At the outset, it is important to remember that the ITC serves in an advisory role to the Vatican and its "documents are not considered expressions of authoritative church teaching." The document on Communion and Stewardship has to be evaluated in this context, especially since the magisterial documents that we cite in our publications are of a higher level of authority than any ITC document.
Having said this, it is worth noting that nothing in Communion and Stewardship offers any authoritative abrogation of the magisterial teachings cited in “The Traditional Catholic Doctrine of Creation” on the Kolbe website. However, the two documents differ in two fundamental respects. In the first place, they differ in respect to fundamental truths related to origins that are left out of Communion and Stewardship (without being condemned) and in the second place over their understanding of the limitations of natural science.
As an example of the first difference, consider the section of Communion and Stewardship that deals with human sexual differences. The Ecumenical Council of Vienne, the Pontifical Biblical Commission rulings of 1909, an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Holy Marriage, and other authoritative magisterial teachings have taught that God literally formed Eve from Adam’s side. In the light of these facts, isn’t it rather remarkable that this infallible teaching of the ordinary Magisterium does not even get a mention in the section of this document devoted to the origins and meaning of human sexuality? Doesn’t this reveal a certain unhealthy tendency to overemphasize the new and unauthoritative speculations of modern Popes while ignoring or downplaying authoritative magisterial teachings on important topics?
It is interesting that when the document does take seriously the authoritative magisterial teaching of the past, that authoritative teaching weighs heavily against evolutionary speculation. For example, in section 30, the authors write that:
In order to maintain the unity of body and soul clearly taught in revelation, the Magisterium adopted the definition of the human soul as forma substantialis (cf. Council of Vienne and the Fifth Lateran Council). Here the Magisterium relied on Thomistic anthropology which, drawing upon the philosophy of Aristotle, understands body and soul as the material and spiritual principles of a single human being.
This definition rules out the possibility that the body of a beast could be prepared to receive a human soul.
On the other hand, it is also worth noting that even when teaching the orthodox Catholic doctrine of human origins, the authors of Communion and Stewardship leave themselves open to being misinterpreted in heterodox ways. For example, in section 43, they write:
Every individual human being as well as the whole human community are created in the image of God. In its original unity – of which Adam is the symbol – the human race is made in the image of the divine Trinity. . .
It is not wrong to call Adam “the symbol” of the original unity of the human race, but it is exactly the kind of statement that is often misinterpreted by many theologians who seize upon such statements to argue that Adam is only a symbol and not a real individual from whom all human beings are descended. It is revealing that the authors, who must be aware of these rampant misinterpretations, do not take more pains to guard against them.
It is also worth noting that some of their best statements do not make sense except in light of the traditional doctrine of creation that is defended by the Kolbe Center. For example, in section 43 they also write:
Sharing in a created human nature and confessing the triune God who dwells among us, we are nonetheless divided by sin and await the victorious coming of Christ who will restore and recreate the unity God wills in a final redemption of creation (cf. Rom 8:18-19).
In this passage the authors refer to the restoration of the original unity of creation. But in the theistic evolutionary account of origins that is treated so approvingly later in the document, there is no original unity of creation to be restored. It might be argued that the authors are only speaking of the original human unity, but in that case they would be misinterpreting Romans 8 which clearly speaks of the restoration of the entire creation. It is only the traditional doctrine of creation that teaches that the entire universe was created in perfect integrity and harmony for man in the beginning and that this integrity and harmony was lost through Adam’s sin. According to theistic evolution, there never has been a time when the entire universe existed with all of its parts in a state of perfect harmony before the Original Sin.
As mentioned above, however, the greatest weakness of the document is the way that it embraces a uniformitarian philosophy of natural science that is completely at odds with Catholic tradition. The authors write:
63. According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the “Big Bang” and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life.
In this passage the authors forget almost 2000 years of Catholic theology and philosophy which carefully distinguished between the period of creation and the period of providence, and approve of wild extrapolations from present-day observations to conditions at the very beginning of creation allegedly 15 billion years ago. Thus, they are prepared to make a radical departure from all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils by restricting the creative action of God, in the strict sense, to the moment of the alleged Big Bang! What makes this even more disturbing is that the same authors were apparently completely unaware of the numerous expert scientists all over the world who reject the Big Bang hypothesis on purely scientific grounds. Even as Communion and Stewardship was being published and distributed, a document was posted on the internet whose signatories now number in the hundreds of professional scientists and engineers who reject the Big Bang hypothesis on scientific grounds. Here is the statement:
The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed―inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.
But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypo-thetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.
Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory’s explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.
What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory’s supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.
Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.
Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that “science is the culture of doubt,” in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.
Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.
Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.
Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a fundamental element of the scientific method―the constant testing of theory against observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible. To redress this, we urge those agencies that fund work in cosmology to set aside a significant fraction of their funding for investigations into alternative theories and observational contradictions of the big bang. To avoid bias, the peer review committee that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from outside the field of cosmology.
Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang’s validity, and its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the history of the universe. [End of Open Letter] (emphasis added).
Is it not remarkable that the authors of the ITT document do not even mention the variety of scientific opinion on this issue, or the possibility that the Big Bang hypothesis could be wrong? Isn’t this ipso facto proof that they did not do their homework in regard to the state of the scientific evidence? The authors’ deference to the speculations of biological evolutionists is even more remarkable. They write:
While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5-4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution. While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage. However it is to be explained, the decisive factor in human origins was a continually increasing brain size, culminating in that of homo sapiens. With the development of the human brain, the nature and rate of evolution were permanently altered: with the introduction of the uniquely human factors of consciousness, intentionality, freedom and creativity, biological evolution was recast as social and cultural evolution.
The reality is that cutting edge sedimentology, in particular the work of Guy Berthault, Alexander Lalomov and others, has shown that huge sedimentary rock formations can form (and have formed) very rapidly, and did not require the millions of years assigned to them by Lyellian geologists. Experts in physics like Jean de Pontcharra have shown that radiometric dating methods are based on unproven assumptions and are completely unreliable. And cutting edge genetics has demonstrated that mutations and natural selection cannot provide the engine for biological evolution—on the contrary, they have a devolutionary effect on the genome so that genetic information degrades over time. (I have pasted below the testimony of world-famous geneticist Dr. John Sanford on this topic.) As their blithe acceptance of the Big Bang hypothesis demonstrates, the authors of the ITC document did not exercise due diligence in evaluating the claims of mainstream materialistic natural science speculations. Then, rather than turning to the wealth of authoritative magisterial teaching on origins to provide a framework within which to evaluate these speculations, the authors appeal to a letter favorable to evolutionary theory from Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a body which has no magisterial authority whatsoever, and which has published a number of papers advocating positions contrary to Catholic doctrine in recent decades, including recommendations that family size be limited to two children per family. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n25_v111/ai_16269652/
Conclusion
This brief analysis of Communion and Stewardship has established that the authors failed to cite key magisterial teachings on the origins of man and the universe; failed to exercise due diligence in their evaluation of natural science speculations; and, most egregiously, failed to maintain the traditional distinctions between the period of divine creation and the period of providence which all of the Church Fathers and Doctors had used to protect the right relationship between theology and the natural sciences for almost two thousand years. One can only hope and pray that the members of the ITC will make a thorough, fair, and balanced investigation of the evidence for and against the evolutionary hypothesis, which will undoubtedly restore their esteem for the traditional magisterial teaching on the origins of man and the universe.
Appendix on 21st Century Genetics and the Collapse of the Theory of Biological Evolution
Dr. John Sanford – Genetics Researcher and former Professor at Cornell University
Dr. John Sanford has made the journey from atheist with evolution as his God to Christianity. His Christian faith has given him the freedom to see that his life’s work in genetics which he believed was made possible by macro evolution actually demonstrates that the Darwinian mechanism is falsified.
Dr. Sanford was a Cornell University Professor for more than 25 years and he has been semi-retired since 1998 so that he can continue his good works and scientific research. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in the area of plant breeding and plant genetics. While a professor at Cornell, John has trained graduate students and conducted genetic research at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, NY. During this time, John bred new crop varieties using conventional breeding and then became heavily involved in the newly-emerging field of plant genetic engineering. John has published over 80 scientific publications and has been granted over 30 patents. His most significant scientific contributions involve three inventions, the biolistic (“gene gun”) process, pathogen-derived resistance, and genetic immunization. A large fraction of the transgenic crops (in terms of numbers and acreage) grown in the world today were genetically engineered using the gene gun technology developed by John and his collaborators. John also started two biotech enterprises derived from his research, Biolistics, Inc., and Sanford Scientific, Inc.
[1][1] Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, John C. Sanford, FMS Publications, 3rd Edition, 2005-08.The issues of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going seem to me to be of enormous importance…Modern Darwinism is built, most fundamentally, upon what I will be calling “The Primary Axiom”. The Primary Axiom is that man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection. Within our society’s academia, the Primary Axiom is universally taught, and almost universally accepted…It is very difficult to find any professor on any college campus who would even consider (or should I say – dare) to question the Primary Axiom. It is for this reason that the overwhelming majority of youth who start out with a belief that there is more to life than mere chemistry – will lose that faith while at college…Late in my career, I did something which for a Cornell professor would seem unthinkable. I began to question the Primary Axiom. I did this with great fear and trepidation…To my own amazement, I gradually realized that the seemingly “great and unassailable fortress” which has been built up around the Primary Axiom is really a house of cards. The Primary Axiom is actually an extremely vulnerable theory – in fact it is essentially indefensible… (p. v, vi)
Mutation is never “good”
Apart from our ideological commitment to the Primary Axiom, it can very reasonably be argued that random mutations are never good…The overwhelmingly deleterious nature of mutations can be seen by the incredible scarcity of clear cases of information-creating mutations. It must be understood that scientists have a very sensitive and extensive network for detecting information-creating mutations – most scientists are diligently keeping their eyes open for them all the time…Yet I am still not convinced there is a single, crystal-clear example of a known mutation which unambiguously created information. There are certainly many mutations which have been described as “beneficial”, but most of these beneficial mutations have not created information, but rather have destroyed it…Information decreases. This is the actual case, for example, in chromosomal mutations for antibiotic resistances in bacteria, where cell functions are routinely lost. The resistant bacterium has not evolved – in fact it has digressed genetically and is defective. (p. 17)
The consensus among human geneticists is that at present the human race is degenerating genetically, due to rapid mutation accumulation and relaxed natural selection pressure (Crow, 1997)…Geneticists widely agree that essentially all of these mutations are either neutral or deleterious (if any are beneficial, they are considered so rare as to be entirely excluded from consideration). Subsequently, they realize that genetic information is currently being lost, which must eventually result in reduced fitness for our species… Hence human geneticists would probably all agree that eventually selection must be increased if we are to stop genetic degeneration. (p. 45)
We now know that human nucleotides exist in large lined clusters or blocks, ranging in size from 10,000 to a million. These linkage blocks are inherited as a single unit, and never break apart. This totally negates one of the most fundamental assumptions of the theorists – that each nucleotide can be viewed as an individually selectable unit…This should be an enormous embarrassment to the entire field of population genetics. On a practical level – it means natural selection can never create, or even maintain, specific nucleotide sequences. (p.55)
Limits of Natural Selection and Devolution
Even the simplest selection requires: 1) maintenance of population size; 2) clear identification of mutants; and 3) effective exclusion of the mutants from the breeding population. As we will see more clearly in the next chapter, when we consider all mutations simultaneously each one of these three requirements becomes utterly impossible…Natural selection, because of the cost of selection, cannot select against too many mutations simultaneously – or else selection will either become totally ineffective, or will result in rapidly shrinking population sizes (or both). Furthermore, natural selection needs to be able to recognize multitudes of what are essentially “invisible” mutations. Lastly, natural selection needs to be able to somehow exclude multitudes of mutations from the breeding population simultaneously – which is logistically impossible because of selection interference. These very real constraints on natural selection will limit what we can realistically expect natural selection to accomplish...While I will enthusiastically agree that selection can shape some specific gene frequencies, I am going to argue that no form of selection can maintain (let alone create) higher genomes… (p. 62-64)
As the number of traits undergoing selection increases, selection efficiency for each trait rapidly approaches zero, and the time to achieve any selective goal approaches infinity… (p.77 ) By the time that at least two mutations per linkage block have accumulated, nearly every beneficial mutation will have been canceled out by a linked deleterious mutation…Based upon the logic provided above, we can know with very high certainty that every single one of these “building blocks of evolution” is deteriorating. Based upon numerous independent lines of evidence, we are forced to conclude that the problem of human genomic degeneration is real. While selection is essential for slowing down degeneration, no form of selection can actually halt it… (pg. 82, 83)
If the Genome is actually degenerating, it is bad news for the long term future of the human race. It is also bad news for evolutionary theory. If mutation/selection cannot preserve the information already within the genome, it is difficult to imagine how it could have created all that information in the first place! We cannot rationally speak of genome-building when there is a net loss of information every generation! (p.105, 106)
Immense time Required for Fixation
So a typical mildly-beneficial mutation must happen about 100 times before it is likely to “catch Hold” within the population (even though it is beneficial!). So on average, we would have to wait 120,000 x 100 = 12 million years to stabilize our typical first desired beneficial mutation, to begin building our hypothetical new gene. So, in the time since we supposedly evolved from chimp-like creatures (6 million years), there would not be enough time to realistically expect our first desired mutation – the one destined for fixation.
After our first mutation has been found (the one that will eventually be fixed), we need to repeat this process for all the other nucleotides encoding our hoped-for gene. A gene is minimally 1,000 nucleotides long …it would take about 12 million years x 1000 = 12 billion years to create the smallest possible gene. This is approximately the time since the reputed big bang! So it is a gross understatement to say that the rarity of desired mutations limits the rate of evolution! (p. 126)
In the last 6 million years, selection could maximally fix 1,000 unlinked beneficial mutations – creating less new information than is one this page of text. There is no way that such a small amount of information could transform an ape into a human. (p. 129)
Mathematical Impossibility of a Chimp Becoming a Man
Therefore, our evolutionary assumptions should lead us to logically conclude that we should have significantly degenerated downward from our ape-like ancestors (deleterious fixations greatly outnumbering beneficial fixations). The power of this logic is overwhelming. In fact, we know man and chimp differ at roughly 150 million nucleotide positions (Britten, 2002), which are attributed to at least 40 million hypothetical mutations. Therefore, assuming man evolved from a chimp-like creature – during that process there must have been about 20 million nucleotide fixations within the human lineage (40 million divided by 2), yet we now can see that natural selection could only have selected for 1,000 of these mutations. All the rest (about 20 million) would have to have been fixed by random drift- resulting in millions of nearly-neutral deleterious substitutions. The result? A maximum of 1000 beneficial substitutions – in opposition to millions of deleterious substitutions. This would not just make us inferior to our chimp-like ancestors, it would obviously have killed us! (p. 130)
Primary Axiom Falsified
We have reviewed compelling evidence that even when ignoring deleterious mutations, mutation/selection cannot create a single gene – not within the human evolutionary timescale. When deleterious mutations are factored back in, we see that mutation/selection cannot create a singe gene – ever. This is over whelming evidence against the Primary Axiom. In my opinion this constitutes what is essentially a formal proof that the Primary Axiom is false. (p. 139)
Genetic Entropy
For decades biologists have argued on a philosophical level that the very special qualities of natural selection can essentially reverse the biological effects of the second law of thermodynamics. In this way, it has been argued, the degenerative effects of entropy is living systems can be negated – making life itself potentially immortal. However all of the analyses of this book contradict that philosophical assumption. Mutational entropy appears to be so strong within large genomes that selection can not reverse it. This makes eventual extinction of such genomes inevitable. I have termed this fundamental problem Genetic Entropy. Genetic Entropy is not a stating axiomatic position –rather it is a logical conclusion derived from careful analysis of how selection really operates. (p. 144)
The genome appears to be a program so well designed that it can tolerate tens of thousands of errors. It is amazingly robust – unlike anything designed by man. But for all that, the genome is still not immune to failure due to error accumulation. In 300 generations (6000) years, if the rate of loss was constant and at its current level, we would lose about .003% of our total information. This is huge – (90,000 errors) – yet given the extremely robust nature of the genome, it is conceivable. However, if we continued to lose information at this same rate for 300,000 generations (6million years) we would lose 3% of all our information! This would represent 90 million errors! This is inconceivable. No program could still be functional. (p. 150)
The Mystery of the Genome
What is the mystery of the genome? Its very existence is its mystery. Information and complexity which surpass human understanding are programmed into a space smaller than an invisible speck of dust. Mutation/selection cannot even begin to explain this. It should be very clear that our genome could not have arisen spontaneously. The only reasonable alternative to a spontaneous genome is a genome which arose by design. Isn’t that an awesome mystery – one worthy of our contemplation? (p. 151)
