Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
From time to time we have mentioned the fact that it is almost impossible for us to find Catholic progressive creationists and theistic evolutionists who are willing to debate in a public forum. For that reason we were delighted to hear that Dr. Fuz Rana of the progressive creationist organization Reasons to Believe has agreed to a public debate with Dr. Robert Sungenis on December 16. About ten years ago, Dr. Thomas Seiler and I participated in a three-way debate at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, with Dr. Kenneth Miller and another speaker who defended theistic evolutionism, and with Dr. Rana and another speaker who defended progressive creationism. We were not permitted to post the video of the debate, but I am permitted to distribute it privately, so I thought that this would be a good time for me to share a link to the debate with our newsletter subscribers and to ask for your prayers for Dr. Sungenis.
There is one particular event that occurred during our previous debate with Dr. Rana that was particularly noteworthy, and I would like to draw your attention to it. If you watch the video, you will see that the organizers of the debate insisted on having the natural science speakers go first, so that the first evening of the debate featured the three natural science speakers, while the theological speakers were relegated to the second and final evening of the debate. This way of organizing debate was decided over our objections, since Dr. Seiler and I have always insisted that Theology is the Queen of the sciences and that the theological speakers should go first in any debate on the origins of man and the universe. Nevertheless, what I believe to have been a preternatural event took place during the debate which indirectly confirmed our thesis that theistic evolutionism and progressive creationism both represent an abandonment of the traditional Christian doctrine of creation and a surrender to a diabolical deception in the form of naturalism which leads natural scientists to overstep their proper boundaries and fall into scientism.
A Preternatural Power Outage
If you watch the video, you will notice that the debate took place in a state-of-the-art facility at Samford University, with excellent audio-visual equipment. Nevertheless, during my presentation, at about 3:28, the power went out on the projector. There was no explanation for the power outage, and nothing like it occurred during the presentations of the other speakers. Yet, as I pointed out on the spot when it happened, the interruption was anything but random. It occurred when I reached the slide that represented the fulfillment of St. Peter’s prediction of a future naturalistic revolution against God’s Genesis Revelation when Rene’ Descartes had a demonically-inspired mystical experience which led him to reject traditional Catholic theology and philosophy in favor of naturalism and materialism. The fact that Our Lord permitted the demonic forces to interfere with my presentation at that particular moment demonstrated that God only gives the demons permission to interfere with the proclamation of the Truth so as to turn the tables on them and highlight the Truth in a more powerful way.
For those in the audience who were attuned to the spiritual dimension of the debate, rather than focusing exclusively on the intellectual dimension, the power outage highlighted the fact that the revolution against God’s Genesis Revelation and the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis had nothing to do with advances in natural science—that is to say, with new observations of reality in nature or in the laboratory. Rather it had everything to do with a deliberate denial of the primacy of the supernatural order over the natural order and a commitment to the unproveable and unreasonable assumption that “things have always been the same from the beginning of creation”—in other words, that the same material processes that are going on now have been operating in the same way since the beginning of the universe and can explain the origin of life and of all living things.
One Catholic thinker who came very close to making this observation was G. K. Chesterton when he reflected on the relationship between man and Nature in his masterpiece Orthodoxy:
Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals … That you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being cruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws.
If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continues to recur: only the supernaturalist has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.
In these two paragraphs, Chesterton came very close to identifying the fatal flaw in the molecules-to-man evolutionary hypothesis in its theistic and atheistic forms. He acknowledges that it is impossible to give a natural explanation for nature, and that only a supernaturalist—like Moses in Genesis—can give a reasonable account of the origin of nature. In this way he comes very close to reaffirming the traditional Catholic Creation-Providence Framework for the study of the origins of man and the universe, upheld by all of the Apostles, Fathers and Doctors of the Church. According to this framework, the entire work of creation was supernatural, and the natural order, the order of providence, in which we are living, did not begin until the entire work of creation was finished.
Within this traditional framework, “nature” is indeed “our sister,” because the whole natural order was produced by God supernaturally at the beginning of time, including our first parents, Adam and Eve. Had Chesterton pursued this line of reasoning, he could have exposed the fatal flaw in the naturalistic uniformitarian approach to nature of Descartes and the Enlightenment philosophers who did, indeed, hold that “nature is our mother,” because, they assumed that “things have always been the same from the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3) and that the same natural processes going on now could explain the origin of everything in nature, including plants, animals or even the human body.
A Fatal Concession to Scientism
By accepting the possibility that modern science could legitimately contradict and “correct” the Biblical account of creation and the history of the world so long as it made room for a “special providence” watching over the process, Chesterton unwittingly made a fatal concession to the very scientism that he rejected in principle. Viewed from within the traditional Creation-Providence Framework believed and proclaimed by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, it is apparent that natural scientists are as incapable of determining the age of the cosmos or of the Earth as they would be of determining the age of the miraculous wine at the Wedding of Cana. In both cases, any attempt to extrapolate from our observations of presently-operating natural processes to explain the origin of the Earth or of the Cana wine would be bound to fail, no matter how intelligent the natural scientists making the extrapolations and no matter how sophisticated their technology. Indeed, Chesterton’s defense of miracles in Orthodoxy applies just as well or better to the doctrine of fiat creation:
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.
To paraphrase Chesterton, we can say what we wish he had said to those who tried to recast the “sacred history of Genesis” as “the exalted myth or poem of Genesis”—namely that the only reason that anyone would deny God’s revelation of how He created “the heavens, and the earth, the seas and all they contain” is because he “has a doctrine” against that revelation—the doctrine, to be precise, of naturalistic uniformitarianism, in the mode of Rene’ Descartes and Immanuel Kant, who insisted that it was possible to explain the origins of man and the universe in terms of the same natural processes going on now in the order of providence. Chesterton’s mistake was to concede that natural scientists could establish an accurate chronology of the world that contradicted God’s revealed chronology by extrapolating from the material processes observed in the present back to the beginning of the world. Dr. Thomas Seiler correctly identified this as a fatal error at the beginning of the debate, because once Catholics granted natural scientists the authority to pass judgment on the Word of God as understood in the Church from the beginning on one point, it was inevitable that the right order of the sciences would be overthrown and that natural scientists would begin dictating to the theologians in other matters of faith or morals.
For example, during the recent coronamania, scientific “experts” galore drew upon their dubious—and in most cases totally spurious—scientific knowledge to dictate to Church leaders if, when, and how they should be allowed to administer or receive the sacraments and whether or not they ought to use vaccines derived from or tested on murdered babies. But how many Catholics realize that this usurpation of Queen Theology’s place by upstart natural science was the culmination of a long process that began hundreds of years ago when prominent Catholic thinkers like Descartes allowed themselves to be seduced by the sons of the Enlightenment? In particular, these brilliant thinkers were seduced into questioning God’s revelation regarding the Earth’s location in time and space—a seduction that exalted the grandiose conjectures and extrapolations of fallible human beings above the Word of God as it had been understood in the Church from the beginning. Viewed from within the traditional Creation-Providence Framework believed and proclaimed by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, it is apparent that natural scientists are as incapable of determining the location of the Earth in time and space as they would have been of determining the age of the miraculous wine at the Wedding of Cana had they arrived on the scene after it took place. In both cases, any attempt to extrapolate from our observations of presently-operating natural processes to explain the origin of the Earth or of the Cana wine would be bound to fail, no matter how intelligent the natural scientists making the extrapolations and no matter how sophisticated their technology.
Education vs. Indoctrination
Throughout the United States and the world today, students are indoctrinated into the false philosophy of naturalism and into evolutionism--the belief that molecules turned into human beings through billions of years of purely material processes. Meanwhile, Catholic creationism—the divine revelation that a supernatural Creator brought the universe into existence from nothing, rapidly and recently, by acts of His Divine Will—is excluded. Defenders of the evolutionary world-view claim that molecules-to-man evolution is empirical science while creationism is a religious belief. In reality, both ways of explaining the origin of the universe are philosophical conclusions but it is creationism which draws its conclusions from empirical science while evolutionism draws its conclusions from a religious presumption, namely materialism. The non-empirical basis underlying the evolutionary story of the universe is the dogma that material processes governing the structures and functions of all physical and biological objects are also the cause of the emergence of these objects. On the other hand, the Christian philosophy regarding origins is based on a purely empirical and reasonable approach. It holds that observational data show that natural objects do not come into existence through natural processes. From this, it draws the rational and necessary conclusion that a supernatural Creator brought the universe into existence by acts of His Divine Will. Students should be given a fair opportunity to evaluate the reasonableness of these two approaches. If this were done, they would realize that the Christian philosophy is the rational one.
According to evolutionary speculation, students are told that molecules organized themselves into nucleotide letters to form genetic programs in a language far more sophisticated than anything that Microsoft has produced. Students are told that the code that directed molecular machines in one-celled organisms to build and maintain those organisms changed through copying errors into the code that directed molecular machines to build and maintain the various kinds of multi-celled organisms that could crawl on land, fly in the air, and, eventually, walk upright, think and speak like human beings! If the evolutionary assumption were true, we should see countless evolving, half-finished constructions in nature and in the laboratory. But we do not. The examples given to students in textbooks are misleading. One of the most widely-touted examples is Lenski's e. coli experiments. Students are told that since one group of e. coli mutated and developed the ability to feed on citrate in an oxygen-rich environment, this demonstrates the "evolution" of a new function. In reality, the e. coli already had the ability to metabolize citrate in an oxygen-free environment, so the "new" function was actually a LOSS of a switching on and off function—specifically the partial loss of the bacteria's ability to regulate its metabolism. In other words, this and all other such observations always demonstrate a reduction of genetic diversity and not in one single case an increase of functional complexity as would be needed to call evolution “science.“
While natural processes always proceed from order to disorder, increases in functional information always result from the activity of an intellect and a free will. There are no exceptions to this rule. Unlike evolutionary speculation, the Christian account of origins respects this rule. God the Supreme Being used His intellect and Will to create the different kinds of organisms, programming their genomes so that they could perform various functions and, in a very limited way, even adapt to changes in their environments by switching on and off pre-programmed morphologies. Dictionary.com defines "science" as "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." By this definition, the Catholic Christian account of origins is based on genuine science, in contrast to evolution. Allowing students to evaluate competing explanations of origins would result in a better educated and less materialistic citizenry.
Tragically, within the Catholic community today indoctrination in so-called theistic evolution and progressive creationism takes place almost everywhere, and many Catholic teachers enforce this new pseudo-orthodoxy by censorship, sarcasm, and ridicule, rather than by open dialogue or debate. With the help of your prayers and financial support, by God’s grace we will eventually ensure that every Catholic young person has at least one opportunity to hear a good defense of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation in his or her formative years. If you would like to contribute to the marketing of the new condensed version of our DVD-series that we are striving to get ready for distribution during the next three months—and if you have not already contributed—please go to the Kolbe website and sign up to make a recurring or a one-time donation.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata, in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
P.S. You can view the debate between Dr. Robert Sungenis and Dr. Fuz Rana at this link on Monday, December 16, at 7 p.m. Eastern Time.
P.P.S. The 2025 Kolbe leadership retreat will take place at the Catholic Conference Center in Hickory, North Carolina, from July 31 to August 6. The retreat will equip attendees to defend and promote the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation in their spheres of influence as the foundation of our Faith and as the only firm foundation for a culture of life. For more information and to register for the retreat, please contact Hugh Owen at howen@shentel.net.
