as the greatest among them do work, or even as the others work in moments of grace when, suddenly masters of their media, they work with the rapidity and infallible sureness of nature. . . .

I also object to the way the ID Movement conflates the Thomistic distinction between primary and secondary causality. The advocates of this movement claim that if it can be proved scientifically that God must intervene on occasion to get various species up and running, then this will throw the atheist Darwinians into a panicked rout.

I disagree. My view is that, according to St. Thomas, secondary causality can be allowed full rein without threatening God's providential oversight of the world. . . .

Remember that for Aquinas God's primary causality does not refer to an initial moment of creation, after which secondary causality kicks in and runs things from then on out.

No, God must sustain the world in each moment of its existence. God keeps the world in being because God is "He Who Is." God is Being itself; and because of God's self-sufficient Being, the universe "is," albeit derivatively.

Think of primary causality, in other words, less like the ignition of a motor and more like a singer singing a song: the song is sustained only while the singer sings. But that does nothing to abrogate the laws of sound waves, of musical harmony, of the biology of vocal chords and so on.

Furthermore, the doctrine of providence as primary, pervasive causality in no way asserts that God directly causes as secondary causality some events in order to bring about the later good that he has foreseen. . . .