Above: Greater Blue-ringed Octopus (Hapalochlaena lunulata). (Author: Jens Petersen) [copyright information at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hapalochlaena_lunulata2.JPG]

It is a natural human instinct to look for the purpose or meaning of things.  We ask why we exist, what meaning our lives have, and whether the universe itself has any purpose.  And so it is with evolution.  Ever since Darwin published the On the Origin of Species in 1859, people have been asking whether there is any meaning or message in evolution.  Not surprisingly, every imaginable answer has been given.  Some saw in evolution the idea of inevitable Progress, others the sinister idea that only the strongest and fittest should survive.  For many evolutionary biologists the meaning of evolution is that there is no meaning or purpose.  Douglas Futuyma, for example, wrote, “Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere mechanical mechanisms — but this seems to be the message of evolution.” ¹  But others see evolution as telling us something about God’s purposes.  The MIT-trained biologist Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, for example, says that the evolutionary process manifests God’s munificence, because through its enormous generative power God “was able to create more species to reflect his glory” than would have been the case through the more static means of “special creation.”  And, finally, there is the famous answer of the twentieth century biologist J.B.S. Haldane, who when asked what the evolutionary record could teach us about the mind of God, replied that God must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.” (More than 350,000 different species of beetles exist.)

We should not be surprised by the variety of answers that biologists have given, since answering questions about meaning is a task that modern empirical science is wholly unequipped to perform.  And yet such questions cannot be avoided.  As Pope Benedict XVI pointed out, “Of course, the question remains open whether … evolution as a whole has a meaning, [but] it cannot be decided within the theory of evolution itself; [since] for that theory this is a methodologically foreign question; although of course for a live human being it is the fundamental question of the whole thing.” ²

The methods of empirical science, while enormously powerful, are also circumscribed.  There is no experiment or measurement that could identify the meaning or ultimate purpose of the transition by which Homo sapiens emerged from other hominins.  As the philosopher of science Ernan McMullin noted, “If purpose is to be attributed to the evolutionary sequence leading to the human, support for it will have to come from a different quarter [than science].”

Then where does one turn?  Some, such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, simply turn away, dismissing anything like ultimate meaning and purpose as chimerical, simply because modern science does not deal with such things.  He writes, “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind.”

Of course, no purely material process can have a “purpose in mind,” for the simple reason that no purely material process has a mind.  Meaning and purpose require minds, and the processes of evolution which science studies (mutation rates, selection pressures, species interactions, etc.) are obviously devoid of mind.  On this point Dawkins is correct, though trivially so.  But that does not mean that material processes, though mindless in themselves, cannot be deployed by a mind for meaningful purposes.  In fact, our everyday experience provides countless examples of this.  We use electrical signals to send text messages and combustion reactions to move about in cars and planes.  The fact that we could explain the physics of text messaging in terms of blind indifferent electrons moving about and blind indifferent electromagnetic waves traversing space does not mean that there are no underlying meanings or purposes in the text messages or in the systems for sending and receiving them.  As the Anglican theologian Steven Ames points out, “There was always something wrong with the simple inference from ‘blind’ to ‘Godless’ because, of course, we are surrounded by technology operating according to ‘blind’ processes, which have been deployed by human agents for a reason.”

So, contrary to Dawkins, Futuyma, and many other evolutionary biologists, the fact that the processes of evolution are themselves “blind” does not resolve the question of whether there is a purpose behind them, and in particular whether there might be a purpose in the mind of God.  But it does raise a number of interesting questions for religious believers.  The most basic of these questions is why God would use blind processes of any sort — whether evolutionary or not — to achieve his ends?  Why not just directly and immediately create species in a miraculous way, rather than relying on such a slow and haphazard natural process?  Part of the answer may lie in an insight of St. Thomas Aquinas, who was born six hundred years before Darwin.  St. Thomas was not thinking about evolution — of which he could have no inkling — but more generally, about the kind of world God has created, which contains within it many things, both living and non-living, that possess their own power to act and produce effects.

In discussing God’s creation of things which can themselves act as true causes, St. Thomas wrote,

“It is a greater perfection for a thing to be good in itself and also the cause of goodness in others, [rather] than only to be good in itself. Therefore, God so governs things that he makes some of them to be causes of others in government; as a master, who not only imparts knowledge to his pupils, but gives [them] also the faculty of teaching others.” ³

From this perspective, a dynamic evolutionary world can be seen as having a greater perfection than a static one; it is a richer creation that is able, in a sense, to work with God’s creative power.

But this raises other questions.  Is it not somehow “risky” for God to govern things by working through created causes and allowing them to play an active part?  For example, evolution is subject to rare contingent events that can knock it off whatever course it was on and put it on a completely different path.  There seems to be no certainty within it, only probabilities.  Had an asteroid not hit the Yucatan peninsula some 65 million years ago, mammals might never have gained a foothold as the dominant predators on the planet.

Another question concerns the violence and destruction inherent in biological evolution.  The evolutionary process as it has played out on earth over the last four billion years is littered with death and extinction.  This aspect of evolution seems to be difficult to square with a Christian understanding of a loving, providential God.  The great Victorian poet Tennyson wrestled with this in his poem In Memoriam, where a personified Nature declares, “A thousand types are gone: / I care for nothing, all shall go.” The poem contrasts the cruelty and indifference of Nature with the loving God of Christian belief: “Who trusted God was love indeed, And love Creation’s final law–, Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw, With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.”  In our own time, Richard Dawkins has famously argued that the “blind, pitiless indifference” of Nature is an argument against God.

Yet, the Church has a long tradition of viewing the “Book of Nature” as revealing the Creator.  Just as a story or painting, if properly interpreted, can reveal something about the artist, a proper understanding of our evolutionary world should reveal something about God and the meaning of his creation.  Reading the Book of Nature is not necessarily an easy task, however.  As the Catechism states: “Our human understanding, which shares in the light of the divine intellect, can understand what God tells us by means of his creation, though not without great effort and only in a spirit of humility and respect before the Creator and his work” (CCC 299).

The first challenge that presents itself in interpreting a work of art is to understand it as a whole.  For example, one cannot properly appreciate a symphony by focusing on a single instrument to the exclusion of all the others.  Similarly, to properly grasp the meaning of evolution, one must engage evolution in its entirety. One must not simply focus on beetles as Haldane humorously did or elevate above all else one aspect of the evolutionary process such as its contingent nature or the death and destruction inherent in it.  Just as those who interpret Scripture by reading verses in isolation end up trapped in intellectual cul-de-sacs, so those who only examine aspects of evolution in isolation can miss the larger picture.

Both contingency and death play important roles in evolution, certainly, but they are only part of the story.  There are other parts that are just as important, though often they are overlooked, ignored, downplayed, or even disputed.  One of them is that the evolutionary process as a whole is both dependent upon and driven by the deep underlying order inherent in the created world.  One reason this is often overlooked is that many modern popularizers of evolutionary thought tend to exalt the contingent nature of evolution, because stressing its chanciness is more amenable to their philosophical claims.  Yet, there is a great deal of order and predictability at the level of physics and chemistry that is essential both for getting the evolutionary process off the ground and for moving it toward certain ends.

Without that deeper order, there would be no stable atoms with well-defined properties.  Without stable atoms, there would be no stable molecules.  And without stable atoms and molecules, there would be no stable organisms, nor the predictable biochemical processes on which their life is based.  In short, there would be no biology at all and therefore no possibility of biological evolution.  Every layer of nature is dependent upon the layers beneath it.  Without the enormous and impressive order at the level of physics and chemistry, evolution via natural selection could never have gotten started or led anywhere.

Even those who are not chemists cannot help but be impressed by the remarkable degree of order that is manifest in the Periodic Table of Elements.  Those elements are the building blocks of life, and it is important that there be many types of them.  The chemistry of life is very complicated and makes use of many elements with different properties, such as hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, phosphorus, and so on — at least 21 elements play a role in the human body.  The rich variety of elements in the world is, in turn, the consequence of the subtle interplay of many factors at the even deeper level of subatomic physics, which is itself a realm of highly intricate order.

As many physicists have emphasized, including even atheists such as Stephen Hawking, there are numerous features of the deeper laws of physics that seem “tailor-made” to make the emergence of life possible.⁴  That is, if these features had been even slightly different, the universe would have been so radically different as to make life as we know it impossible.  For example, certain very slight differences in these laws would have prevented or greatly suppressed the formation of carbon or any of the elements heavier than carbon.⁵  Other slight differences would have prevented any elements other than hydrogen from having formed.⁶  And such a universe would have been devoid of complex molecules or life based on chemistry.  Fortunately, however, the actual universe is ordered in such a manner that there are roughly eighty different stable elements that can combine in accordance with chemical laws to produce the vast array of molecules, including the organic molecules necessary for the emergence of living organisms.

This foundational order at the chemical, atomic, and subatomic levels did not itself evolve, but was there from the earliest moments of the universe.  It is essentially a gift to the evolutionary process, one that not only allows it to operate, but (as Darwin himself seemed to intuit) also shapes its outcomes.

One of the most interesting examples of how this underlying chemical and physical order shapes evolution can be seen at the level of protein structure.  Proteins are long strings of amino acids that fold up into three-dimensional shapes, which are important for how the proteins function in living things.  Biological proteins are composed of roughly 20 different types of amino acids.  And just as the 26 letters of the English alphabet can be arranged to produce a vast number of words and sentences, these 20 amino acids can be strung together to produce a vast number of different proteins.  Given that typical proteins are hundreds of amino acids long, the number of possible protein sequences is virtually infinite.  Because of this, one might think that the specific three-dimensional protein shapes (or “structures”) that evolution has stumbled upon within the virtually infinite space of possibilities would be totally unpredictable.  Re-run evolution, and expose the process to a different set of chance events, and a whole new set of utterly different protein structures would emerge.  However, this does not seem to be the case.  It turns out that the possible ways in which proteins can fold up, given the underlying chemistry, are limited.

The shapes that proteins can form are based on the ways that they can fold.  And proteins predominately fold into two distinct “secondary structures,” called beta-sheets and alpha-helices.  For chemical and physical reasons, chains of amino acids in the aqueous cellular environment only tend to be stable if they fold in these two ways.⁷  If evolution were to run again, beta-sheets and alpha-helices would certainly form once amino acids found themselves strung together into polymers.

Furthermore, chemistry and physics dictate that beta-sheets and alpha-helices in amino acid polymers can only interact with each other in a limited number of ways.  As a result, protein folding leads to a rather limited array of three-dimensional shapes. As the biologist Michael Denton has explained, “a number of organization rules, ‘laws of form,’ which govern the local interactions between the main structural sub-motifs [e.g. the alpha helices and beta sheets] have been identified, and these restrict the spatial arrangement of amino acid polymers to a tiny set of about 1,000 allowable higher-order architectures.” Re-run evolution again using the same chemistry and physics, and the same folds would likely reappear because the “forms of the folds are given by physics and matter is drawn by a process of free energy minimization into the complex form of the native conformation.” ⁸ 

Here is a concrete way chance variations in protein sequences could be led via circuitous routes to certain ends, not by the Creator having to constantly meddle, but as a consequence of the inherent order that he placed in Creation.  The chance variations of the amino acid sequences of the protein are secondary in producing these folds.  They represent the engine used to search for and uncover the folds that are possible given the underlying order that has been written into the structure of the universe.  It is such structure and order that, as the Catechism highlights, points toward the divine:

“By the very nature of creation, material being is endowed with its own stability, truth, and excellence, its own order and laws. Each of the various creatures, willed in its own being, reflects in its own way a ray of God’s infinite wisdom and goodness” (CCC 339).

There is evidence that evolution is constrained and channeled toward certain robust biological forms on the macro level as well.  The evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris, in his excellent book Life’s Solution, catalogues numerous instances of how the evolutionary process repeatedly produces the same forms and behaviors in independent evolutionary lineages.⁹ A well-known example is that camera-like eyes have independently evolved several times, in lineages as different and distant from each other as vertebrates and octopi.  This phenomenon of “convergent evolution” is ubiquitous: there is hardly a biological structure or behavior that hasn’t convergently evolved multiple times.  The chance and contingent elements of evolution cannot drive it in any conceivable direction, rather the directions are highly influenced by the very laws that allow the evolutionary process to operate in the first place.  (For example, given the laws of optics, a camera-like eye is a very effective instrument for collecting, focusing, and sensing light.)

A second key aspect of evolution that is usually ignored, and often explicitly denied, is its directionality or arrow.  The idea that there is no “progress” in the evolutionary process is often part and parcel of the textbook presentation of natural selection.  Supposedly, there are no “higher” or “lower” organisms, there is no inherent movement toward something, whether it be toward more diversity or complexity or behavioral freedom.

While such claims are often grounded in philosophical commitments to “purify” evolution from any whiff of teleology, there is ample evidence from a purely scientific perspective to suggest that there is an inherent direction in evolution, particularly when the entire four-billion year process is examined.  Even Darwin himself made allusions to evolution having a direction.  Toward the end of the Origin he wrote the following: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted objects which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”  He seemed to indicate that the emergence of the “higher” animals simply followed from “laws acting all around us,” that it was a natural and predictable outcome of evolution.  While defining what is higher or more complex can be contentious, it is hard to deny that the creatures and ecosystems of the late Cretaceous (65 million years ago) are more complex and diverse than the creatures of the Ediacaran (560 million years ago).

The great evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky stated it this way: “Viewing evolution of the living world as a whole, from the hypothetical primeval self-reproducing substance to higher plants, animals, and man, one cannot avoid the recognition that progress or advancement, or rise, or ennoblement, has occurred.” ¹⁰

This does not mean, however, that when one focuses in on any specific evolutionary lineage “progress” or a move toward increased complexity is always seen.  On the contrary, the opposite is often found, as some organisms actually lose complexity over time, such as tetrapods that lose limbs or mammals that lose functional eyes.  But such instances do not undermine the key point that overall there has been an increase of complexity over the past four billion years.  Even non-theists such as the biologist E.O. Wilson agree on this point:

“Many reversals have occurred along the way, but the overall average across the history of life has moved from the simple and few to the more complex and numerous. During the past billion years, animals as a whole evolved upward in body size, feeding and defensive techniques, brain and behavioral complexity, social organization, and precision of environmental control…. More precisely the overall average of these traits and their upper extremes went up.” ¹¹

Not only is there an overall movement in evolution toward increased complexity, but it is driven in part by an overall increase in cooperation between cells, between organisms, and within entire ecosystems.  Whether it is defined as organisms with more types of tissues or cells, more diverse ecosystems, or more complex and “ennobled” behavior, it is hard to argue there has not been a movement toward increased complexity and sophistication.

Equipped with this richer more complete understanding of evolution, one can return to the question that Pope Benedict XVI said was “the most fundamental” for human beings.  Does evolution have a meaning?  Why did God create the world in such a fashion?  What does the story of evolution reveal about the Creator?

In thinking about these questions, it is important to keep two things in mind.  First, the answers must come from outside the confines of modern science, and, second, the answers will always be incomplete and limited by our human understanding.  Moreover, for Christians, reflection upon the meaning of evolution must be centered upon what gives meaning to all things, namely Christ and the story of salvation.  Viewed in this way, one cannot help but notice several striking parallels between evolutionary history and salvation history.  We will focus our attention on three of these parallels, which seem to shed particular light on the meaning of evolution.

The first parallel is that both evolutionary history and salvation history are stories that are moving toward something or someone.  They both have a direction or teleology.  In the case of salvation history, the story is moving toward mankind’s ultimate redemption in Christ, while the evolutionary story seems to be moving toward what Dobzhansky called a greater “ennoblement” of Creation.  As the Catechism points out, “The universe was created ‘in a state of journeying’ (in statu viae) toward an ultimate perfection yet to be attained, to which God has destined it” (CCC 302).  While it is more fashionable among scientists of secular stripe to see humans as an unremarkable recent side branch on the evolutionary tree, there is no conflict with science for Christians to view humans as the crown of evolution, the Creator’s desired fulfillment of the evolutionary story.  The story, as it has unfolded through the eons, has produced organisms with greater and greater degrees of mental complexity and spontaneous behavior, until, very recently, it brought forth the one organism that it was fitting to endow with a rational soul and which can be brought into an intimate relationship with the Creator.

The second parallel between evolution and salvation history has to do with how creatures participate in the story.  As with all great stories, both salvation history and evolutionary history involve plot twists and dramatic tensions, points where the story looks like it might come to a dead end or move in a disastrous direction. In both cases, this tension occurs precisely because these stories have been “written” in such a way that creatures are active participants in shaping the plot.  As the theologian Matthew Ramage points out:

“Creation does not merely follow the preprogrammed instructions of a divine craftsman, nor does God “tweak” his story or score in the middle of its performance as envisioned by some Christians. On the contrary, evolutionary adaptations arise naturally from within the story of creation itself, according to the rules of its nature instilled therein by its divine author. But why would this author allow his script to seemingly go off the rails at points? In brief, it is because God has bestowed on creatures the dignity of being real causes. And their errors — our errors — are all known to God and allowed as part of his plan.” ¹²

God guides his creation not by overriding or negating creaturely causation (he does not, for example, intervene miraculously to repopulate the planet with new species ex nihilo every time evolutionary history seems to go awry), but by working in union with creaturely causation with all the messiness this entails.  Such messiness, so evident in evolutionary history, can be seen in salvation history as well.  Throughout salvation history, God has willed human actors a role in his plan and in doing so has provided them with the “immense dignity of participation” in it.  While this also allows the plot “to seemingly go off the rails at points,” here also God does not respond by overriding the freedom with which he has endowed his creatures.  Instead, he draws his creation toward him through that same freedom.  In this manner, evolutionary history, with its twists and turns, its setbacks and apparent dead ends, mirrors the course of salvation history.  The selling of Joseph into slavery in Egypt, the Israelites worshipping idols in the desert, the sins of King David, the excesses of King Solomon, the loss of ten of the twelve tribes, the captivity in Babylon, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem twice — none of these ultimately disrupted God’s story.  Rather they are simply a part of the great symphony of salvation, a symphony that God, despite our failings, directs toward its proper end.  God’s Providence is such that even when creatures cause things “to go off the rails,” they cannot derail his ultimate plan.  This radical openness to creaturely causation leads to the third parallel between evolutionary history and salvation history, the intimate connection between death and rebirth.

Many people, theists and non-theists alike, point to the death and destruction inherent in the evolutionary process as proof that it must be inconsistent with a loving God.  Even Darwin implied this in the Origin: “it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers, –ants making slaves, –the larvae of Ichneumonidae feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars, –not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”  For Darwin, such seemingly gratuitous nastiness and death was incompatible with his view of a loving Creator.

But in the Christian understanding, death and suffering are not unrelated to love and sacrifice.  Indeed, the loving Creator himself underwent suffering and death on a cross, and that event represents the central point in salvation history.  Why then should we be surprised to find that suffering and death are also prominent features of evolutionary history if the same God stands behind both stories?  Dobzhansky correctly said that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” but for a Christian nothing in creation makes sense except in the light of the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ.  And from that perspective, we see that the story of evolution has another thing in common with the story of salvation, namely an ultimate connection between death and new life.

In the case of evolutionary history, nowhere is death and destruction more evident than in the recurring “mass extinction events” that have marked the history of life on earth.  (These are defined as events in which more than 75% of species go extinct.)  There is evidence for at least five such events in the last 500 million years and while they are an obvious feature of the evolutionary story they do not necessarily subvert the direction of evolution.  In fact, the death of certain organisms and the disruption of certain ecosystems seems to be intimately tied to the movement of evolution toward more complexity.  For example, the end-Ediacaran extinction seems to have opened up biological niches that facilitated the “radiation” of animals in the Cambrian explosion into numerous new complex forms.  Likewise, the KT extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period seems to have been a key factor contributing to the radiation of mammals in the Cenozoic era, particularly the radiation and diversification of the primates.  As in salvation history, so in evolutionary history, even in cataclysms such as mass extinctions, death and destruction have not had the last word.  Rather, they have laid the groundwork for a new evolutionary stage and have played a part in fueling the increase in complexity that has been the long-term trend of evolutionary history.

Does this mean that extinctions must of necessity always lay the groundwork for increased complexity and new life?  Certainly not.  But on our planet, the “book: that holds our evolutionary story, such events have always been followed by the rebirth of entirely different and surprising ecosystems, entirely different manners of surviving and living, and new levels of complexity.  This is our actual story of evolution.

This connection between death and new life is also very obvious in salvation history.  The destruction of the first temple and the Babylonian exile seemed to indicate the end of the Israelites and their religion.  But, eventually, after over seventy years, it led to a new stage in Jewish history and the building of the second temple, which in certain respects came to occupy a more significant place in the life of the Israelites than had the first.  Likewise, the persecutions of the early Church did not bring about its destruction, but were a powerful force for the spread of the gospel throughout the Roman Empire and beyond.  As Tertullian was famously supposed to have said, “the blood of the martyrs” was “the seed of the Church.”  And what seemed the greatest possible catastrophe to Christ’s disciples, his crucifixion and death, led to the resurrection and the promise of eternal life.

What then does all this tell us about the meaning of evolution?  Of course, one can read the message of evolution (or lack thereof) through some simplistic understanding of what God “should” do and be scandalized by its dark aspects, just as St. Paul tells us that Christ’s death on the cross was a “scandal to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks.”  Yet, how much more appropriate to read the message of evolution in the light of Christ and the Paschal Mystery.  If this is the interpretive key for all of reality, it should not be surprising that the story of evolution points to the ultimate connection between death and new life or the reliance on creaturely causation.  The fact that salvation history is built upon these same themes points to the reality that that both salvation history and evolutionary history reveal one and the same God.  This then is at least part of the meaning of evolution.

In fact, the story of evolutionary history both lays the groundwork for the story of salvation history and ultimately finds its meaning therein.  While the story of evolutionary history, through fits and starts, through extinction and death, produced the type of creature that was fitting to be informed by a rational soul, ultimately that was not enough.  Man needed the story of salvation history to bring his project to completion.  He needed a God who would suffer and die for him, who could draw him beyond this world to complete the journey of Creation, to bring it to its ultimate perfection in Christ.

[Dan Kuebler is a Professor of Biology at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, where he teaches courses on evolution, cell physiology, and science and faith. He is the project co-lead for the Purposeful Universe, a Templeton funded grant that focuses on examining the order and purpose inherent in the world around us. which includes the Purposeful Lab podcast that he co-hosts with Catherine Hadro. Dan is the co-author of The Evolution Controversy: A Survey of Competing Theories (Baker Academic, 2007) and another forthcoming book on Evolution and Catholicism (Word on Fire Press) and he has written both academic and popular articles on issues related to science, religion and ethics. He is Vice-President of the Society of Catholic Scientists. He has been married to his wife Nellie for 26 years and has six children and resides in Steubenville Ohio.]

References

1.. Douglas J. Futuyma, Science on Trial (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), pp. 12-13.

2..  Creation and Evolution: A Conference With Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo, ed. Stephen Otto Horn (Ignatius Press, 2008), p.12.

3.. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 103, Article 6.

4.. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Random House, 2010).

5.. Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame University Press, 2003), p 121.

6.. ibid. pp 119, 126.

7.. This is largely due to hydrophobic/hydrophilic interactions along the backbone of the protein chain that stabilize the structure of the protein in the cellular environment.

8.. M.J. Denton, Peter K. Dearden, and Stephen J. Sowerb, BioSystems 71 (2003) 297–303.

9.. Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

10.. Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Chance and creativity in evolution,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, ed. F. J. Ayala and T. Dobzhansky, London: Macmillan, 1974, 307-338; pp. 309, 311.

11.. Quoted in Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea (Wm. B. Eerdman’s Co., 2010), p. 134.

12.. Matthew J. Ramage, From the Dust of the Earth: Benedict XVI, the Bible, and the Theory of Evolution.