Faith and science

Wesley J. Smith, writing today at First Things, has addressed the conservative writer John Derbyshire's apologia pro atheismo suo that was published the other day at National Review.  Professor Rob Vischer at Mirror of Justice discusses the issues raised by Dr Smith, as does the Catholic attorney Matt Donovan:

First, "God formed man out of the clay of the earth"; that is, one could say that he created our physical, chemical, and biological make-up out of the earthly matter he had already created. (By the way, for a fascinating evolutionary account of creation in the Genesis stories, see Leo Strauss's "On the Interpretation of Genesis" and "Jerusalem and Athens" in part VI of Kenneth Hart Green's collection, "Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity"). But second, and perhaps more importantly, God "blew into his nostrils the breath of life" such that "man became a living being"; that is, one could say that man becomes distinctly human only after being directly enlightened with the immaterial spirit of the divine.

 
This accounts, in part, for the traditional Judeo-Christian anthropological construction of man as mind or spirit embodied. And as Aristotle noted, it is intelligence or rationality that distinguishes human beings from other biological beings. In other words, being "created in God’s image," seems to be intimately connected to being endowed with his spirit; that is, being endowed with intelligence -- the pure immaterial intelligence that God is. Put another way, unlike the reductionist (or naive realist) anthropology of, say, modern scientific materialism, the Judeo-Christian doctrine regarding the "Imago Dei" puts forth a more transcendent anthropology that takes into account -- perhaps emphasizes -- the immaterial, spiritual, or rational element of man’s make-up.

Dr Smith remarks that "understanding that there is such a thing as evil action proves we are special in the known universe"; nor does the fact that our awareness of the natural bonds that unite us to the rest of animal life--elephants, evidently, grieve over their dead relations--has developed somehow 'disprove' the Christian dogmas of creation, salvation history and redemption.