Liar, Liar, Word on Fire Part II: Darwin and Doctrine – Book Review

Word on Fire has published yet another book on science and faith, entitled Darwin and Doctrine: The Compatibility of Evolution and Catholicism. Its author, Dr. Daniel Kuebler, recently withdrew from a scheduled public debate at Franciscan University when he learned that one of his opponents was a representative of the Kolbe Center. Apparently, his reason was that he “did not trust the Kolbe Center.” While Kuebler fears to face the Kolbe Center in a public debate, he is perfectly happy to criticize the Kolbe Center’s director Hugh Owen by name from the safety of his book. We normally would not spend too much energy critiquing a book of this caliber, which likely will fail to have a lasting impact on the younger generation of Catholics who are increasingly critical of evolutionism. However, this kind of behavior on Dr. Kuebler’s part warrants a proper response. Though the book contains too many fallacies and misrepresentations to exhaustively address within the scope of a single article, we will attempt to give a high-level treatment of its core content.

The book starts off by making the dubious claim that: “In fact, when it comes to a position on the science of evolution, it turns out that the Church doesn’t have one.” It is true that the Church does not have a position on every error in regard to origins. However, the Church has made authoritative statements on origins which, rightly interpreted, are not compatible with evolution. For example, the Firmiter decree of the Fourth Lateran Council stated that:

God…creator of all visible and invisible things, of the spiritual and of the corporal; who by His own omnipotent power at once [meaning with relative simultaneity] 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 [Denz 428].”

This decree was reiterated by the First Vatican Council, almost verbatim, and the greatest commentators on the Firmiter for six hundred years, like St. Lawrence of Brindisi, Doctor of the Church, understood it to teach that God created each kind of creature supernaturally, in the beginning, just as the book of Genesis describes. This does not mean that God created every species that now exists, or that they were all on Noah’s Ark, but it does mean that all the different kinds of plants and animals were created in the beginning and have developed from those original created kinds.

Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical letter Arcanum (1880) stated that:

We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep (emphasis added).

That alone should have settled the matter for all Catholics, especially since it was written shortly after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). But, no, the PhD’s would just not let it go. They could not stand to have another Galileo affair where the Church would look bad in the face of so much scientific opinion.

Dr. Kuebler quotes Pius XII several times from his 1950 encyclical letter Humani Generis. What he and most other evolutionists reading the text fail to see is that it is very negative towards the idea of human evolution. For example:

Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.

Pius XII further states that the first 11 chapters of Genesis, “pertain to history in a true sense.” The book of Genesis is a history book, not a fable or poetry. Dr. Kuebler is apparently unaware of this when he states that: “There is not now, nor has there ever been, a requirement that Catholics read the first few chapters of Genesis as a historical description of events.” The Jews have understood Genesis as history since the time of Moses, but evolutionists cannot recognize that if they want evolution to be accepted.

Hugh Owen gets a special mention in the book as being a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) who sets aside human reason when it comes to the age of the earth or the universe, or any evolutionary links between living organisms.  In reality, Hugh Owen rejects the YEC label in favor of DRAC, i.e., “Divinely-Revealed-Age-Catholic,” placing himself in the same category as all of the Fathers of the Church, including St. Augustine, who would have shed their last drop of blood to defend the literal historical truth of every word in the sacred history of Genesis, including its statements about chronology and the long life-spans of the patriarchs.

Although from a naturalist, uniformitarian perspective, light from distant stars seems to pose a challenge to the DRAC position, this challenge can easily be answered by appealing to the supernatural character of the whole work of creation, attested to by all of the Fathers and by St. Thomas Aquinas and the greatest Doctors of the Church.  When Scripture speaks of God stretching out the heavens as described in Isaiah 44:24: “I am the Lord, that make all things, that alone stretch out the heavens, that establish the earth, and there is none with Me,” it is clearly describing a supernatural act of stretching-out the heavens by God which now makes it possible for light to travel over the stretched-out ether medium that fills all space much faster than when the speed of light is measured near the surface of the Earth.

Other scientists try to justify their belief in a relatively-ancient earth by citing the geologic column, but that can be best described as a record of the rapid burial of organisms in the sediment flows of the worldwide Flood. Radiometric dating has so many inconsistencies that it cannot provide absolute dates, so there is no solid proof for the millions and billions of years required for the evolution of the universe or of living organisms. Moreover, cutting-edge genetics has confirmed that just as physical systems move inexorably from order to disorder according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, genetic mutations build up in the genomes of all living things, so that time is actually the enemy, not the friend of evolutionary speculation, producing devolution from the original perfection of the created kinds before the Original Sin, without a single documented example of new functional biological information arising through a material process.

Kuebler’s treatment of the Fathers is predictably threadbare. He trots out the same old tired quotes from St. Augustine and Origen and virtually ignores all the other writers of the early Church. Let’s briefly examine his claims.

More importantly, [St. Augustine’s] interpretation of Genesis is such that it can possibly accommodate an evolutionary understanding of creation… To be clear… he did not advocate for one life form emerging from another. However, his belief that natural causes could allow for new life forms to emerge from the underlying created order is consistent with evolutionary ideas. (pp. 99-100, emphasis added).

How does Dr. Kuebler justify this claim about a Catholic Doctor of the Church? By quoting two Protestant theologians, Alister McGrath and Gavin Ortlund. We prefer to cite Catholic sources. The critical words here are natural and new.

Regarding “natural”: Having apparently not thoroughly read St. Augustine’s work or any serious Catholic literature dedicated to his primordial seeds (rationes seminales), Dr. Kuebler does not realize that St. Augustine makes the creation/providence distinction between the two ways God uses these potencies: the first, in the instant formation of things in a fully mature state (which St. Augustine admits is, to our perspective, miraculous), and the second, in the preservation and propagation of the same forms throughout time in the common order of nature, in which seeds give rise to plants and embryos to mature animals by slow growth. St. Augustine assigns the formation of Adam’s body to the former method. This is not just our interpretation of his words, but also how Catholic authorities have understood them. Peter Lombard writes:

Augustine, in On Genesis, says that Adam was made immediately of a fully mature age; and this in accordance with higher causes, not lower ones, that is, according to God’s will and power, which he did not bind to the kinds of nature [which he had created], just as the staff of Moses was turned into a snake.

Regarding “new”: St. Augustine states that the primordial seeds given to nature at creation were meant to propagate the same forms that were present at the beginning, rather than to bring about new ones:

[T]hese creatures were produced so that others might be born from them and by succeeding one another might keep the form originally given… According to their kinds, therefore, refers to the power of the seed to reproduce a likeness in the offspring of a creature that must perish…”

St. Augustine writes that this applies even for the very small creatures that he (erroneously) viewed as being produced asexually from water, earth, or decay: God may have created them potentially and not visibly at the beginning, but across time only the same old forms have been brought forth again and again, even if the “seed” resides in the elements rather than in the creature itself. Again, this is not simply our understanding of St. Augustine’s words. Blessed Alcuin of York, a premier Augustinian thinker, provides a concise summary:

Unknown natures do not arise from the primordial seeds, but the known ones are formed again more frequently so that they do not perish.

If one wants any further proof that St. Augustine’s rationes seminales are not in any way analogous to an evolutionary process that produces new forms, they should look no further than a trustworthy Catholic source: Fr. Henry Woods’ Augustine and Evolution.

Dr. Kuebler continues:

As the Protestant theologian Gavin Ortlund has pointed out, “It should, at least, discourage us from dismissing evolutionary processes of creation a priori, as though God must always create quickly and directly, rather than slowly and indirectly, for it to be really a work worthy of divine power.” (p. 100).

Again, Dr. Kuebler’s position is so theologically bankrupt that he finds its clearest expressions among Protestant thinkers. We prefer the Doctors of the Church. We will answer Ortlund’s statement with one from St. Irenaeus, who refuted the claim that God’s role as creator would not be diminished if His creatures were formed indirectly by lesser powers that He had made:

This manner of speech may perhaps be plausible or persuasive to those who know not God, and who liken Him to needy human beings, and to those who cannot immediately and without assistance form anything, but require many instrumentalities to produce what they intend. But it will not be regarded as at all probable by those who know that God stands in need of nothing, and that He created and made all things by His Word, while He neither required angels to assist Him in the production of those things which are made, nor of any power greatly inferior to Himself… For this is a peculiarity of the pre-eminence of God, not to stand in need of other instruments for the creation of those things which are summoned into existence…Whom, therefore, shall we believe as to the creation of the world – these heretics who have been mentioned that prate so foolishly and inconsistently on the subject, or the disciples of the Lord, and Moses, who was both a faithful servant of God and a prophet? (emphasis added)

We choose to listen to Moses, as the Saints have authentically interpreted him. All of God’s actions are done in such a way as to be revelatory of His Nature, and the Creation is the supreme revelation of His power. As for the quickness and directness of His creation, St. Augustine, whom Ortlund seems to think supports a slow and indirect creation, when writing about the formation of Adam’s body in adult form, rhetorically asked: “Did the one who instituted time need the help of time?” St. Cyril wrote about the formation of animals: “What seemed good to Him He brought about instantaneously and incomprehensibly. Respecting each of the things that were made, its Maker was the Word, and its origin was solely a command.” As St. Lawrence of Brindisi wrote about creation: “God wished to show how He could produce perfectly and in an instant, without middle causes, all the effects of middle causes.” St. Bede wrote: “It was proper in the beginning for every species of things to come for at the Lord’s command in perfect shape, in the same way as man himself, for whom all things were made on earth, is also known to have been perfectly formed, that is, in the freshness of young manhood”, and a little further on; “It must be understood that everything that He wanted came into existence faster than speech.”

Dr. Kuebler goes on to cite Origen as “Church Father” – a claim even evolutionist Jimmy Akin admits is untenable. The Scholastic theologians made it clear that Origen’s opinions are not to be placed among those of the orthodox Fathers. He cites Origen’s rejection of the literal sense on the early chapters of Genesis, ignoring of course (or, more likely, ignorant of) the fact that the cited passage not only earned Origen the condemnation of St. Jerome, St. Epiphanius, and virtually the entire body of subsequent Catholic theologians, but also earned the Origenists an additional condemnation at the 3^rd Council of Constantinople through the synodal letter of St. Sophronius. As Bp. Melchior Cano, a Council Father of Trent, put it:

But nothing is more relevant to faith than the true knowledge and sense of the divine word. In the Church therefore resides the proven understanding of the Scriptures, from which we can surely have understanding and certainty of the sign of the Catholic faith, and with the same sign we can also identify contrary errors. Of course, the clearest example of this first precept is in the earthly paradise, in the molding of Adam from the slime of the earth, in the formation of Eve from Adam’s rib, and finally in the temptation of the serpent. All these the Origenists perverted with allegorical and figurative interpretations. But since the Church has always accepted them not figuratively but literally as history, the eleventh act of the sixth [ecumenical] council expelled them [the Origenists] by law.

It is telling that Kuebler would rather cite the opinion of a condemned heretic than the opinion of orthodox saints and theologians. As for his quotations from Cdl. John Henry Newman, we would simply say that it is much easier to believe that a single saint was mistaken in his private judgment than to think that all the Fathers and Doctors before him were unanimously wrong in their public teachings on the matter.

It is certain that organisms have developed over time into their current forms, but these changes have all been accidental and devolutionary. There is no compelling scientific evidence for the evolution of life from non-living matter, for a common ancestor of all of the different kinds of living things, or for a common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. All the “missing links” in these speculative scenarios are just that – “missing”! If scientists would stick to what can actually be proven, then our Catholic Faith would not be denigrated by the spectacle of Catholic intellectuals abandoning the Faith of our Fathers for the wild speculations of evolutionary mythology.  When Catholic scholars once again use their God-given intellects to defend the Faith of our Fathers, we will be able to stop the mass exodus of young adult Catholics out of the Church and hasten the restoration of Catholic civilization and the social reign of Christ Our King throughout the world.