{"id":6697,"date":"2020-05-13T12:45:09","date_gmt":"2020-05-13T16:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/?p=6697"},"modified":"2020-05-13T19:40:09","modified_gmt":"2020-05-13T23:40:09","slug":"should-catholics-believe-in-evolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kolbecenter.org\/should-catholics-believe-in-evolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Catholics Believe in Evolution?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2014, Dr. Brett Salkeld, official theologian for the Archdiocese of Regina in Canada, wrote an article entitled, \u201cCan Catholics Believe in Evolution?\u201d\u00a0 Recently, Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute wrote a response to it for his daughter, who had been assigned the article by her biology teacher in a homeschool co-op.\u00a0 Dr. Salkeld saw the rebuttal and attempted to counter it.\u00a0 Links to both documents can be found here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We are grateful to Dr. Salkeld and to Mr. Hichborn for creating a rare opportunity for the Catholic faithful to evaluate the arguments for and against theistic evolution, from the perspective of theology, philosophy and natural science.\u00a0 In this document we will set forth and defend the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation and demonstrate the fatal flaws in Dr. Salkeld\u2019s defense of theistic evolution as set forth in his 2014 article and in his critique of Mr. Hichborn\u2019s response.<\/p>\n

In his 2014 article \u201cCan Catholics Believe in Evolution?\u201d <\/strong>Dr. Salkeld writes:<\/p>\n

the idea persists among some Catholics, and many media outlets, that Catholicism is necessarily uncomfortable with evolution.\u00a0 This is for a few reasons.\u00a0 First of all, many people simply assume that the Bible teaches that evolution is false, or, secondly, that evolution is incompatible with centuries of Church teaching.\u00a0 Neither of these is, in fact, the case.\u00a0 Finally, many people have bought into the myth that science and religion are necessarily at odds.\u00a0 This, of course, usually follows on the first two mistakes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We will begin by responding to these statements before addressing some of the subsidiary arguments that Dr. Salkeld made in his critique of Mr. Hichborn\u2019s response to his article. As a preliminary and fundamental issue of difference with Dr. Salkeld, however, it is extremely important to point out that\u2014most likely due to an unwarranted acceptance of the same uniformitarian approach to natural science that characterized Rene\u2019 Descartes, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin and their disciples down to the present day\u2014Dr. Salkeld continuously argues that origins is a matter for natural science, not theology. This is a drastic and unwarranted departure from traditional Catholic teaching. All Catholics should understand that if origins occurred exactly as understood in the straightforward account in Genesis 1 and 2, the creation would have occurred through supernatural means, not through naturalistic means, making origins properly a topic for historical theology, not natural science.<\/p>\n

In our reply to Dr. Salkeld below, we argue that there is no reason or necessity\u2014from the perspective of natural science or theology\u2014to depart from this understanding, which was adhered to by all the Church Fathers, Doctors, and Magisterial statements through Vatican I.\u00a0 It is only with the increasing influence of Lyellian geology and Darwinian biology after 1859 that some theologians began to depart from historical Catholic teachings about origins. This departure, we explain, was due to deceptive claims made by the Darwinists and the resulting influence on those in the Church who did not take the time to study whether those claims had scientific merit. This failure on the part of many theologians stood in direct conflict with the instructions of the two important encyclicals, Providentissimus Deus<\/em> (par. 18 and 22) and Humani Generis<\/em> (par. 36). As a result, while the truth in theology cannot contradict truth in natural science, many Catholics now hold an incorrect theological view of origins due to false and unsubstantiated Darwinian claims.<\/p>\n

The only way back to the authentic harmony of truth is to study what the Church historically taught (through the Fathers, Doctors and Magisterium) and to understand that Darwinian claims fall apart under scrutiny and do not justify rejecting nineteen centuries of Catholic teaching.\u00a0 Let us begin, then, by returning to several key questions about Genesis.<\/p>\n

What is the Genre of the First Eleven Chapters of Genesis?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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Before we can determine whether the Biblical teaching on creation excludes the belief in molecules-to-man evolution that Dr. Salkeld defends, we must answer one of the most important questions regarding\u00a0 the text of Genesis 1, namely: \u201cWhat is the genre<\/em> of the first eleven chapters of Genesis?\u201d<\/p>\n

Happily, this question has a straightforward and unambiguous answer.\u00a0 The genre of Genesis is history.\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0That Genesis is history <\/em>and not poetry, myth, or a mixture of myth and history, has been affirmed repeatedly by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church right up until modern times. The words of Our Lord are the highest authority on this question, and He always spoke of the contents of Genesis 1-11 as true history.\u00a0 Indeed, He said: \u201cFor if you did believe Moses, you would perhaps believe me also; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?\u201d (John 5:46-47).\u00a0\u00a0 He also said when questioned about divorce: \u201cFrom the beginning of creation, God made them male and female\u201d (Mark 10:6) He also spoke of the \u201cblood of Abel\u201d shed at \u201cthe foundation of the world\u201d (Luke 11:50-51) and of Noah\u2019s worldwide Flood (Matt 24:37) in literal terms.<\/p>\n

When the Council of Trent approved the publication of the Catechism of Trent <\/em>or Roman Catechism, <\/em>it ratified the constant teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church that Genesis is a \u201csacred history.\u201d\u00a0 The Roman Catechism <\/em>was written for pastors so that they could instruct their people in the fundamental dogmas of the Faith. When pastors had questions about creation and the early history of the world, the Catechism <\/em>directed them to \u201crefer to the sacred history<\/em> of Genesis\u201d and explain it to the people, as written. \u00a0In its binding decrees, the Council of Trent also defined that when all of the Fathers of the Church agree on any interpretation of Scripture regarding a doctrine of faith or morals, that interpretation is true. As will be explained further below, all of the Fathers accepted Genesis as a sacred history <\/em>and concurred with St. Augustine\u2019s verdict on the genre of Genesis:<\/p>\n

The narrative in these books is not written in a literary style proper to allegory, as in the Canticle of Canticles, but from beginning to end in a style proper to history, as in the Books of Kings and the other works of that type.[1]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since the historicity of Genesis establishes the factuality of the events at the beginning of human history which undergird the fundamental dogmas of the Faith, including Original Sin and Redemption, it follows that the case, according to Trent, is closed, and Genesis must be regarded as history.\u00a0 Indeed, from the time of Trent until the reign of Pope St. Pius X, Pope after Pope lauded the Roman Catechism <\/em>as, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, a \u201cgolden summary\u201d of Catholic doctrine.\u00a0 By the reign of St. Pius X, however, evolutionary propaganda had persuaded so many Catholic intellectuals of the \u201cfact\u201d of long ages of Earth\u2019s history that the Pope had to mobilize the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC) founded by his predecessor to counteract the tendency to mythologize the first chapters of the book of Genesis.\u00a0 By a motu proprio<\/em> \u201cPraestantia Scripturae<\/em>,\u201d on November 18, 1907, Pope St. Pius X affirmed that Catholics who dissented from the decisions of the PBC would incur the guilt of grave sin.<\/p>\n

On June 30, 1909, the members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission strongly affirmed the historical truth of Genesis from the first verse.[2]<\/a>\u00a0 The affirmations came in reply to two questions:<\/p>\n

Question I<\/strong>: Whether the various exegetical systems which have been proposed to exclude the literal historical sense of the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, and have been defended by the pretense of science, are sustained by a solid foundation?\u2014Reply<\/strong>: In the negative.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

This reply establishes that the literal historical sense of the first three chapters of Genesis cannot be called into question.<\/p>\n

Question II<\/strong>: Whether . . . it can be taught that the three aforesaid chapters of Genesis do not contain the stories of events which really happened, that is, which correspond with objective reality and historical truth . . . or, finally, historical in part and fictitious in part?\u2014Reply<\/strong>: In the negative.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

This reply definitively excludes the possibility that even a part <\/strong>of the Genesis narrative could be fictitious and non-historical.<\/p>\n

We can here agree with Dr. Salkeld, who states in his response to Hichborn: \u201c[Genesis] was not written to be read as scientific description, and . . . the Church throughout the ages has not read it as such.\u201d\u00a0 Throughout the ages the Church has read the chapters of Genesis as history<\/em>, which is not properly a field for scientific study at all.\u00a0 Since scientific inquiry is based on the experimental method, it is properly restricted to events that can be subjected to tests in the present<\/em>.\u00a0 It cannot establish how an event in the past proceeded, and indeed cannot even properly provide us with a sense of whether or not an historical event could<\/em> have occurred.\u00a0 And, of course, natural science is at a complete loss to account for how artifacts like the Shroud of Turin and the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe came into being.\u00a0 We will deal more with the limitations of experimental science in a later section and return for now to our discussion of the Magisterium\u2019s position on Genesis.<\/p>\n

The next magisterial document dealing explicitly with the historical events recounted in Genesis 1-3, the encyclical Humani Generis <\/em>of Pope Pius XII, <\/em>must be understood in the context of the 1909 PBC rulings.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 Although Pope Pius XII charged \u201cexegetes\u201d with the task of determining in precisely what sense<\/strong> the first eleven chapters of Genesis are<\/strong> history, he insisted that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are <\/strong>\u201ca kind of history\u201d and that they contain a popular description of the origins of the human race and of the chosen people.\u00a0 He also upheld the constant teaching of the Church that these chapters are \u201cfree from all error\u201d (DZ, 2329).\u00a0 Therefore, the PBC decrees and Humani Generis <\/em>uphold the constant teaching of the Church that Genesis 1-11 is a sacred history and leave the very heavy burden of proof where it has always rested\u2014on those who question the plain and obvious sense of Genesis 1-3, as interpreted by the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching.<\/p>\n

Does the Bible Teach that Evolution Is False?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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Since the sacred history of Genesis was revealed by God so that we could know the truth<\/em> about how God created the world, we should not expect it to provide a catalog of errors<\/em> about the origin of the universe.\u00a0 Rather, we should expect to find what we do discover there: a true account of how God created the world and what happened in the first period of human history<\/em>.\u00a0 In the sacred history of Genesis Moses tells us that God created, by fiat, the entire material universe and all of the different kinds of creatures, for man, at the beginning of time, less than ten thousand years ago; and this constitutes the common doctrine of all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers from the time of the Apostles in their authoritative teaching.<\/p>\n

Theistic evolutionists scoff at the notion that the length of the period of creation could be a matter of great importance for Catholics.\u00a0 Dr. Salkeld himself makes the strong claim: \u201cNeither the Bible nor the Church teach, have taught, or could have taught that evolution is false. It simply does not fall into the realm of what either the Bible or Church teaching is concerned with.\u201d But this disregards the mind of the Church Fathers who held that the fiat creation of all things at the beginning of time less than ten thousand years ago was an indisputable fact contained in Divine Revelation and one that had to be maintained in the face of the scorn of the Graeco-Roman intellectual elite. \u00a0Many of the pagan intellectuals of the patristic era believed in some form of evolution over long ages and heaped scorn on the Church Fathers for placing their trust in a book produced by Hebrew barbarians who lacked the culture of the philosophers of Greece or Rome.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, the Church Fathers had to contend regularly with the ideas of pagan philosophers like Lucretius who believed in molecules-to-man evolution through natural selection over long ages of time. In De Rerum Natura, <\/em>Lucretius writes of the wonders that natural selection can accomplish in \u201ca vast time\u201d:<\/p>\n

Struck with blows and carried along by their own weight from infinite time until the present, [atoms] have been accustomed to move and meet in all manner of ways, and to try all combinations, whatsoever they could produce by coming together, for this reason it comes to pass that being spread abroad through a vast time, by attempting every sort of combination and motion, at length those come together which . . . become the beginnings of great things, of earth and sea and sky and the generation of living creatures.[7]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Far from making peace with these long ages of \u201cvast time,\u201d the Fathers of the Church rejected these long-age evolutionary phantasies as illogical, absurd, and totally contradictory to God\u2019s revelation to Moses in the sacred history of Genesis. Of these early advocates of long ages of evolution, St. Basil wrote that:<\/p>\n

Some had recourse to material principles and attributed the origin of the Universe to the elements of the world. Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules and ducts, form, by their union, the nature of the visible world. Atoms reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths and the most durable bodies only owe their consistency to the strength of their mutual adhesion: a true spider's web woven by these writers who give to heaven, to earth, and to sea so weak an origin and so little consistency! It is because they knew not how to say \"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.\" Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that was all was given up to chance.[8]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

St. Basil added elsewhere that so complete is the information contained in the sacred history of Genesis that those who rightly interpret the Sacred Scriptures can even know \u201cthe day on which the universe was made,\u201d a conviction grounded in the certainty that the chronological information in the Sacred history of Genesis was inspired, inerrant, and sufficient to establish a chronology from creation to the later periods of human history.[9]<\/a> This stands in direct contrast to Dr. Salkeld\u2019s claim that Genesis was not meant to be a \u201cnewspaper like recounting of historical events.\u201d Indeed, the belief in long ages so dominated the pagan world that the Church Fathers repeatedly rejected this erroneous belief and firmly upheld the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis and of the chronology of the world derived from the genealogies contained in the Pentateuch. Hence, we read in the City of God <\/em>of St. Augustine:<\/p>\n

They [pagans] are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents that profess to give the history of [man as] many thousands of years<\/strong>, though reckoning by the sacred writings we find that not 6,000 years have yet passed.[10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Julius Africanus observes that not only the Greek and Roman pagan intellectuals embraced these mythical long ages but also the Egyptians before them:<\/p>\n

The Egyptians, indeed, with their boastful notions of their own antiquity, have put forth a sort of account of it by the hand of their astrologers in cycles and myriads of years \u2026\u201d [myriad = 10,000].[11]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

St. Theophilus of Antioch, occupying the see founded by St. Peter, and reckoning from the chronological data in the Septuagint, at the end of the second century expounded upon:<\/p>\n

the number of years from the foundation of the world . . . to condemn the empty labour and trifling of these [pagan] authors, because there have neither been twenty thousand times ten thousand years from the flood to the present time, as Plato said . . . affirming that there had been so many years; nor yet 15 times 10,375 years, as we have already mentioned Apollonius the Egyptian gave out; nor is the world uncreated, nor is there a spontaneous production of all things . . . but, being indeed created, it is also governed by the providence of God, who made all things; and the whole course of time and the years are made plain to those who wish to obey the truth<\/a> . . . All the years from the creation of the world amount to a total of 5698 years, and the odd months and days\u2026. For if even a chronological error<\/a> has been committed by us, of, e.g., 50 or 100, or even 200 years, yet not of thousands and tens of thousands, as Plato<\/a> and Apollonius and other mendacious authors have hitherto written.[12]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his capacity as tutor of the imperial household after the conversion of Constantine, the Church Father Lactantius lent his voice to the chorus of patristic witnesses to the truth of the Biblical chronology of the world:<\/p>\n

Plato and many others of the philosophers, since they were ignorant of the origin of all things, and of that primal period at which the world was made, said that many thousands of ages had passed since this beautiful arrangement of the world was completed.[13]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of these statements stand in stark contrast to Dr. Salkeld\u2019s claim:<\/p>\n

While the Church could not possibly have taught evolution as it has come to be understood with modern scientific advances, both because the information was unavailable and because matters of science do not fall within the realm of what the Church understands herself as competent to pronounce upon, many of the most prominent theologians in the Christian tradition have said things that look remarkably like the theory of evolution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the contrary, historically the theologians, Fathers, and Doctors of the Church have said many things that look remarkably like a literal-historical interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis.\u00a0 Dr. Salkeld raises a common objection to the historical character of the first chapters of Genesis, the alleged contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2 when taken literally as historical narrative:<\/p>\n

Dr. Sankeld alleges that the simultaneous creation of man as male and female in Genesis 1 contradicts the account of the creation of man before woman in Genesis 2 and shows that these chapters are not meant to be understood as historical narrative.\u00a0 In reality, with the possible exception of St. Augustine, whose reasons for proposing a simultaneous creation of all things are discussed below, none of the Fathers saw this as an example of a contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2, understood as historical narrative. Hence, the great Belgian exegete Cornelius a Lapide, summing up the teaching of the Fathers and Doctors, wrote:<\/p>\n

Scripture does not say, \u201cHe created him<\/em>;\u201d it says \u201cHe created them<\/em>,\u201d specifically Adam and Eve. In other words, He created Adam a male and Eve a female. Therefore, it is clear that their names are announced by way of anticipation, for Moses has not yet described Eve\u2019s creation, even though she was made on this same sixth day. (He reserves her creation for Genesis 2:22).[14]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In reality the overwhelming majority of the Church Fathers saw no contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2 as historical narrative. As explained in the article \u201cRediscovering the Literal Interpretation of Genesis in the Writings of St. Augustine,\u201d other apparent contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2 when taken literally as historical narrative flowed from deficiencies in the Vetus Latina translation of Genesis used by St. Augustine and disappear in the superior Vulgate translation of St. Jerome.[15]<\/a> Biblical Hebrew expert Dr. Mark Koehne addresses other alleged contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2 when taken literally as historical narrative and shows that a correct understanding of the Hebrew resolves them all.\u00a0 For example, addressing one of the primary objections, Dr. Koehne writes:<\/p>\n

A third primary objection to yom <\/em>meaning a twenty-four hour period of time is Genesis 2:5 which, according to some commentators, contradicts the sequence of creation in Genesis 1, therefore demonstrating the symbolic meaning of the six days. Genesis 2:5 reads: \u201c\u2026no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up; the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground, but a stream came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.\u201d Based on a cursory reading, in many translated languages, God seems to have created plant life for the first time on both day 3 (Genesis 1:11-12) and day 6 (Genesis 2:5\u2014plant life following the creation of man on the sixth day). However, even in English the solution emerges. The vegetation on day 3 are \u201cevery kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it.\u201d In Genesis 1:29, God tells our first parents about their food source: \u201cI give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food.\u201d The vegetation on day 3 is their food source. By contrast, the vegetation referenced in 2:5, that would only spring up with rain and man to work the ground, are field shrubs (siakh ha sadeh, <\/em>i.e., \u05e9\u05d9\u05d7 \u05d4\u05e9\u05d3\u05d4) and field grass (ehsev ha sadeh<\/em>, \u05e2\u05e9\u05d1 \u05d4\u05e9\u05d3\u05d4), i.e., cultivated garden plants.[16]<\/a><\/p>\n

Chronology of Concern to All of the Church Fathers<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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It is important to realize that the conviction that Genesis was history and that a chronology of the world could be derived from the genealogies and other historical information in Genesis remained strong throughout the patristic era.\u00a0 An incident in the life of one of the greatest scholars of the patristic age and one of the last of the Church Fathers, Venerable Bede (672-735), illustrates how seriously the Fathers took the historical information in Genesis 1-11.\u00a0 According to one of the leading modern authorities on Bede\u2019s life and work:<\/p>\n

...[Bede divided the history of the world] into six ages, with a seventh running concurrently and an eighth still to come. The days of the week of Easter lay behind this in the early Church, which in turn relied on the idea of six days of creation in Genesis, ending in the seventh day of rest of the Creator. In the Christian dispensation these were completed by an \u2018eighth day\u2019 which was also the first and only day of the New Creation . . .[17]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The dominant chronology of the world in Bede\u2019s day was the one derived from the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which gave 5200 years from Creation to the Nativity of Christ. By a rigorous examination of all of the manuscripts available to him, Venerable Bede concluded that the chronology derived from the Hebrew manuscripts that St. Jerome used for the Vulgate was more reliable than the chronology derived from the Septuagint genealogies, even though this chronology had been accepted by most of the theologians of his time.\u00a0 In his work De Temporibus\u00a0<\/em>Bede set the beginning of the sixth age of the world at 3,952 years from Creation instead of 5,199.[18]<\/a>\u00a0 Thus, his biographer writes that:<\/p>\n

In 708, when he was thirty-five and an established writer, he was told that he had been cited as an heretic on this\u00a0subject\u00a0before the aged bishop Wilfrid of York. In\u00a0De Temporum Ratione\u00a0<\/em>he had challenged the calculation of the last age of the world by the recalculation of the years belonging to each age, while saying, as did St. Augustine, that the end of the last age and the coming of Christ was known only to God: \u2018it is not for you to know the times and the seasons\u2019, he quoted, \u2018 that the Father has put in his own power\u2019 (Acts 1:8). The charge of heresy distressed Bede profoundly; he wrote to a friend:<\/p>\n

How could I, denying Christ, be a priest of the church of Christ and with what logic could I, believing in the gospels and the epistles, disbelieve that he had become incarnate in the sixth age?[19]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As she concludes her account of this excruciating episode in Bede\u2019s life, Sister Benedicta adds that \u201cBede was sure he was innocent, never altered his opinion,\u201d and never suffered any kind of penalty for arguing against the majority view, but the fact that he was cited as a heretic for daring \u2013 after years of the most meticulous research \u2013 to differ from the accepted chronology by a mere 1200 years explodes the myth that our Fathers in the Faith cared little about the date of creation and that late-nineteenth century protestant fundamentalists were the first self-identified followers of Christ to get worked up about the age of the universe.<\/p>\n

Thanks in part to the work of Venerable Bede, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church eventually embraced his reasoning, and in the post-Tridentine era the greatest Doctors of the Roman Church, like St. Alphonsus Liguori, upheld the chronology derived from the genealogical data contained in the Vulgate, which is why all of the Douay-Rheims Bibles in the United States published at the beginning of the twentieth century had an appendix citing a chronology of four thousand years from Creation to the Nativity of Christ, almost identical to Venerable Bede\u2019s!<\/p>\n

In light of the evidence we have presented here, which is but a brief sample of the unanimous teaching of the Church Fathers on the recent creation of the world, and before leaving this topic, we would like to ask the theistic evolutionists of our day to please show us a single statement from a Church Father who taught that God used long periods of time in the creation of the material universe or that it does not matter if one believes in these mythical long ages, as did most of the pagan philosophers of the patristic era. When the testimony of the Church Fathers and Doctors is taken seriously, it becomes apparent that the fiat creation of all things at the beginning of time is absolutely integral to the true Catholic doctrine of creation and that the insertion of long ages of time into the creation period involves a denial of the goodness of God and of the goodness of the first created world before the Original Sin and calls into question the inerrancy of the chronological information contained in the sacred history of Genesis.[20]<\/a><\/p>\n

Are Science and Religion at Odds?<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The First Perfection of the Universe and the Creation-Providence Distinction<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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The Ecumenical Councils of Trent and Vatican I defined that when all of the Church Fathers agree on any interpretation of Scripture that pertains to a doctrine of faith or morals that is the truth and we must believe it. Unfortunately, theistic evolutionists have forgotten or overlooked one of the fundamental tenets of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation which was believed and taught by all of the Church Fathers in their interpretation of Genesis 1-3. St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica calls this doctrine \u201cthe first perfection of the universe,\u201d which he defines as \u201cthe completeness of the universe at its first founding\u201d and which is what, according to the Angelic Doctor, is \u201cascribed to the seventh day.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of the Fathers whose writings on this topic have been preserved agree that God created all of the different kinds of corporeal creatures for man in six days or an instant much less than ten thousand years ago and that when He had finished creating Adam, body and soul, and Eve from Adam\u2019s side, He stopped creating new kinds of creatures, at which point all of the different kinds of creatures, angelic and corporeal, each one perfect according to its nature, existed together with man and for man, in perfect harmony.\u00a0 According to the Fathers whose writings have been preserved on this topic, the first-created world was completely free not only from human death, but from deformity, disease, man-harming natural disasters or any kind of disorder in nature, all of which \u201cnatural evils\u201d only came into the world because of the Original Sin of Adam.[21]<\/a><\/p>\n

Indeed, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church held that the natural order in which we live and which the Fathers and Doctors sometimes refer to as the order of Providence only began to operate with relative autonomy after<\/em> the work of creation was finished on the sixth day of creation. Hence, summing up the teaching of all of the Church Fathers, St. John Chrysostom writes:<\/p>\n

When the Scripture here says: \u201cGod rested from all his works,\u201d it thereby instructs us that on the Seventh Day He ceased to create and to bring out of nonexistence into existence; but when Christ says: \u201cMy Father worketh hitherto, and I work,\u201d it thereby indicates to us His uninterrupted Providence, and it calls \u201cwork\u201d the preservation of what exists, the giving to it of continuance (of existence) and the governance of it at all times.[22]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With their distinction between the supernatural work of creation and the natural order of providence, the Fathers and Doctors expose the principal error of the theistic evolutionists\u2014their mixing of the order of the supernatural work of creation and the natural order of providence which are always distinguished in the writings of the Fathers and Doctors. This error flows in turn from the uniformitarian error that St. Peter warned us would enter the Church in the last days (cf. 2 Peter 3<\/em>)\u2014the false assumption that \u201cthings have always been the same from the beginning\u201d of the universe and that therefore we can legitimately extrapolate from the material processes that are going on now all the way back to the beginning of time to determine the age and origin of the universe.\u00a0 St. Peter prophesied:<\/p>\n

in the last days there shall come deceitful scoffers, walking after their own lusts, Saying: Where is his promise or his coming? for since the time that the fathers slept, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation<\/em><\/strong>. For this they are willfully ignorant of, that the heavens were before, and the earth out of water, and through water, consisting by the word of God (emphasis added) (2 Peter<\/em> 3:3-5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With this in mind, we will now examine the rise of the uniformitarian scoffers during the so-called Enlightenment to see how the revolution against the true Catholic doctrine of creation began outside of the household of the faith before eventually infiltrating the highest levels of the Church in the form of theistic evolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cScoffers Will Arise\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\"\"\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n

St. Thomas Aquinas defined the relationship between the work of creation and the operation of the natural order which only began after its completion as follows:<\/p>\n

The completion of the universe as to the completeness of its parts belongs to the sixth day, but its completion as regards their operation, to the seventh.[23]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, the origin<\/em> of the different kinds of creatures\u2014stars, plants, animals and men\u2014cannot be explained in terms of the activity of created things\u2014that is, in terms of the same material processes that are going on now.\u00a0 This is because, until the entire supernatural work of creation was complete, the universe was still \u201cunder construction,\u201d and did not function with the relative autonomy that it has enjoyed since the work of creation was finished.\u00a0 Thus, according to all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers, who addressed this question in their authoritative teaching, it is impossible to extrapolate from the present order of nature and from the material processes that are going on now to explain how these things originally came to be.<\/p>\n

This framework was not based on human reasoning or experience. It was based on God\u2019s revelation to Moses in which He clearly stated that the work of creation was a fiat creation and that it was finished on the sixth day with the creation of Adam and Eve. Therefore, ALL the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers drew the boundary between theology and natural science AFTER the creation of Adam and Eve. From this starting point, they recognized that the work of creation was the proper realm of the theologian. The natural order\u2014which began AFTER the work of creation was finished\u2014was the proper realm of the natural scientist.[24]<\/a><\/p>\n

Those who defend atheistic or theistic evolution do not accept this premise from Divine Revelation. They believe that the same material processes that are going on now have been operating in the same way since the BEGINNING of creation\u2014in contradiction to all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching.\u00a0 Remarkably, when St. Peter our first Pope foretold this revolution in men\u2019s ideas he went on to predict that these scoffers\u2014men like Descartes, Kant, Hutton, Lyell, Darwin, Teilhard de Chardin and all other theistic evolutionists and their modern disciples\u2014 would have to deliberately ignore the FACT\u2014not the pious belief\u2014that it was the Word of God that brought the heavens and the Earth and all they contain into existence, NOT a material process like what we observe in the world today (cf. 2 Peter 3:3-7). And this is, indeed, the fundamental error of all evolutionists, theistic or atheistic.<\/p>\n

No one exposed the folly of a uniformitarian approach to the origins and antiquity of man and the universe better than St. Augustine. In The City of God, <\/em>he reflected on the creation of Eve from Adam\u2019s side and observed that:<\/p>\n

This [the creation of Eve] He did as God\u2026some people use the standards of their own daily experience to measure the power and wisdom of God, by which he has the knowledge and the ability to make seeds even without seeds. And so they regard the account of man\u2019s Creation as fable, not fact; and because the first created works are beyond their experience, they adopt a skeptical attitude.[25]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this passage St. Augustine lays bare the error that St. Peter warned us against in 2 Peter 3 and which remains the fatal flaw in all accounts of origins put forward by theistic evolutionists who regard the account of creation at least in part as a \u201cfable,\u201d precisely because the \u201cfirst created works are beyond their experience,\u201d and they \u201cadopt a skeptical attitude\u201d toward the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-11, especially in regard to the chronology of the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe Did His Best to Dispense with God\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\"\"\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n

Ren\u00e9 Descartes (1596-1650) was the first Catholic thinker of note\u2014i.e., the first Baptized Catholic \u201cscoffer\u201d\u2014to propose that it would be \u201cmore reasonable\u201d to explain the origin of stars, galaxies and other kinds of creatures in terms of the same material processes going on now than by fiat creation. In his 1637 work Discourse on Method (of Rightly Conducting the Reason),<\/em> Part V, Descartes wrote:<\/p>\n

But it is certain, and it is an opinion commonly received by the theologians, that the action by which He now preserves is just the same as that by which He at first created it. In this way\u2026.we may well believe\u2026that by this means alone all things which are purely material might in course of time have become such as we observe them to be at present; and their nature is much easier to understand when we see them coming to pass little by little in this manner, than were we to consider them as all complete to begin with.[26]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In reality, Descartes wittingly or unwittingly distorted the \u201ccommon opinion\u201d of theologians which identified the creative action of God in creating the universe with His action in maintaining it. Rightly understood, this common opinion held that God created and sustained the universe by His divine omnipotent power, but it distinguished (on the side of the effect) between the exercise of that power to create the corporeal and spiritual creatures ex nihilo<\/em> and the maintenance of the universe after it was finished and complete.\u00a0 To appreciate the importance of this conflation of the order of creation with the natural order of providence, consider the following statement by secular humanist philosopher John Dewey about the pivotal importance of this concept in Descartes\u2019 writing and its link to Darwinism:<\/p>\n

When Descartes said: \u201cThe nature of physical things is much more easily conceived when they are beheld coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as produced at once in a finished and perfect state,\u201d the modern world became self-conscious of the logic that was henceforth to control it, the logic of which Darwin\u2019s Origin of Species is the latest scientific achievement.[27]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In light of the fact that John Dewey (1859-1952)\u2014the man most responsible for destroying the moral integrity of public education in the United States\u2014identified Descartes as the one who laid the FOUNDATIONS of modern evolutionary thought, we might ask ourselves: WHY was Ren\u00e9 Descartes the first Catholic thinker of note to embrace this idea? Was he really so much smarter than St. Augustine, St. Thomas and all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church? Is it a coincidence that Descartes dabbled in the occult and then had three \u201cmystical dreams\u201d brought to him by a \u201cspirit of truth\u201d which gave him the key to igniting a revolution in men\u2019s thinking\u2014 a revolution that would overturn the traditional teaching that \u201cthe past\u2014as revealed in Divine Revelation\u2014is the key to the present\u201d with the new mantra of the evolutionists, \u201cthe present is the key to the past\u201d?<\/p>\n

Perhaps we need look no further for an answer than to Descartes\u2019 devout Catholic contemporary Blaise Pascal. Pascal was as great a genius as Descartes but, unlike Descartes, he had true piety and he saw the terrible consequences that would result from Descartes\u2019 arrogant denial of the traditional teaching on fiat creation in favor of a naturalistic account of origins. Hence, Pascal wrote in Pensees<\/em>:<\/p>\n

I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy he did his best to dispense with God. But he could not avoid making Him set the world in motion with a flip of His thumb; after that he had no more use for God.[28]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

St Thomas followed Aristotle in teaching that a small error in the beginning becomes a huge error later on.[29]<\/a> But in the case of Descartes, a huge error in the beginning became an unimaginably monstrous error in the end. And this explains why highly intelligent and virtuous people can be completely wrong in their conclusions about origins\u2014because in regard to the origins of man and the universe they have accepted the false premise of Descartes and unwittingly rejected the premise that was held by ALL of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching. Indeed, a man could be the smartest person in the world\u2014and virtuous and well-intentioned to boot\u2014yet if he starts from a false premise, he will always reason (perhaps even sincerely and brilliantly) to a false conclusion\u2014as all evolutionists do.<\/p>\n

Has the Magisterium Upheld the Patristic Understanding of Creation?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\"\"\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n

The patristic teaching on creation was implicit in the words of the Nicene Creed, \u201cI believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.\u201d\u00a0 Not until the Middle Ages when the Albigensian heresy denied the divine creation of the material universe and the special creation of the various kinds of corporeal creatures did an Ecumenical Council elaborate on the first article of the creed in the following words:<\/p>\n

God\u2026creator of all visible and invisible things of the spiritual and of the corporal who by his own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time created each creature from nothing, spiritual and corporal namely angelic and mundane and finally the human, constituted as it were, alike of the spirit and the body.[30]<\/a> <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For 600 years, according to the foremost Catholic Doctors and commentators on this dogmatic decree, the words \u201call things\u201d \u201cat once from the beginning\u201d signified that God created all of the different kinds of corporeal creatures and angels \u201csimul\u201d (\u201cat once\u201d). This could be reconciled with the six days of creation (the view of the overwhelming majority of the Fathers) or with the instantaneous creation envisioned by St. Augustine\u2014but it could not be reconciled with a longer creation period. Among the commentators who taught that Lateran IV had defined the relative simultaneity of the creation of all things, perhaps the most authoritative was St. Lawrence of Brindisi (1559-1619), Doctor of the Church. In his commentary on Genesis, St. Lawrence wrote:<\/p>\n

the Holy Roman Church determined in the Fourth Lateran Council that the angels along with the creatures of the world were at once created ex nihilo<\/em> from the beginning of time.[31]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This precise meaning of the words of Lateran IV was also explained by the most authoritative catechism in the history of the Catholic Church\u2014the Roman Catechism<\/em>\u2014which taught that God created ALL things by his Fiat instantaneously \u201cin the beginning\u201d without any natural process:<\/p>\n

...[T]he Divinity \u00ad\u00ad created all things in the beginning. He spoke and they were made: He commanded and they were created.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to the Roman Catechism<\/em>, \u201cCreator of heaven and earth\u201d in the Creed also referred to the creation of all of the different kinds of living things. It states:<\/p>\n

The earth also God commanded to stand in the midst of the world, rooted in its own foundation, and made the mountains ascend, and the plains descend into the place which he had founded for them. That the waters should not inundate the earth, He set a bound which they shall not pass over; neither shall they return to cover the earth. He next not only clothed and adorned it with trees and every variety of plant and flower, but filled it, as He had already filled the air and water, with innumerable kinds of living creatures (Catechism of Trent<\/em>).<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note that God created all of these creatures by His word, instantly and immediately. During the creation period, He made, specifically, trees, \u201cevery variety of plant and flower,\u201d air creatures, water creatures and land animals. There was no long interval of time. There was no evolution. The Council Fathers reiterated the constant teaching of the Fathers, Doctors, and Popes, that God created the first man, Adam, by an act of special creation. They wrote:<\/p>\n

Lastly, He formed man from the slime of the earth, so created and constituted in body as to be immortal and impassible, not, however, by the strength of nature, but by the bounty of God. Man\u2019s soul He created to His own image and likeness; gifted him with free will, and tempered all his motions and appetites so as to subject them, at all times, to the dictates of reason. He then added the admirable gift of original righteousness, and next gave him dominion over all other animals. By referring to the sacred history of Genesis the pastor will easily make himself familiar with these things for the instruction of the faithful (Catechism of the Council of Trent<\/em>).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The text shows that the plain sense of the \u201csacred history of Genesis\u201d is so sure a guide to the truth about the creation and early history of the world and of man that the council fathers direct the pastor to read the sacred history so that he can \u201ceasily\u201d make himself familiar with the facts. The Catechism teaches that God created man \u201clastly.\u201d There has been no further creation since the creation of Adam and Eve\u2014only variation within limits established during the six days.\u00a0 Indeed, the Catechism of Trent underscored the teaching of all of the Fathers and Doctors that creation was complete with the creation of Adam and Eve\u2014and that God ceased creating new kinds of creatures after creating the first human beings:<\/p>\n

We now come to the meaning of the word sabbath. Sabbath is a Hebrew word which signifies cessation. To keep the Sabbath, therefore, means to cease from labor and to rest. In this sense the seventh day was called the Sabbath, because God, having finished the creation of the world<\/u>, rested on that day from all the work which He had done. <\/strong>Thus it is called by the Lord in Exodus (Catechism of the Council of Trent<\/em>) (emphasis added).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here we see that pastors throughout the world were instructed to teach the faithful that God finished the creation of the whole world and all of the different kinds of creatures specifically on the sixth day<\/strong> of a seven-day week. \u00a0As we have seen above, St. Thomas Aquinas had summed up the teaching of all the Church Fathers on the two perfections of the universe:<\/p>\n

...[T]he final perfection, which is the end of the whole universe, is the perfect beatitude of the saints at the consummation of the world; and the first perfection is the completeness of the universe at its first founding, and this is what is ascribed to the seventh day.[32]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The teaching of St. Thomas makes clear that the reason why God created the entire universe and everything in it was to show forth His glory and so that men made in the image of His Son could share one life with Him. He also reaffirms the teaching of all of the Church Fathers who held that the original creation was perfect, complete and harmonious in all of its parts. In contrast, theistic evolution holds that all kinds of creatures evolved and became extinct long before man evolved, that there never was a perfectly complete and harmonious creation in the beginning, and that God ordained that hundreds of millions of years of death, deformity, negative mutations, and disease should exist on earth before the first human beings evolved from sub-human primates.<\/p>\n

Besides being an unintentional blasphemy against the goodness of God and His original Creation, theistic evolution\u2019s account of the origin of man and the universe also suffers from incoherence.\u00a0 On the one hand, the Catholic theistic evolutionist professes to believe in miracles\u2014most especially the ones connected with the Life, Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord.\u00a0 But when he is asked why he believes in these things, he can only say that he believes the testimony of the truthful witnesses appointed by God to attest to them in the Word of God, as that testimony has been understood in the Church from the beginning.<\/p>\n

If we ask him, \u201cDo you believe that Our Lord Jesus Christ raised Lazarus, a going-on-four-days-old-decaying corpse from the dead?\u201d\u2014he will answer, \u201cYes, I believe.\u201d\u00a0 But a decomposing corpse is just a disorganized mess of chemicals which has no potential to become a living human being.\u00a0 Thus, the theistic evolutionist must hold that the fearfully and wonderfully made human body of Lazarus with all of its organs and physiological systems was instantaneously raised to life from a mess of lifeless disorganized chemicals at the Word of the Lord.\u00a0 But if we ask him whether we should believe that God created Adam in essentially the same way in the beginning of creation, as the Roman Catechism <\/em>teaches, he tells us \u201cNo, modern science gives us overwhelming evidence that the bodies of the first humans evolved over millions of years from non-living matter through the same kinds of material processes that are going on now!\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only is this kind of teaching incoherent; it overturns the right hierarchy of knowledge, removing theology from her place as the queen of the sciences and exalting fallible human conjectures to give a natural explanation<\/em> for that which we simultaneously explain supernaturally<\/em> with regard to the miracles of Jesus.\u00a0 In regard to creation, the Word of God as understood in His Church from the beginning is subordinated to the word of man.\u00a0 No wonder our young people are leaving the Church in droves!<\/p>\n

Has the Modern Magisterium Endorsed Theistic Evolution?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\"\"\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n

The teaching of the Catechism of Trent <\/em>on creation summarized above was upheld by the Magisterium well in to the twentieth century and has never been abrogated to this day. The First Vatican Council affirmed the teaching on creation of Lateran IV word for word. The Popes who reigned during the decades after Vatican I all mandated that the Catechism of Trent <\/em>be used to teach priests and faithful the true doctrine of creation. Moreover, every magisterial teaching that touched on the interpretation of Genesis 1-11 upheld the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-11.\u00a0 Less than a decade after Darwin published The Descent of Man<\/em>, Pope Leo XIII wrote to the Bishops of the whole world in an encyclical on Holy Marriage:<\/p>\n

What is the true origin of marriage? That, Venerable Brethren, is a matter of common knowledge. For although the revilers of the Christian faith shrink from acknowledging the Church\u2019s permanent doctrine on this matter, and persist in their long-standing efforts to erase the history of all nations and all ages, they have nonetheless been unable to extinguish, or even to weaken, the strength and light of the truth. We call to mind facts well-known to all and doubtful to no-one:<\/strong> after He formed man from the slime of the earth on the sixth day of creation, and breathed into his face the breath of life,<\/strong> God willed to give him a female companion, whom He drew forth wondrously from the man\u2019s side as he slept. In bringing this about, God, in His supreme Providence, willed that this spousal couple should be the natural origin of all men: in other words, that from this pair the human race should be propagated and preserved in every age by a succession of procreative acts which would never be interrupted. And so that this union of man and woman might correspond more aptly to the most wise counsels of God, it has manifested from that time onward, deeply impressed or engraved, as it were, within itself, two preeminent and most noble properties: unity and perpetuity (emphasis added).[33]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pope Leo XIII also defended the traditional Catholic approach to Scriptural exegesis with his encyclical Providentissimus Deus, <\/em>in which he reaffirmed the rule that Scripture scholars must \u201cuphold the literal and obvious sense of Scripture, except where reason dictates or necessity requires.\u201d In the light of this rule, the \u201csacred history\u201d of Genesis 1-11 had to be interpreted literally unless exegetes could offer proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the literal interpretation of that history could not be true. \u00a0Pope Leo\u2019s successor, St. Pius X, was equally aware of the tendency of contemporary intellectuals to see evolution at work in theology and morality as well as in nature\u2014and he deplored this tendency. In Lamentabili <\/em>St. Pius X condemned with the full weight of his office the proposition that \u201cthe progress of the sciences demands that the concept of Christian doctrine about . . . creation . . . be recast.\u201d As mentioned above, in the Motu proprio, <\/em>\u201cPraestantia Scripturae<\/em>,\u201d Pope St. Pius X also declared that no one could contest the rulings of the PBC without \u201cgrave sin.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1909, the Pontifical Bible Commission\u2019s answers to several questions about Genesis 1-3 established certain truths unequivocally. In addition to its replies to Questions 1 and 2 cited above, the PBC\u2019s answer to Question III established that the literal and historical truth of the following facts cannot be called into question: \u201cThe creation of all things wrought by God in the beginning of time\u201d; \u201cThe special creation of man\u201d; and \u201cThe formation of the first woman from the first man.\u201d\u00a0 With this reply, the PBC reaffirmed the teaching of Lateran IV and Vatican I that all things <\/em>were created by God in \u201cthe beginning of time\u201d; excluded any natural process in the formation of Adam and Eve and reaffirmed that their creation was immediate and instantaneous.<\/p>\n

In 1950, in the encyclical Humani generis, <\/em>Pope Pius XII gave permission to Catholic scholars to evaluate the pros and cons of human evolution. But this permission in no way abrogated the authoritative teachings cited above. Permission to investigate an alternative view is not tantamount to approval! On the contrary, it is often a means to expose an error root and branch. Pope Pius XII also called the German philosopher Dietrich Von Hildebrand a \u201ctwentieth century Doctor of the Church.\u201d Commenting on a Catholic catechism that spoke favorably of theistic evolution, Von Hildebrand wrote the following:<\/p>\n

A grave error lies in the notion of \u201can evolutionary age\u201d \u2013 as if it were something positive to which the Church must conform. Does the author consider it progress, an awakening to true reality, that Teilhard de Chardin\u2019s unfortunate ideas about evolution fill the air? Does he not see that the prevailing tendency to submit everything, even truth \u2013 even divine<\/em> truth! \u2013 to evolution amounts to a diabolical undermining of revealed truth? Truth is not truth if it is ever changing. The \u201ccourageous response\u201d called for is precisely the opposite of yielding to evolutionary mythologies.[34]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nowadays many Catholics reject the \u201ctraditional\u201d Catholic doctrine with respect to the special creation of man, the creation of Eve from Adam\u2019s side, and other doctrines derived from the literal historical interpretation of Genesis 1-11 on the mistaken grounds that the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium in recent decades has \u201cmoved beyond\u201d and \u201ccorrected\u201d certain errors in its earlier pronouncements on these subjects in the light of scientific advances. However, in the passage quoted above Dr. Von Hildebrand has given the simple reason why the special creation of Adam and the creation of Eve from Adam\u2019s side, among other doctrines derived from Genesis 1-11, are authoritative and unchangeable Catholic doctrine. He reminds his readers that \u201cTruth is not truth if it is ever changing.\u201d Therefore, it is impossible for the Magisterium to have taught these doctrines as authoritatively as it has in the past and then to contradict that authoritative teaching. This would not be a \u201cdevelopment of doctrine,\u201d like the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception or Papal Infallibility, but a deformation of doctrine.<\/p>\n

Scriptural Inerrancy Inseparable from Fruitful Theological Discourse<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\"\"\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n

The theistic evolutionist will argue against our thesis that theology has matured and makes use of tools, like the historical-critical method and the latest findings of the natural sciences, that were not available to the Fathers of the Church or to the great theologians of the past. According to this way of thinking, the Fathers and great theologians of the past can be appreciated for their wisdom but should not be considered reliable authorities in the realm of history or natural science. \u00a0But this objection obscures the fact that the constant teaching of the Church\u2014as defined at the First Vatican Council and reaffirmed in Dei Verbum <\/em>in the Second Vatican Council\u2014has been, is, and always shall be that every word in the Holy Scriptures is true, whether it speaks of faith and morals, history, geography or any other subject; and that, as a consequence, all fruitful theological reflection begins from this starting point.<\/p>\n

Theistic evolutionists like to point out that the Magisterium has never defined the literal historical truth of the historical propositions in Genesis 1-11.\u00a0 So, they say, we are free to believe or not to believe that Adam lived to be 930 years old or that the Flood waters covered all of the Earth\u2019s highest mountains.\u00a0 But this approach to determining the truth of historical statements in Holy Scripture would have been anathema to the Fathers and Doctors. Indeed, the Angelic Doctor summed up the mind of the Fathers when he wrote that:<\/p>\n

A thing is of faith, indirectly, if the denial of it involves as a consequence something against faith; as for instance if anyone said that Samuel was not the son of Elcana, for it follows that divine Scripture would be false.[35]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again and again, theistic evolutionists accuse the defenders of the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-11 of exalting their private opinions above the Magisterium of the Church.\u00a0 But this is a calumny.\u00a0 We are simply maintaining the reverence for the historical books of the Bible that all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Council Fathers maintained in their authoritative teaching.\u00a0 If Genesis 1-11 is a sacred history, and all historical propositions in historical books of the Bible are free from error, as Pope Pius XII in Humani generis <\/em>reaffirmed, we do not require a Magisterial decree to believe that Adam was 930 years old when he died or that the Flood waters covered all of the Earth\u2019s highest mountains (and was, necessarily, therefore, global in its extent).\u00a0 On the contrary, we are bound to believe these things without any Magisterial decree, because if anyone says that \u201cAdam did not live to be 930 years old\u201d or that \u201cthe Flood waters did not actually cover all of the Earth\u2019s highest mountains,\u201d it follows that divine Scripture would be false.\u00a0 The Angelic Doctor reminds us that:<\/p>\n

It is unlawful to hold that any false assertion is contained either in the Gospel or in any canonical Scripture, or that the writers thereof have told untruths, because faith would be deprived of its certitude which is based on the authority of Holy Writ<\/em><\/strong>[36]<\/a> (emphasis added).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For St. Thomas Aquinas and the Church Doctors who came after him, it was sufficient to say, \u201cAccording to Moses in Genesis, God said X, Y, or Z,\u201d to settle an argument.\u00a0 No reference to a Church Council or papal document was necessary.\u00a0 This approach stands in direct opposition to the methodology of most contemporary Catholic theologians.\u00a0\u00a0 Proof that the plain sense of Scripture had sufficient authority for the Fathers and Doctors to define doctrine can be found, for example, in the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica<\/em> on transubstantiation.\u00a0 Since the Fourth Lateran Council had just defined the dogma of transubstantiation for the first time, one might expect St. Thomas to cite the teaching of the Council in his treatment of the topic. But he does not.\u00a0 It is sufficient for him to cite the text of Scripture and to comment on it with the help of the Church Fathers.[37]<\/a>\u00a0 Until the rise of evolution-based modernism, this was the modus operandi <\/em>of all the greatest theologians and commentators on Holy Scripture, like Cornelius a Lapide, who followed in the footsteps of the Church Fathers and Doctors.<\/p>\n

Even in recent times, fruitful theological reflection has continued to result from this methodology, as when St. Maximilian Kolbe, in the last theological work of his life before being taken to Auschwitz, gave this profound explanation for the words of Our Lady of Lourdes to St. Bernadette, \u201cI am the Immaculate Conception.\u201d\u00a0 He writes:<\/p>\n

Who then are you, O Immaculate conception?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Not God, of course, because he has no beginning. Not an angel, created directly out of nothing. Not Adam, formed out of the dust of the earth (Gen. 2,7). Not Eve, molded from Adam\u2019s rib (Gen. 2,21).<\/strong> Not the Incarnate Word, who exists before all ages, and of whom we should use the word \u201cconceived\u201d rather than \u201cconception\u201d.<\/strong> Humans do not exist before their conception, so we might call them created \u201cconceptions.\u201d But you, O Mary, are different from all other children of Eve. They are conceptions stained by original sin; whereas you are the unique, Immaculate Conception (emphasis added).[38]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here we see that by taking God at His Word in the sacred history of Genesis with regard to the special creation of Adam and the literal creation of Eve from Adam\u2019s side, St. Maximilian was able to grasp the profound reason for Our Lady\u2019s identification of Herself as \u201cthe\u201d Immaculate Conception\u2014an expression which, on the eve of the publication of Darwin\u2019s Origin of Species <\/em>the following year, gave the lie to the diabolical deception of human evolution.[39]<\/a><\/p>\n

Is Fidelity to the Traditional Doctrine of Creation Disobedience to the Current Magisterium?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\"\"\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\n

Nowadays it is widely asserted that defenders of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation only accept Magisterial teachings that agree with their own views and reject more recent pronouncements that contradict earlier teachings. Since this accusation goes to the heart of the creation-evolution debate within the Catholic community, it is worth taking the time to examine it closely. What is really at issue here is whether an ambiguous or non-authoritative teaching of a Pope or Council on a matter of faith or morals trumps a more authoritative prior Magisterial teaching on the same matter. Theologian Fr. Chad Ripperger has written a penetrating reflection on this very question entitled \u201cConservative vs. Traditional Catholicism.\u201d In his essay Fr. Ripperger observes that:<\/p>\n

some ecclesial documents today do not have any connection to the positions held by the Magisterium prior to the Second Vatican Council. For example, in the document of Vatican II on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio<\/em>, there is not a single mention of the two previous documents that deal with the ecumenical movement and other religions: Leo XIII\u2019s Satis Cognitum<\/em> and Pius XI\u2019s Mortalium Animos<\/em>. The approach to ecumenism and other religions in these documents is fundamentally different from the approach of the Vatican II document or Ut Unum Sint <\/em>by Pope John Paul II. While the current Magisterium can change a teaching that falls under non-infallible ordinary magisterial teaching, nevertheless, when the Magisterium makes a judgment in these cases, it has an obligation due to the requirements of the moral virtue of prudence to show how the previous teaching was wrong or is now to be understood differently by discussing the two different teachings. However, this is not what has happened. The Magisterium since Vatican II often ignores previous documents which may appear to be in opposition to the current teaching, leaving the faithful to figure out how the two are compatible, such as in the cases of Mortalium Animos <\/em>and Ut Unum Sint<\/em>. This leads to confusion and infighting within the Church as well as the appearance of contradicting previous Church teaching without explanation or reasoned justification. Moreover, the problem is not just with respect to the Magisterium prior to Vatican II but even with the Magisterium since the Council.[40]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For an example of the problem that Fr. Ripperger highlights here, consider a fundamental element of the Church\u2019s traditional teaching on the roles of husband and wife in the family which is rooted in the sacred history of Genesis and the Mosaic account of the special creation of Adam and Eve but which is not explicitly affirmed in the 1994 Catechism\u2014that is, the God-given role of the husband and father to be the spiritual head of his wife and children. This\u2014the constant teaching of all the Fathers, Doctors, Popes, and Council Fathers in their authoritative teaching\u2014was re-affirmed by Pope Pius XI in\u00a0Casti connubii<\/em>, the same encyclical that re-affirmed the Church\u2019s constant teaching on the intrinsic evil of birth control. He wrote:<\/p>\n

The submission of the wife neither ignores nor suppresses the liberty to which her dignity as a human person and her noble functions as wife, mother and companion give her the full right. It does not oblige her to yield indiscriminately to all the desires of her husband, which may be unreasonable or incompatible with her wifely dignity. Nor does it mean that she is on a level with persons who in law are called minors and who are ordinarily denied the unrestricted exercise of their rights on the ground of their immature judgment and inexperience. But it does forbid such abuse of freedom as would neglect the welfare of the family; it refuses, in this body which is the family, to allow the heart to be separated from the head, with great detriment to the body itself and even with risk of disaster. If the husband is the head of the domestic body, then the wife is its heart; and as the first holds the primacy of authority, so the second can and ought to claim the primacy of love.[41]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In spite of the fact that this has been the constant authoritative teaching of the Church from the time of the Apostles until now, it is nowhere to be found in the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church<\/em>. Moreover, when Pope St. John Paul II wrote that husbands and wives should practice \u201cmutual submission\u201d he did not explain how his exhortation could be reconciled with the constant teaching of the Church on the roles of husband and wife prior to his pontificate.[42]<\/a>\u00a0 Are the faithful to conclude that the traditional teaching on the spiritual headship of the husband and father has been abrogated, because it is not explicitly affirmed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church<\/em>? Absolutely not! That has NEVER been the modus operandi<\/em> of the Magisterium. On the contrary, the Church has always operated on the principle that her authoritative teaching on a doctrine of faith or morals must be upheld, unless and until a new definition of that doctrine is proclaimed at the same\u2014or a higher\u2014level of authority. Since no authoritative Magisterial teaching has ever abrogated the constant teaching of the Church on the God-given roles of husband and wife in the family, Catholics are obliged to uphold the traditional doctrine.<\/p>\n

Moreover, we are obliged to ask the Magisterium to explain<\/em> how the doctrine of \u201cmutual submission\u201d should be reconciled with the constant teaching of the Church on the roles of husband and wife in holy marriage, since we know that God cannot contradict Himself. It is actually not difficult to reconcile Pope St. John Paul II\u2019s \u201cmutual submission\u201d with the traditional doctrine, but, sadly, very few contemporary theologians make the effort to do this. One way to reconcile the two is to recognize that a Catholic husband and father must submit himself to the spiritual and material needs<\/em>\u2014not wants!\u2014of his wife and children, while his wife and children should submit to his authority<\/em> in all things but sin.<\/p>\n

I think that it would be helpful for the reader to pause for a moment and reflect on the question, \u201cDoes the treatment of family roles contained in the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church<\/em> and its silence on the spiritual headship of the Catholic husband and father abrogate the traditional teaching of the Church summarized in Casti connubii<\/em>?\u201d How one answers this question is crucial for any constructive discussion of the Church\u2019s authoritative teaching on creation and evolution. On the one hand, the Catechism <\/em>is an authoritative guide for bishops\u2019 conferences to use in developing their own contemporary catechisms. On the other hand, the treatment of family relationships contained in the new Catechism<\/em> leaves out an essential element of the subject that has been taught since the time of the Apostles and summarized in Casti connubii<\/em>. When faced with a contradiction of this kind, should the faithful follow the more recent teaching because it necessarily reflects the guidance of the Holy Spirit? If so, does this mean that Catholic fathers are no longer the spiritual heads of their families? Or does the informed Catholic have an obligation to evaluate the more recent teaching in the light of the constant teaching\u2014the \u201ctraditional doctrine\u201d\u2014of the Church?\u00a0 Throughout her history, the Church has always held that an authoritative Magisterial teaching must take precedence over a less authoritative teaching on the same topic, especially when the latter teaching is incomplete, ambiguous, or contradicts the prior teaching. There are many examples of this in Church history.<\/p>\n

The Traditional Doctrine of Creation and the Recent Popes<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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Defenders of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation do not challenge the legitimacy of Vatican II or of the 1994 Catechism. Nor do we deny that Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have made non-authoritative statements favorable to theistic evolutionism. We simply maintain that an ambiguous, incomplete, tentative or non-authoritative teaching of a Pope, Bishop, or Council cannot supersede a clear, unambiguous teaching that has been handed down from the Apostles. Any such tentative or ambiguous teachings on matters of faith and morals must be understood in light of previous clear and authoritative magisterial teachings on those matters, if any have been handed down. In regard to creation and evolution, we have demonstrated that a great number of highly authoritative magisterial teachings have upheld special creation and the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-11.<\/p>\n

Advocates for theistic evolution will object that cosmological or biological evolution are hypotheses in natural science<\/em> and cannot be excluded by the Church\u2019s creation theology. And it is true that Pope St. John Paul II believed his scientific advisors when they asserted that everything in the universe (except for man\u2019s soul) could have evolved through natural processes after the creation ex nihilo<\/em> of some material elements and natural laws in the beginning. But the Pope never cited any evidence that their opinion was true beyond a reasonable doubt. Moreover, Pope St. John Paul II\u2019s endorsement of the evolutionary hypothesis was always tentative and never obliged our assent. For example, in one Wednesday audience he stated:<\/p>\n

It can therefore be said that, from the viewpoint of the doctrine of the faith, there are no difficulties in explaining the origin of man, in regard to the body, by means of the theory of evolution. It must, however, be added that this hypothesis proposes only a probability, not a scientific certainty.[43]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Furthermore, in his famous speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996, the Holy Father admitted:<\/p>\n

A theory\u2019s validity depends on whether or not it can be verified; it is constantly tested against the facts; wherever it can no longer explain the latter, it shows its limitations and unsuitability. It must then be rethought.[44]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These statements demonstrate that Pope St. John Paul II always recognized that the molecules-to-man hypothesis remained \u201conly a probability\u201d as a hypothesis in natural science.\u00a0 Nevertheless, theistic evolutionists continually cite the statements of recent Popes expressing their belief that the natural science evidence favors some kind of molecules-to-man evolution as if these statements abrogated the mountain of authoritative teaching in favor of the traditional doctrine of creation.\u00a0 Indeed, there are two important points that theistic evolutionists usually overlook in regard to these recent papal statements.<\/p>\n

In the first place, all of the statements by Pope St. John Paul II and other recent Popes favorable to some kind of microbe-to-man evolution have been made as private opinions <\/em>in regard to evolution as a hypothesis in natural science<\/em>. This is significant, because the First Vatican Council purposely defined papal infallibility very narrowly and explicitly stated that the gift of infallibility was not given to the Pope to define \u201cnew doctrine\u201d but only to define a doctrine of faith or morals as contained in the Deposit of Faith that was handed down from the Apostles. Needless to say, no modern Pope has found microbe-to-man evolution in the Deposit of Faith handed down from the Apostles! Therefore, none of the recent Popes\u2019 opinions favorable to the microbe-to-man hypothesis can possibly abrogate the authoritative teachings of their predecessors in regard to the doctrine of creation.<\/p>\n

In the second place, and more importantly, when Pope St. John Paul II did teach in the realm of faith and morals he directed the Bishops and theologians of the Church to do certain things which \u2013 if they obeyed him \u2013 would lead inevitably to the complete rejection of molecules-to-man evolution in its theistic and atheistic forms.\u00a0 Specifically, in\u00a0Fides et Ratio<\/em>, Pope St. John Paul II repeated the call of Pope Pius XII in\u00a0Humani generis\u00a0<\/em>to maintain the metaphysical principles of traditional Catholic philosophy and to bring them to bear on the examination of controversial ideas, like human evolution.[45]<\/a> Sadly, few theologians have heeded the call of these two Popes to bring the metaphysical principles of traditional Catholic philosophy to bear on the examination of the evolutionary hypothesis. However, one theologian and philosopher who has done so is Fr. Chad Ripperger, formerly professor of dogmatic theology at the Fraternity of St. Peter Seminary of North America, whose article \u201cThe Metaphysical Impossibility of Human Evolution<\/a>\u201d can be found on the Kolbe website.[46]<\/a><\/p>\n

Fr. Ripperger\u2019s recent book\u00a0The Metaphysics of Evolution<\/em><\/a>\u00a0demonstrates that when the metaphysical principles of Catholic philosophy \u2013 like \u201cNo effect is greater than its cause\u201d \u2013 are applied to molecules-to-man evolution, it cannot pass the test. Indeed, when Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Pius XII\u2019s exhortations to apply the metaphysical principles of traditional Catholic philosophy are obeyed, one quickly discovers that the whole evolutionary story violates this fundamental principle from beginning to end.\u00a0 As Mr. Hichborn observed, in the evolutionary system, non-living matter produces a living organism; but that is only the beginning of the story.\u00a0 The one-celled organism must then produce the multi-celled.\u00a0 The multi-celled non-swimmer must produce the swimmer; the swimmer must produce the walker; the walker must produce the flyer\u2014and so on until the sub-human primate gives birth to the body of the first human being.\u00a0 The ability of some bacteria to metabolize non-living matter is irrelevant to this scenario, because it does not change the fact that non-living matter cannot produce a living organism without violating this fundamental principle.\u00a0 Indeed, from the beginning to the end of this mythical evolutionary process, the effect is greater than the cause, so that molecules-to-man evolution constitutes a continuous stream of violations of a metaphysical principle which Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Pius XII agreed cannot be violated by any sound system of thought.<\/p>\n

Confronted with Fr. Ripperger\u2019s argument, the theistic evolutionist of the Teilhardian school falls back on the claim that he is not an atheist like Richard Dawkins, and that he acknowledges that God must supply the \u201cforce\u201d that changes the reptile into a bird or the land mammal into a whale.\u00a0 But theologians who take that position wittingly or unwittingly abandon the pretense that molecules-to-man evolution is an hypothesis in natural science.\u00a0 Indeed, the moment that \u201cGod\u201d must be invoked to save the molecules-to-man hypothesis it ceases to be an hypothesis in natural science and becomes a religious belief.\u00a0 Perhaps this is why Dr. Salkeld asks the question, \u201cCan Catholics BELIEVE in Evolution?\u201d rather than \u201cCan Catholics entertain the Evolutionary Hypothesis?\u201d because the only form of theistic evolution that does not violate the metaphysical principles of traditional Catholic philosophy is a kind of panentheism which identifies God with the evolutionary process and makes God the savior of a bankrupt hypothesis in natural science.<\/p>\n

In reality, however, the Teilhardian version of theistic evolution violates another metaphysical principle of traditional Catholic philosophy which Fr. Chad Ripperger has highlighted in a more recent publication entitled\u00a0The Principle of the Integral Good<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 <\/em>In his new work,<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Fr. Ripperger shows how the metaphysical principle of the integral good\u2014the goodness of God and the integrity of His handiwork in the first-created world\u2014is incompatible with the hypothesis of molecules-to-man evolution in both its theistic and atheistic forms.\u00a0\u00a0One of the most valuable and important parts of this new book is its critique of the idea of so-called \u201ccontinuous creation,\u201d which holds that God continuously creates new kinds of creatures through a process of evolution. This idea has no precedent in the writings of the Fathers or Doctors of the Church, but it has become so widespread that it is even taught in the deeply-flawed\u00a0YOUCAT,\u00a0<\/em>or Youth Catechism (which ought more properly to be called a Youth Cataclysm because of the harm that it has done to faith of so many young Catholics!)[47]<\/a><\/p>\n

In reply to Question 47: \u201cWhy did God rest on the seventh day?\u201d\u00a0YOUCAT<\/em>\u00a0answers:<\/p>\n

God\u2019s rest from his work points toward the completion of creation, which is beyond all human efforts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the whole history of the Church, no Father, Doctor, Pope or Council (in an authoritative statement) has ever taught that God\u2019s rest from the work of creation \u201cpointed towards its completeness,\u201d in the sense that the original creation was unfinished or incomplete.[48]<\/a> On the contrary, as we have shown above, the correct explanation of the \u201crest of the Lord\u201d was well articulated by the\u00a0Catechism of Trent<\/em>\u00a0which taught that:<\/p>\n

the seventh day was called the \u201cSabbath\u201d because [God], having\u00a0finished<\/u><\/strong><\/em> and completed the creation of the world<\/strong>, rested from all his work which he had done (emphasis added).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The essential truth that God created a world that was finished and complete has been withheld from YOUCAT\u2019s young readers who are told that \u201cevolution takes place as God\u2019s continuous creation in natural processes.\u201d[49]<\/a>\u00a0 The YOUCAT view further echoes the Teilhardian vision of a monstrous god who deliberately created an incomplete world filled with physical evils like birth defects and natural catastrophes when it states:<\/p>\n

God created the world to be good, but it is not yet complete. In violent upheavals and painful processes it is being shaped and moved toward its final perfection. That may be a better way to classify what the Church calls\u00a0physical evil<\/em>, for example, a birth defect, or a natural catastrophe.\u00a0Moral evils,\u00a0<\/em>in contrast, come about through the misuse of freedom in the world.[50]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From the time of the Apostles until now, no Father, Doctor, Pope or Council in an authoritative teaching has ever taught or tolerated YOUCAT\u2019s distorted implication that God created a world with birth defects or man-harming natural catastrophes before Original Sin. On the contrary, the unanimous teaching of all of the Fathers and Doctors is that God created all of the different kinds of creatures perfect according to their natures, in a state of harmony with man, and that all deformity and disease was a consequence of the Original Sin. Fr. Ripperger\u2019s book offers a timely correction to many modern errors that flow from a denial of the goodness of God and of His handiwork in light of the traditional Catholic understanding of the metaphysical principle of \u201cthe integral good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theistic evolutionists try to find some precedent for their notion of continuous creation in the writings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, especially in the statements cited by Dr. Salkeld:<\/p>\n

It is therefore,\u00a0causally\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>that Scripture has said that\u00a0earth brought forth<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0the crops and trees, in the sense that\u00a0it received the power<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0of bringing them forth.\u00a0 In the earth from the beginning, in what I might call the roots of time, God created\u00a0what was to be in times to come<\/em><\/strong>.[51]<\/a><\/p>\n

Nature is nothing but the plan of some art, namely a divine one, put into things themselves, by which those things move towards a concrete end: as if the man who builds up a ship could give to the pieces of wood that they could move by themselves to produce the form of the ship.[52]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rightly understood, however, neither of these statements contradicts the traditional Creation-Providence distinction.\u00a0 They uphold it.\u00a0 While St. Augustine only speaks of the generation of identical offspring from already created biological species, St. Thomas is speaking of the natural laws which were created alongside the physical bodies and which govern their movements, like the movements of stars or the course of a chemical reaction. In both cases, the Doctors are saying that any development that takes place in the order of nature or Providence is an unfolding of the essential structure of each kind of creature which God created in the beginning.\u00a0 It cannot be the development of any new kind of creature that reproduces itself, since these creatures\u2014which St. Thomas calls \u201cperfect\u201d creatures precisely because they possess all the senses and reproduce themselves\u2014are all, according to St. Thomas and all of the Fathers and Doctors, descended from prototypes which God created at the beginning of time.\u00a0 Hence, St. Thomas teaches in the Summa:<\/p>\n

the corporeal forms that bodies had when first produced came immediately from God, whose bidding alone matter obeys, as its own proper cause.\u00a0 To signify this, Moses prefaces each work with the words, \u201cGod said, \u2018Let this thing be,\u2019 or \u2018that,\u2019 to denote the formation of all things by the Word of God . . .[53]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like all of the Fathers and Doctors before him, St. Thomas also taught that only Divine Power, being infinite, can produce things of the same species out of any matter, such as a man from the slime of the earth, and a woman from out of man.[54]<\/a>\u00a0 All that St. Thomas and St. Augustine are saying in the statements quoted by Dr. Salkeld is that any developments that we see in the biosphere in the order of providence were programmed into the original created things\u2014in the light of our knowledge of genetics, we could say, into the genomes<\/em> of the original kinds of plants and animals\u2014which God created in the beginning.\u00a0 There is not a hint in the writings of St. Thomas or St. Augustine of any kind of evolution, whereby a less ordered organism gives rise to a more highly ordered one through any kind of material process. Even their belief in spontaneous generation never led them to doubt the special creation of all of the different kinds of plants, animals and Adam and Eve in the beginning of time or the fact that all of the living things that reproduce themselves were direct descendants of the original specially created prototypes.<\/p>\n

Open Dispute Long Overdue<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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One of the main reasons why molecules-to-man evolution still appears to many Catholics to be a credible hypothesis is that it has not been subjected to rigorous critical examination in the public forum. As Dr. Salkeld points out: \u201cNot everyone has the time, talent, or inclination to study evolutionary biology and so pronounce on the question of evolution from within their own realm of expertise.\u201d\u00a0 Unfortunately, instead of addressing any evidence himself, he jumps to this conclusion: \u201cNevertheless, Catholics can be comfortable with the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community on this question.\u201d As we will elucidate in the next section, not only are a growing number of scientists publicly dissenting from Darwinism on purely scientific grounds[55]<\/a> but, as Michael Hichborn has noted, there are a number of popular \u201cproofs\u201d of evolution that do not support the hypothesis, but which actually undermine it when they are carefully examined.<\/p>\n

In his encyclical letter Humani generis <\/em>in 1950, Pope Pius XII asked that Catholic scholars examine the evidence for and against<\/em> the hypothesis of human evolution. However, in the last 70 years only a handful of Catholic universities and research centers have given any attention to the serious shortcomings of the evolutionary hypothesis. On the eve of his election to the papacy, then-Cardinal Ratzinger approved the publication, in English, of his work Truth and Tolerance <\/em>in which he observed:<\/p>\n

There is . . . no getting around the dispute about the extent of the claims of the doctrine of evolution as a fundamental philosophy . . . This dispute has therefore to be approached objectively and with a willingness to listen, by both sides\u2014something that has hitherto been undertaken only to a limited extent.[56]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This statement was all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has long refused to give any serious consideration to the scientific evidence against the evolutionary hypothesis, while defending a number of positions on other issues that are highly questionable from a Catholic point of view. (Questionable positions advocated by publications of the PAS include limiting family size to two children; using the so-called \u201cbrain death\u201d criterion to determine human death; and using GMO food to combat world hunger.) During the Darwin year, the organizers of a PAS conference on evolution refused to allow scientists to present compelling scientific evidence against <\/em>the evolutionary hypothesis, even when Ph.D. level Catholic scientists offered to do so at their own expense.[57]<\/a><\/p>\n

In reality, as explained above, the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church\u2014upheld by all of the Fathers and Doctors without exception\u2014has been that the origin of man and the universe is not<\/em> a question for the natural sciences but for theology.\u00a0 For decades Catholic theistic evolutionists have attempted to defend evolution as the \u201conly scientific explanation for origins\u201d on the grounds that \u201cnatural science\u201d is restricted to explanations in terms of presently-observed natural processes. \u201cCreation,\u201d they say, is not a \u201cscientific\u201d explanation for the origins of man or of other life-forms, because it does not meet this criterion. But the Church has always held that \u201ctheology<\/em><\/strong>\u201d is the \u201cqueen<\/em><\/strong> of the sciences,\u201d so there is nothing \u201cunscientific\u201d about the traditional doctrine of creation. It simply acknowledges that there are limits to how far natural scientists <\/em>can extrapolate from presently-observed material processes back into the remote past. This is a much more reasonable conclusion in the light of Divine Revelation about Creation, the Fall, and the Flood, than the evolutionists\u2019 assumption that \u201cthings have always been the same\u201d since the beginning of creation.<\/p>\n

Moreover, by embracing evolution as the \u201conly scientific\u201d explanation for the origin of the different kinds of living things, theistic evolutionists not only jettison the constant teaching of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils; they also unintentionally impugn the goodness and wisdom of God. This is because, unlike St. Thomas and the Fathers and Doctors who taught that God created all of the different kinds of creatures, perfect according to their natures, for man, in a perfectly harmonious cosmos, theistic evolutionists hold that long before the Original Sin took place God deliberately produced\u2014through evolutionary processes\u2014many different kinds of creatures only to destroy them so that something more highly evolved could take their place. Moreover, this evolutionary god used a process of mutation and natural selection that littered the earth with diseased and deformed creatures in the process of producing the alleged \u201cbeneficial mutations\u201d that transformed reptiles into birds and land mammals into whales. Whatever one wants to call this evolutionary god, it is not the God of the Bible, of the Fathers, and of the Doctors of the Church, of whom St. Thomas says again and again that \u201call His works are perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGod of the Gaps\u201d or Evolutionary \u201cIdol of the Gaps\u201d?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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Like many other theistic evolutionists past and present, Dr. Salkeld accuses defenders of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation of harming the faith and indirectly retarding scientific progress by arguing against the possibility of a naturalistic explanation for the origin of the human body and the various kinds of corporeal creatures.\u00a0 By saying that God created the first living cell, the argument goes, Catholics would discourage natural scientists from discovering how the first living cell evolved from non-living matter\u2014a discovery that Dr. Ken Miller assures us will be one of the great achievements of the twenty-first century![58]<\/a><\/p>\n

In reality, as we have demonstrated at length in various places, it is the traditional creation-providence framework that provides the most fruitful framework for doing scientific and medical research, while the widespread acceptance of the molecules-to-man evolutionary framework has retarded scientific and medical research for the last 161 years.[59]<\/a>\u00a0 The traditional Catholic doctrine of creation as defined above\u00a0 provided a unique framework for medical research\u2014one that recognized the existence of A Lawful Universe of Well-Designed Creatures, Marred (but not Ruined) by the Effects of Original Sin, whose Function (but not their Origins) can be Discovered through Rational Investigation.\u00a0 <\/strong>This proved to be an extremely fruitful framework for natural scientists and medical researchers.<\/p>\n

In the Christian, pre-Darwinian world, biology operated on a presumption of stable form and function.\u00a0 If a biologist encountered an organ or bodily system in an organism whose function he could not identify, he presumed that the Creator had given it a function and he sought to discover it.\u00a0 As we shall see, Darwinian evolutionary biology replaced this creation-based presumption of stable form and function with an evolution-based presumption of flux and dysfunction.\u00a0 We will now consider examples of the consequences of this replacement. The examples we will examine span the entire 161-year history from the Origin of Species <\/em>until today, and will include the scientific investigation of so-called \u201cvestigial organs,\u201d \u201cembryonic recapitulation,\u201d and \u201cjunk DNA.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Myth of Vestigial Organs <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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While definitions of biological evolution may vary superficially, biological evolution can be defined, essentially, as the development of all life-forms from non-living matter through natural processes over hundreds of millions of years.\u00a0 In Origin of Species <\/em>Charles Darwin speculated that small changes in living things as they adapted to changing environmental conditions could somehow be passed on to their descendants so that, over many generations, reptiles could change into birds, land mammals into whales and a subhuman primate into a human being.\u00a0 As evidence for his hypothesis, Darwin cited what he called \u201cvestigial organs\u201d in various species of animals, organs which once had a useful, adaptive function at an earlier stage of evolutionary development but which no longer had that function, had it only to a lesser degree, or had acquired a different function.<\/p>\n

In the Descent of Man, <\/em>Darwin cited several examples of such \u201cvestigial organs\u201d in man, including the appendix, wisdom teeth, muscles of the ear, the tail bone, body hair, and the semilunar fold in the corner of the eye.\u00a0 Darwin held that the appendix was vestigial because it was small in comparison with the caecum of monkeys, a fact which Darwin took to be evidence that in the course of man\u2019s evolution his need for the caecum had diminished as his diet had changed so that the caecum and the appendix (or caecal appendage) had grown smaller in man through \u201cdisuse.\u201d\u00a0 Darwin\u2019s disciples continued the same line of reasoning and identified various organs, glands, and other features of the human body that seemed to have either lost or diminished their function during the course of human evolution.[60]<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the foremost anatomists of his day and a Darwin disciple, Robert Wiedersheim, identified numerous vestigial organs in the human body, including the appendix.\u00a0 Wiedersheim\u2019s testimony played a part in the famous \u201cScopes Monkey Trial\u201d in Dayton, Tennessee, when a zoologist from the University of Chicago, Prof. Horatio Hackett Newman, submitted expert testimony to the effect that:<\/p>\n

There are, according to Wiedersheim, no less than 180 vestigal [sic] structures in the human body, sufficient to make of a man a veritable walking museum of antiquities. Among these [is] the vermiform appendix. These and numerous other structures of the same sort can be reasonably interpreted as evidence that man has descended from ancestors in which these organs were functional.[61]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis by most biologists and medical researchers ensured that the actual function of the appendix in humans remained obscure for over a century after Origin of Species.\u00a0 <\/em>According to an introduction to biology published in 1950:<\/p>\n

Science has piled up still further evidence for its case. It has found a number of useless organs among many animals. They have no apparent function and must therefore be a vestige of a once useful part of the body. A long time back these vestigial organs must have been important; now they are just reminders of our common ancestry. One example is the vermiform appendix which not only is utterly useless in human beings but which often causes great distress.[62]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To understand the anti-scientific nature of the Darwinian approach to understanding the function of the appendix in man, it is helpful to begin with a look at the position of the appendix in the human body.\u00a0 As shown in this diagram, the appendix sits between the nearly sterile ileum at the end of the small intestine and the caecum at the entrance to the large intestine. Noting that monkeys lacked an appendix but had a developed caecum for the digestion of plant matter, Darwin reasoned that the appendix in man was an appendage of the caecum and that the whole unit had degenerated through disuse as man evolved from an herbivorous ancestor.\u00a0 In this way, Darwin based his evaluation of the appendix on an evolutionary interpretation, then used the appendix as \u201cevidence\u201d for evolution\u2014a classic example of circular reasoning!<\/p>\n

The evolutionary interpretation of the appendix discouraged researchers from considering that the function of the appendix in man might be distinct from that of the caecum.\u00a0 This proved to be the case.\u00a0 In the 1960\u2019s, experimental evidence demonstrated that the appendix actually serves as a center for antibody-producing cells.\u00a0 By 1976, experimental knowledge of the appendix had advanced to the point that a medical textbook on gastroenterology noted the following:<\/p>\n

The appendix is not generally credited with significant function; however, current evidence tends to involve it in the immunologic mechanism.[63]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1995, a textbook on anatomy and physiology stated categorically that:<\/p>\n

The mucosa and submucosa of the appendix are dominated by lymphoid nodules, and its primary function is as an organ of the lymphatic system.[64]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is now recognized that the lymphoid nodules appear in the appendix roughly two weeks after birth which coincides with the colonization of the bowel with bacteria.\u00a0 The appendix can be safely removed later in life because it plays its most important role in the body\u2019s development immediately after birth and because it is only one part of the Gut Associated Lymphatic Tissue system (G.A.L.T.) which produces several kinds of antibodies: IgA immunoglobulins, which help to protect the bloodstream from infection from the contents of the bowel, and IgM and IgG immunoglobulins, which combat infections in the bloodstream.<\/p>\n

In spite of the overwhelming evidence for the functionality of the appendix, 160 years after Origin of Species<\/em>, Darwin\u2019s dim view of the appendix continues to be upheld by respected information sources.\u00a0 For example, in this year of Darwin, a visitor to the British Broadcasting Corporation\u2019s \u201cScience and Nature Home Page\u201d can still read the following description of the appendix:<\/p>\n

The appendix has no known function in humans. Evidence suggests that our evolutionary ancestors used their appendixes to digest tough food like tree bark, but we don't use ours in digestion now. Some scientists believe that the appendix will disappear from the human body.[65]<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The extraordinary ignorance of this statement\u2014which is still posted on the BBC\u2019s \u201cScience and Nature Home Page\u201d!\u2014shows how much faith in the evolutionary hypothesis continues to influence leaders in the field of public information, even when the facts contradict their evolutionary presuppositions.\u00a0 But the statement also reflects the degree to which the conventional wisdom pins the blame for diseases of the appendix squarely on the \u201cvestigial\u201d and defective nature of the organ itself, without even considering the possibility that these diseases could be symptomatic of deeper disorders.<\/p>\n

Extensive studies of non-industrialized societies all over the world have found that appendicitis was virtually non-existent in those who retained their traditional diet and way of life.\u00a0 In the December 2005 issue of the British Journal of Surgery<\/em>, in an article entitled \u201cThe Aetiology of Appendicitis,\u201d Dennis P. Burkitt of the Medical Research Council argues that<\/p>\n

Extensive evidence from the geographical distribution of appendicitis and its rise in prevalence in economically developed countries in the early part of this century suggest that the change from a high to a low-residue diet is largely responsible for this disease.[66]<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By blaming diseases of the appendix on the defective condition of a vestigial organ, Darwin and his disciples up to the present time have helped to discourage researchers from following the traditional approach of Western natural science and medical research initiated by Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks which looked for the causes of human disease in the defective diet, habits, or environment of their patients rather than in some intrinsic defect of the body or of its component parts.\u00a0 By blaming diseases of a vestigial appendix on evolutionary degeneration, generations of scientists lost their incentive to ask why these diseases did not exist among non-industrialized societies and to seek to prevent them through constructive changes in diet and life-style rather than by treating the symptoms of the disease through surgical removal.<\/p>\n

Darwinian Presumption of Flux and Dysfunction<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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Dr. Jerry Coyne at the University of Chicago is one of the world\u2019s leading scientist-apologists for molecules-to-man evolution. In a fairly recent book, Why Evolution is True, <\/em>Dr. Coyne makes the familiar claim that a certain feature of the human body offers strong \u201cevidence\u201d that humans evolved from microbes through a material process of evolution.\u00a0 In this case, Dr. Coyne\u2019s Exhibit A is the lanugo, or transitory coat of hair, that humans possess in utero.\u00a0 Dr. Coyne confidently informs his readers:<\/p>\n

One of my favorite cases of embryological evidence for evolution is the furry human fetus. We are famously known as \u201cnaked apes\u201d because, unlike other primates, we don\u2019t have a thick coat of hair. But in fact for one brief period we do \u2013 as embryos.[67]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Please note this intelligent scientist\u2019s reasoning process.\u00a0 He argues:<\/p>\n

Now, there\u2019s NO NEED for a human embryo to have a transitory coat of hair. After all, it\u2019s a cozy 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in the womb. Lanugo can be explained ONLY as a remnant of our primate ancestry (emphasis added).[68]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a classic example of an unsubstantiated presupposition looking for support.\u00a0 His argument is absurd, for there are hundreds of hairy mammals who likewise have no need of fur for warmth in the womb of their warm-blooded mothers, but he only singles out man for his specious argument.<\/p>\n

Here we see again how this evolution-believing scientist\u2019s presumption of flux and dysfunction prevents his brilliant intellect from reflecting, as St. Albert the Great, Maxwell, or Faraday, would have done: \u201cLord, I am not knowledgeable enough to understand why this pseudogene \/ lanugo \/appendix is here, but with Your help I will continue to investigate until I discover its purpose.\u201d Instead, with his evolution-based presumption of flux and dysfunction, the brilliant scientist reasons, \u201cIf I, with my trained intellect, cannot see the function of this feature, it MUST BE a useless holdover from the millions of years of evolution!\u201d\u00a0 And yet, long before the publication of Why Evolution Is True, <\/em>current research had already established that:<\/p>\n

...[vernix caseosa<\/em>] covers and protects the skin of the fetus from the constant exposure to the amniotic fluid in which it is bathed. In addition, the vernix caseosa <\/em>facilitates the birth of the fetus because of its slippery nature and protects the skin from being damaged by the nails.[69]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, long before the publication of Dr. Coyne\u2019s book, any up-to-date course in embryology taught that:<\/p>\n

Vernix caseosa <\/em>is a culmination of sebaceous gland secretions and dead epidermal cells, and the lanugo hair helps retain it on the outer skin surface<\/strong> (<\/em>emphasis added).[70]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thus, the atheistic evolutionary faith of Dr. Coyne, like the theistic evolutionary faith of Dr. Kenneth Miller, whose work we will examine more closely below, crippled his scientific understanding by leading him to presume dysfunction in ingeniously-designed structures in the human body which he did not understand. This stands in marked contrast to the presumption of stable form and function that characterized the greatest natural scientists of all time, men like St. Albert the Great, Maxwell, and Faraday, who worked within the framework provided by the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation.\u00a0 The good news is that when Catholic scientists and medical researchers return to the traditional Creation-Providence framework for investigating the natural world, we can expect a golden age of scientific and medical discovery!<\/p>\n

Evolution and the Anti-Culture of Death <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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Faith in the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis has repeatedly led scientists and medical researchers to believe that organs of the human body that have no apparent function are \u201cvestigial\u201d and expendable.\u00a0 The full extent of the danger inherent in this unproven and unsubstantiated assumption emerged soon after the publication of Origin of Species <\/em>with the popularization of the concept of \u201cembryonic recapitulation\u201d by Darwin\u2019s disciple the German medical doctor and professor of anatomy Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919).<\/p>\n

Darwin had argued that similarities in structure among diverse life forms indicated that they had all evolved from a common ancestor.\u00a0 According to Haeckel, the existence of similarities in embryos of various kinds of organisms proved<\/em><\/strong> that the higher life forms \u201crecapitulated\u201d their evolutionary history before birth and that they had all descended from a common ancestor.\u00a0 To make this \u201cproof\u201d more compelling for his contemporaries, Haeckel doctored drawings of the embryos of fish, salamanders, chickens, turtles, rabbits, pigs, and human beings to exaggerate their similarities and minimize their differences.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of his life, Haeckel himself noted that the Catholic Church leadership had initially rejected the microbe-to-man hypothesis as\u2014in the words of Blessed Pope Pius IX\u2014\u201da tissue of fables.\u201d[71]<\/a>\u00a0 However, the skillful propagation of his drawings as \u201cproof\u201d of man\u2019s descent from an amoeba helped to revolutionize the thinking of the intellectual elite of the Catholic Church so that within thirty years Haeckel boasted of \u201cevolution\u2019s greatest triumph\u201d\u2014the conversion of the Church\u2019s intellectuals, led by several prominent Jesuits, to accept microbe-to-man evolution as a \u201cfact\u201d which had to be reconciled with the Catholic Faith.[72]<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Haeckel\u2019s fraud was discovered and exposed by his own academic peers during his lifetime, the evolutionary hypothesis demanded common descent, and the concept of embryonic recapitulation continued to exert a profound influence on the study of embryology for many decades.\u00a0 Just as the conviction that the appendix was a vestigial organ prevented scientists and medical researchers from discovering its true function in the human body, so Haeckel\u2019s fraudulent theory of recapitulation prevented embryologists from investigating the unique patterns of early embryonic development in various kinds of organisms. One of the leading lights in the study of embryology in the twentieth century, Gavin R. de Beer wrote that<\/p>\n

\u201cHaeckel\u2019s theory of recapitulation . . . thwarted and delayed the introduction of causal analytic methods into embryology,\u201d since \u201cif phylogeny was the mechanical cause of ontogeny as Haeckel proclaimed, there was little inducement to search for other causes.\"[73]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

De Beer\u2019s observation implied that Haeckel\u2019s influence had come to an end by the 1950\u2019s\u2014but this was far from being the case.\u00a0 On the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of the publication of Darwin\u2019s Origin of Species <\/em>Sir Julian Huxley, the foremost scientist-apologist for molecules-to-man evolution the whole world, boasted that \u201cembryology,\u201d i.e., Haeckel\u2019s drawings, provided \u201cthe most striking proof\u201d that a microbe turned into a human body through a material process of evolution.\u00a0 To this day, biology textbooks all over the world argue that similarities between embryos of fish, amphibians, reptiles, humans and lower mammals constitute evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis, in spite of the fact that actual photographic evidence completely falsified the \u201cmost striking proof\u201d for evolution more than 20 years ago.[74]<\/a><\/p>\n

Typical of examples too many to cite is the caption that accompanies drawings of embryos of various life-forms from a widely used American biology textbook published in 2002 and co-authored by a prominent member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.\u00a0 Entitled \u201cEmbryonic development of vertebrates,\u201d it states:<\/p>\n

Notice that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking resemblance to each other, even though the individuals are from different classes (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). All vertebrates start out with an enlarged head region, gill slits, and a tail regardless of whether these characteristics are retained in the adult.[75]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although Haeckel\u2019s distorted drawings do not accompany this caption, the drawings that are provided do not show the stark differences between the various kinds of embryos at the same stage of development that were photographically displayed for all to see by biologist Michael Richardson in an article in Scientific American <\/em>in 1994.\u00a0 Rather, together with the inaccurate drawings, the caption falsely gives the impression that human embryos\u2014as members of the vertebrate phylum\u2014possess gill slits.\u00a0 But this is patently false.\u00a0 The pharyngeal arches in human embryos have no connection with gill slits whatsoever but develop into the outer and middle ear, and into the neck bones, muscles, nerves, and glands.\u00a0 Moreover, after the discovery of DNA, confidence in the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis led many evolutionary biologists to predict that similar body parts in diverse organisms would be controlled by the same genes.\u00a0\u00a0 This, however, proved to be false, as embryologists have discovered that the realization of the same body plan\u2014such as five digit extremities\u2014in diverse organisms (such as whales and humans) is controlled by different genes and is achieved through totally different embryonic pathways.[76]<\/a><\/p>\n

The idea of embryonic recapitulation not only led embryonic researchers down the wrong pathways\u2014it also led to a devaluation of the human embryo similar to the devaluation of the appendix documented above.\u00a0 In this case, however, the consequences of the devaluation were far more serious since what was being devalued was no longer an organ of the human body but the human body\u2014and human life\u2014itself!\u00a0 All over the world, abortion advocates have used the alleged similarity between human and lower animal embryos to trivialize abortion in the early stages of pregnancy.\u00a0 For example, in Germany pro-abortion activists: <\/em><\/p>\n

skillfully exploited the disunity of the German Catholic intellectuals to bring their demands for the legalization of abortion to the legislature. \u2026 Karl Rahner, who was in the forefront of the fight over [the loosening of] paragraph 218, wrote in Naturwissenschaft und Theologie<\/em> (brochure 11, page 86, 1970): \u201cI think that there are biological developments which are pre-human, but these developments are still aimed in the direction of man.\u00a0 Why cannot these developments be transferred from phylogeny to ontogeny?\u201d[77]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cOntogeny recapitulates phylogeny\u201d is a fancy way of saying that \u201cembryos re-live their evolutionary history in the womb.\u201d And although this \u201cmost striking proof for evolution\u201d has been thoroughly refuted by the modern science of embryology, belief in the bogus concept of \u201cembryonic recapitulation\u201d led Germany\u2019s most influential Catholic theologian, Fr. Karl Rahner, to conclude that unborn human beings pass through a \u201cpre-human\u201d stage.\u00a0 This opened wide the door to the legalization of abortifacient contraception and abortion\u2014since the child in the womb could now be regarded \u201cscientifically\u201d as \u201cpre-human\u201d during the first stages of development.<\/p>\n

\u201cBreathtaking Prospects for Embryonic Stem Cell Research\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In light of this history, it is particularly tragic that Dr. Salkeld recommends the Biologos institute and the Thomistic Evolutionists who receive funding from Biologos as reliable sources of information in regard to creation theology and natural science. \u00a0According to the Council of Chalcedon, the human nature assumed by Our Lord Jesus Christ began to exist from the moment of His conception:<\/p>\n

We profess the holy Virgin to be Mother of God, for God the Word became flesh and was made man and from the moment of conception<\/strong> (ex auteis teis sulleipseoes \/ ex ipso conceptu) united Himself to the temple he had taken from her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and this doctrine is explicitly reaffirmed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church <\/em>which teaches that:<\/p>\n

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception<\/strong>.\u00a0 From the first moment of his existence<\/strong>, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person (CCC, 2270) (emphasis added).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In contradiction to this fundamental doctrine, the founder of Biologos, Francis Collins, is on record as being \u201cexcited\u201d about the prospects for \u201cembryonic stem cell research,\u201d[78]<\/a> which, according to the official teaching of the Catholic Church, means that he is excited about the killing of tiny boys and girls so that the parts of their mutilated bodies can be used to benefit stronger and less vulnerable human beings. In the light of this gruesome reality, we would like to ask our readers to reflect on this question: \u201cIf Francis Collins believed the traditional Catholic teaching on the special creation of Adam and Eve, body and soul, would he be able to rationalize his support for the dismemberment of tiny human beings in the early stages of their embryonic development?\u201d\u00a0 How could he, on the one hand, believe that God created man as man and woman as woman from the first moment of their bodily existence, but hold simultaneously that the little boy or girl at conception is less than human\u2014or that the body of the little girl or boy could exist without a soul?<\/p>\n

It is one of the most striking features of the patristic teaching on the creation of Adam that the Fathers insist that his soul was created with, and as the form of<\/em>, his body, not before or after the body.\u00a0 As St. John of Damascus, who summarized the whole patristic tradition of the East, wrote in The Orthodox Faith<\/em>:<\/p>\n

From the earth He formed his body and by His own inbreathing\u00a0 gave him a rational and understanding soul, which last we say is the divine image . . . The body and the soul were formed at the same time\u2014not one before and the other afterwards as the ravings of Origen would have it.[79]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The person who believes that God evolved the body of a sub-human primate until it was ready to \u201creceive\u201d a human soul\u2014a metaphysical impossibility as Fr. Ripperger explains at this link<\/a>[80]<\/a>\u2014has little difficulty in believing that the body of a tiny human embryo could exist without a human soul.\u00a0 Yet, in the light of current biological evidence, both of these views contradict the dogmatic decree of the Council of Vienne in 1312 which defined that \u201cthe [human] soul is the form of the [human] body.\u201d[81]<\/a><\/p>\n

Dr. Haarsma, Francis Collins\u2019 successor as president of Biologos, also acquiesces in the destruction of tiny children, though in a less direct way than Collins.\u00a0 You can read her comments made at Calvin College, another bastion of theistic evolutionism, here.[82]<\/a>\u00a0 In them she explicitly states that a tiny human body is not necessarily a person from either a scientific or scriptural standpoint, and that it is legitimate to use, abuse, and destroy existing embryonic stem cells (which have to have come from tiny human bodies) for scientific research.\u00a0 Though she opposes the production of embryos specifically for the purpose of being destroyed and manipulated, she states that using embryonic stem cell lines<\/em> is ethical. However, the use of these cell lines clearly violates the Principle of the Integral Good, as\u00a0 explained by Fr. Phil Wolfe in a homily he gave on this topic, and to allow such use represents a grave evil committed against innocent human beings in the first days of life.[83]<\/a><\/p>\n

Can it be a mere coincidence that Catholics and Evangelical Protestants who do not accept theistic evolution are almost always categorically opposed to embryonic stem cell research, whereas those, like Francis Collins, who accept evolution, are much more likely to promote or at least tolerate the destruction of innocent children in the first days or weeks of life, as defined by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church?\u00a0 Indeed, Francis Collins and Biologos are aiding and abetting the destruction of millions of unborn children with their evolution-inspired refusal to recognize the existence of the human soul as \u201cthe form of the body\u201d from the moment of conception.<\/p>\n

Evolutionary Mythology and \u201cThe Biggest Mistake in the History of Molecular Biology\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\t\t
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While faith in the evolutionary hypothesis has demonstrably retarded the advancement of research in the field of embryology and contributed to the acceptance of abortion, abortifacient contraception, and embryonic stem cell research, that same evolutionary faith has also impeded scientific and medical research in the realm of molecular biology.\u00a0 It can be demonstrated that faith in the evolutionary hypothesis delayed the recognition of the functionality of so-called \u201cjunk DNA\u201d (or non-coding DNA) and thus retarded the discovery, and, probably\u2014at least in some cases\u2014the cure of many genetic disorders.\u00a0 What follows is a brief summary of the history of the rise and fall of the evolution-based concept of \u201cJunk DNA.\u201d[84]<\/a><\/p>\n