Smart stuff, though I have a few caveats.  Later on Cardinal Dulles gives a bit too much credit to the intelligent design folks, making them appear much more scientifically respected than they are. I mean, sure we can get into a large discussion of how scientific respect actually works (conservatives LOVE this stuff on global warming) and there are a lot of great debates to be had on the postmodern critique of science. But let’s face facts: falsifiable, repeatable experiments might not show the TRUTH, but they at least show what has not yet been proven false over and over (for more on this, check out the works of Karl Popper, or more popularly, Nassim Taleb) and such science is our best bet for at least certain forms of reality.

It doesn’t really matter though: my criticism is insubstantial to Dulles’s larger point, that of the other two Aristotelian causes. Those are what matter, and those are what are being ignored.

Several authorities on these questions, such as Kenneth R. Miller and Stephen M. Barr, in their replies to Schönborn, insisted that one could be a neo-Darwinist in science and an orthodox Christian believer. Distinguishing different levels of knowledge, they contended that what is random from a scientific point of view is included in God’s eternal plan. God, so to speak, rolls the dice but is able by his comprehensive knowledge to foresee the result from all eternity.

This combination of Darwinism in science and theism in theology may be sustainable, but it is not the position Schönborn intended to attack. As he made clear in a subsequent article in FIRST THINGS (January 2006), he was taking exception only to those neo-­Darwinists—and they are many—who maintain that no valid investigation of nature could be conducted except in the reductive mode of mechanism, which seeks to explain everything in terms of quantity, matter, and motion, excluding specific differences and purpose in nature. He quoted one such neo-Darwinist as stating: “Modern science directly implies that the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance. There are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature. There are no gods and no designing forces rationally detectable.”

Cardinal Schönborn shrewdly observes that positivistic scientists begin by methodically excluding formal and final causes. Having then described natural processes in terms of merely efficient and material causality, they turn around and reject every other kind of explanation. They simply disallow the questions about why anything (including human life) exists, how we differ in nature from irrational animals, and how we ought to conduct our lives.