Tag Archives: Creation Account

Creation and the Young Earth

August 29, 2020Bible, Church Fathers, Creation, EvolutionCreation Account, Evolution vs Creationism, Fossils, Genesis, Scientism, St. Basil, Young Earthtwowingstogod@gmail.com

Ever since the infamous Scopes-Monkey Trial, there has been an growing insistence that the Creation Account in Genesis is not a scientific account. With an equal vehemence, those in the Church have insisted likewise. When the opening chapters of Genesis are spoken of, they are always introduced with a disclaimer that they do not seek to give a scientific account of how the world was created. This much, of course is true, but most people do not understand why it is true. Instead they focus on trying to make the account fit with a scientific explanation of the origins of the world and of mankind. The Big Bang replaces creation ex nihilio, days become eons, and Adam arises from the slime of primates. Pope Leo XIII’s prediction that “For the young, if they lose their reverence for the Holy Scripture on one or more points, are easily led to give up believing in it altogether” becomes more prescient every day.

When pressed for why Genesis does not offer a scientific explanation, most exegetes will say something along the lines of “God didn’t write a science textbook but wanted used mythic language to let us know that it was He Who created all things.” The problem with this explanation is that the supposed mythic language leaves the door open to any naturalistic explanation of the origin of the universe.

The Failure of Science and Our Origins

The reason why God did not give us a science textbook is, not because He didn’t want to, but because it is impossible. Science concerns itself with explaining natural phenomena. The Creation accounts of the first six days were not natural events but supernatural. Science can no more explain the creation of the universe and all that is in it than it can explain how Our Lord turned water into wine or how the Sun danced at Fatima. It was a supernatural event which can only be explained through Revelation.

God did not create according to scientific laws because the scientific laws are one of the things He created. The laws that govern the Universe are not co-eternal with God but something that He creates in the process. Those laws are not even operative until He ceases the creative act at the end of the sixth day. It is only after the miracle of Creation ceases on the seventh day that God “rests” from creating and Divine Providence takes over.

A careful reading of the text that respects the literal meaning (even if it sometimes resorts to symbolic language) reveals this truth. Starting with the “beginning,” God sets the standard for all days: “God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day” (Gn 1:5). Light is created (with no natural source) by separating it from the darkness. This transition from day to night is then called “one day” as the text says. Note that the author does not say this is the “First Day” but “one day” as St. Basil points out. God creates time ex nihilio, and it is not until the fourth day that He creates the Sun and Moon as means to measure or “rule” over time. As St. John Chrysostom says “He created the sun on the fourth day lest you think that it is the cause of the day.” Nature’s clock could not be used to measure time because it did not yet exist. This means that we must rely on the revealed texts themselves. It is literally three days until the creation of the sun and moon.

The Hebrew word, yom, which we translate as day, always refers to a single day when it is used in Sacred Scripture. According to Fr. Victor Warkulwicz it is used 1904 times in the Old Testament and it is always used in the same sense as we use the English word day. Likewise it is used 359 times with an ordinal number and all of those refer to a regular day. The Pontifical Biblical Commission, which used to be a part of the Church’s official Magisterium, also said that the word yom must refer to either a literal day or a certain space of time to be consistent with its usage in other places in the Hebrew Scriptures.

To declare that the world was created in six literal days is to invoke the scorn of rationalists and even most Catholics. But again, science can tell us nothing about our origins because it is the wrong instrument to measure supernatural events. The idea that the universe was formed over eons of time by natural forces is nothing new. The Greek atomists came up with the same idea in the Centuries before Christ. The Fathers of the Church were all familiar with their ideas and universally rejected them favoring the fact that the Universe was made in six days. We might be tempted to dismiss them as scientifically uneducated, except the Church has repeatedly said that those things that are held by unanimous consent of the Fathers and Doctors are to be held definitively by the Faithful (see Council of Trent and Vatican I for example). Again, it is a question of theology and not empirical science.

Avoiding the Galileo Trap

What is perhaps most disturbing in all of this is the fact that many Catholics have abandoned this teaching in favor of “science”. But science is far from definitive on the question of the age of the universe. First, there is the uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell which posited that that the fossiliferous strata were produced by the geological processes of erosion and sedimentation working slowly over immensely long periods of time. The problem with this is that normal sedimentation does not produce fossils—they will decay long before they are covered over. Only rapid burial from some catastrophic event (like a world-wide flood) will produce fossils. The data actually suggests that if we had such a worldwide flood working on the surface of the earth for five months, then layer after layer of sediment would produce much of the strata that have been found. There are no surface irregularities where strata meet which means there was no erosion between them and thus they must have occurred in short succession. This combined with what are called Polystrate fossils, which are single fossils that pass through more than one stratum, which by uniformitarian reckoning, would leave the tops and bottoms of the same tree differing in age by millions of years, leaves aging of the earth through the fossil record far from an accurate measure of age. The ages could be off by millions of years. Christians would be foolish to abandon the traditional understanding of the Creation account on such shaky scientific ground.

Even if we concede the uniformitarian view there are still reasons to question the scientific accuracy of the age of the Earth. Fr. Warkulwicz names just a few issues with a 4.54 billion year old Earth:

By examining the decay of the earth’s magnetic field in reverse and extrapolating it back in time just 20,000 years the heat generated would have been enough to liquefy the earth. Reversal in the magnetic field could only be instigated by a catastrophic event like the Great Flood.
The concentration of helium in the atmosphere and has been measured and suggest a young earth
The Mississippi River pours about 300 million cubic yards of sediment into the Gulf of Mexico a year which means it would have only taken 4000 years to form the Mississippi delta
Related to (3), the thickness of the sediment on the ocean floor indicates it is a much younger Earth.

The point then is not so much that the Science is wrong, but that it is far from certain and there is plenty of evidence that the Biblical rendering is supported by science. The problem is science is dominated by a scientism that seeks to eliminate God from any discussion in Creation. By taking the science as certain and attempting to remove the Traditional interpretation, many in the Church are setting themselves up for another Galileo method. Catholics should educate themselves on the science and not be intimidated into changing their belief.

On the Origin of Adam

March 4, 2020Anthropology, Creation, Evolution, ScienceCreation Account, Genesis, Hylemorphism, Scholasticismtwowingstogod@gmail.com

Among its many hidden powers, the Zeitgeist has the capacity to hypnotize us. So desirous are we to placate it, that we often allow our thinking to get sloppy. It is in this vein that Pope Pius XII cautioned the Faithful to avoid “indulging in a false irenism” that is quick to conciliate with the Evolutionary Zeigeist of our age especially related to the origins of Man. This effort usually ends up “over-mytholigizing” the Genesis account and treating it entirely as symbolic. In so doing they run the risk of placing more faith in science than in Revelation, stretching the limits of credibility in order to make the creation account fit with evolutionary speculation. Of course the problem with doing this is that it ultimately is damaging to true faith and thus needs to be pointed out when we see it.

Once Pope Pius XII took polygenism off the table in his Encyclical Humani Generis, Catholics still scrambled to make Adam a product of a mixture of evolution and direct creation. Genesis proclaims that Adam was created when the “LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being “(Gn 2:7). They attempt to read this as God taking the body of a humanoid and then infusing a human soul into it in order to create Adam. It seems like a clever way to reconcile Evolution and Revelation, especially because there is nothing in the text that explicitly rules out reading “dust from the ground” as organic living material.

It is clever until we actually try to explain the change using philosophical categories. The proposed change consists of God placing a new form into the secondary matter that is the body of the humanoid. The body itself does not change, but only the form (the human soul) changes.

Philosophical Categories

In describing change, it is first necessary to state an important principle. When we speak of change we must always recall that there is must always be a principle of unity that is there both before and after the change. Otherwise we cannot say what changed. You cannot have change without a subject that undergoes the change.

Identifying the principle of unity depends upon what kind of change we are describing of which there are two possibilities—accidental and substantial change. With an accidental change, the change is within the thing itself. Something changes about the thing, but the thing itself does not change. A substantial change on the other hand is the change from one thing into another. One substance becomes another substance. As an illustration we could look at a glass of water. Adding food dye to it would be an accidental change while doing electrolysis on it would bring about a substantial change into hydrogen and oxygen.

In describing the infusion of the human soul in philosophical terms, I described God’s action as placing a new form into the secondary matter that is the humanoid’s body. In order to understand this change, we need to further define what we mean by “secondary matter”.

All things that exist are composed of form and matter. This idea is commonly referred to as hylemorphism. Put simply, the matter can potentially be anything, but the form determines what particular shape the matter will take currently. This potentiality to be anything is called primary matter while the matter as it currently is informed is secondary matter. Matter has the potential to be arranged in any way long term, but how it will be arranged in the short term is dependent upon how it is currently informed. From this we can conclude that because the form determines what a thing is, it therefore ontologically precedes matter. Adding this to what was said about change above, we can describe an accidental change as having its principle of unity in the form while the principle of unity in a substantial change is the primary matter.

An Explanation to Our Problem

Let us now set out to describe the proposed explanation in terms of the categories of change. In truth Evolution describes all changes as accidental changes, as merely changes in degrees instead of changes in kind. But the theistic explanation requires that the change be one that is substantial. The introduction of a new form is always a substantial change.

In a substantial change the form draws to itself the matter and arranges it such that it “fits”. The problem with this explanation though is that the specific humanoid’s body was arranged in the way it was (e.g. it was a humanoid’s body) precisely because it had the form of humanoid. If you were to swap out that form, the matter would not be arranged that way. It could be that the primary matter was drawn from the secondary matter in that body but it would not be arranged in the same way. Furthermore, the separation of the form of the humanoid from its matter means that it would have died and thus Adam’s soul would have been united to a dead body. In short you can’t really say in any meaningful way that Adam would have been created out of the same body. In fact it is just as accurate to say that the body was formed from the dust of the earth as Genesis does.

To be clear you also could not say it was the same individual that had somehow been elevated with gifts of reason and free will. To say that would be to fall back into thinking it is an accidental change. It must be a substantial change to accommodate the introduction of the new form. Given that substantial change doesn’t work like this, we have to conclude that the explanation is metaphysically impossible.

A Miraculous Explanation?

This doesn’t entirely exhaust the possible ways in which something might change, especially if we make room for a miraculous intervention. Catholics observe a miraculous change each time they attend Mass. In Transubstantiation, the entire substance of the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ with the accidents remaining the same. We might say that a new form is introduced while the physical matter does not change.

It is along these same lines that the irenic evolutionist is proposing that the physical body doesn’t change even if a new form is introduced. The problem with this explanation is that it would have to treat the body as an accident of the human person and not part of its substantial whole. If the soul can simply be inserted into any body then the body itself is an accident. This would strike at the truths closely related to both Christian anthropology as well as at the Incarnation.

In conclusion then there is no way to reconcile Revelation and Evolution when it comes to the origin of Adam’s body directly. As soon as we try to build the necessary bridge using Philosophy we are left without anything to build upon because we are unable to describe the change in any of our categories of change. Until a better scientific explanation for how Adam became a man comes along, it is better to yield to the Heiliggeist than the Zeitgeist.

On the Special Creation of Eve

January 4, 2020EvolutionAdam and Eve, Creation Account, Evolution vs Creationism, Galileo, John Paul II, Leo XIII, Metaphysics, Mongenism, Polygenismtwowingstogod@gmail.com

As the highest of all the sciences, all other sciences depend upon theology for first principles in one form or another. This is why the Church can never tire in proclaiming the truths of Divine Revelation. We have spoken a number of times previously on using Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy, both of which supply natural science with foundational precepts, as governing paths of inquiry into the origins of man. In this post we seek to provide some further theological guiderails; specifically into the origins of woman.

Among the temptations ever before the Church, especially in the wake of the fallout from the “Galileo affair”, is the seduction of capitulating to the Darwinian Zeitgeist in order to accommodate, not so much a scientific theory, but a worldview. This knuckling under stems from both a lack of faith and a lack of charity. A lack of faith because it does not take God’s word as more reliable than the inductive reasoning of science. A lack of charity because the Church, as the “pillar and foundation of the truth” can protect natural science from wasting its time. “Truth cannot contradict truth” so that if the Church knows something has been revealed, and thus true, she has an obligation to proclaim it. She can thus serve natural science by guiding it to areas of explanation that more closely accord with what we already know. This is not an apology for fideism, but an offer to supply the data from which human reason may find the truth.

Monogenism and the First Woman

That being said, theories abound within evolutionary biology as to the necessity of a single first woman from which all of mankind then proceeds. Not a few of them posit that at some point within the evolutionary process a first man and first woman evolved. There are many variations on it, but the monogenistic ones involve two members of some species of Hominids having undergone some change that led to their being the first humans. Widely accepted by many Christians, these versions suppose that from some group of Hominids the bodies of Adam and Eve were supplied while God infused a rational soul.

There are good philosophical reasons to suppose that this explanation of Adam is false because form ontologically precedes matter. The form of the living creature, that is its soul, organizes the matter of the body, not the other way around. But that is a discussion for another time because Revelation tells us that this explanation for the origin of Eve is necessarily false. Eve was specially created by God from the rib of Adam when “the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam” (Gn 2:22).

The Creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 contain both mythical and symbolic language for the prehistoric account of Creation. But this does not mean that everything that is written there is merely symbolic. Some of it, perhaps even most of it, can and should be read in a literal manner. Specifically, we should read the special creation of Eve as taken from the side of Adam as literally true.

Why It Matters

It might not seem like it matters how we read it, until we begin to reflect on its meaning. There is first the point that St. John Paul II made regarding the fact that the origin of Eve makes it a matter of faith that man and woman have equal dignity and were made for each other. The Woman is taken, not from his head or his feet, making her either higher of lower than him, but instead is taken from beside his heart.

Secondly, and more importantly, Eve being brought forth from the side of Adam is a type of the Church being brought forth from the side of Jesus while He slept on the Cross. As the Council of Vienna put it in 1312,

“And that in this assumed nature the Word of God willed the salvation of all not only to be nailed to the Cross and to die on it, but also, having already breated forth His spirit, to permit His side to be pierced by a lance so that from the outflowing of water and blood there might be formed the one, immaculate and holy virginal Mother Church, the Bride of Christ ,as from the side of the first man in his sleep Eve was fashioned as his wife so that to the specific figure of the first and old Adam, who according to the Apostle, ‘is a type of the one who was to come’ (Rom. 5: 14), the truth might correspond in our last Adam, that is to say in Christ.”

To read the creation of Eve as somehow symbolic or metaphorical opens the path to a symbolic reading of Christ’s relation to the Church. But if Eve was literally drawn from the side of Adam, then the Church must literally be drawn from the side of Christ. For the type can never exceed the archetype. The sign can never be more than the thing signified. This, as an aside, is why the Church has always read Jonah as a historical book, because Christ said his time in the belly of the whale was meant to be a sign of His time in the tomb.

Avoiding the Galileo Pitfall

But aren’t we just opening the door to another Galileo problem of so wedding ourselves to a literal interpretation that any scientific challenge to it clears the way for scandal? In this case, no. The analogy of faith, that is, the principle that Scripture interprets itself, paves the way for a literal interpretation.

In defending Church discipline in his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul comments that “For man did not come from woman, but woman from man…For just as woman came from man, so man is born of woman; but all things are from God” (1 Cor 11:8,12). The first woman came from man just as all succeeding men are born of a woman. This is why the Apostle to the Gentiles can later claim to the Athenians without contradiction that : “from one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26). All of mankind, Eve included, comes from Adam.

The direct and unique creation of Eve is part of the Deposit of Faith and has been taught as part of the Ordinary Magisterium since at least the 6^th Century when Pope Pelagius I declared “I confess … that all men from Adam onward who have been born and have died up to the end of the world will then rise again and stand ‘before the judgment-seat of Christ,’ together with Adam himself and his wife, who were not born of other parents, but were created: one from the earth and the other from the side of the man.” It was reaffirmed in the previously quoted Council of Vienna in the 14^th Century and then given a clear affirmation by Pope Leo XIII.

Writing shortly after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Leo XIII solemnly declared that

“For although the revilers of the Christian faith shrink from acknowledging the Church’s 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: 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, God willed to give him a female companion, whom He drew forth wondrously from the man’s side as he slept.”
Acta Sanctae Sedis, English translation provided here

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, the Pontifical Biblical Commission addressed our question head on when it stated in its Response of June 30, 1909 that:

Question 3: Is it possible, in particular, to call into question the literal and historical meaning where there is question of facts narrated in these same chapters that touch the foundation of the Christian religion, such as, among others, the creation of all things that was accomplished by God at the beginning of time, the special creation of man, the formation of the first woman from the first man, the unity of human race…the fall of the first parents from that primitive state of innocence, and the promise of a future Redeemer?
Response: No.

For those looking for a fuller treatment that traces the path of the Magisterium on this issue and why it should be seen as coming from the Ordinary Magisterium, I recommend this paper.

The issue of reconciling the findings of natural science and the truths of Divine Revelation is always an important work. Nevertheless it is a work that must be governed by principles so ably laid out by St. Augustine in the 4^th Century: “Whatever they can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature, we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures; and whatever they assert in their treatises which is contrary to these Scriptures of ours, that is to Catholic faith, we must either prove it as well as we can to be entirely false, or at all events we must, without the smallest hesitation, believe it to be so.” This is especially true for evolution and the origins of Eve.

Two Wings to God

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth"Pope St. John Paul II

Tag Archives: Creation Account