Tag Archives: Evolution vs Creationism

Scoffers in the End Times

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In writing about Our Lord’s second coming, St. Peter says that despite the fact that “the day of the Lord shall come as a thief,” (2Peter 3:10) there is a sure sign that the end is near.  In those days deceitful scoffers will arise 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” (2 Peter 3:5).  He goes on to describe these scoffers as “willfully ignorant of, that the heavens were before, and the earth out of water, and through water, consisting by the word of God.  Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished.  But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of the ungodly men” (2 Peter 3:6-9). 

What the Scoffers are Scoffing About

A moment’s reflection on his words will allow us to realize that these “scoffers of the End Times” are living in our midst.  Peter the Rock is telling us that the scoffers will be those who insist that “things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”  They are, in short, evolutionists.  Evolutionists are those who believe that everything in the universe is a result of an unfolding of naturalistic processes that began with the Big Bang.  There is no room for God in their view and evolution forms the philosophical foundation for their secularist vision of reality. 

Given St. Peter’s caution then, it is odd that many Catholics are so quick to accommodate these scoffers by subscribing to what might be called Theistic Evolution.  They proclaim that Evolution is the mechanism by which God created the world and everything in it.  This proclamation comes despite the clear testimony of Scripture and Tradition that creation was not a result of the unfolding of some natural process, but a supernatural one in which God created each thing immediately.  He did not create by some natural law, but created the natural law along with the rest of creation.  Long before Darwin, the Church Fathers knew of evolutionary explanations for Origins and rejected them (see Summa Theologiae I q.73 a.1, obj 2-3 for a good summary of the Fathers’ explanation).

This accommodationist position usually presents in one of two forms.  Because it seeks to accommodate “science” it only concerns itself with human origins specifically.  These might aptly be called natural transformism and special transformism.

Natural Transformism

Those who hold the position of Natural Transformism hold that man was created through some natural process.  By some “accident” of nature, two primates, through normal reproduction, prepared a body that was capable of receiving a human soul.  This spontaneous generation of a human being from primate parents has been condemned by the Provincial Council of Cologne (which has approval of the Holy See):

“Our first parents were formed immediately by God. Therefore we declare that the opinion of those who do not fear to assert that this human being, man as regards to his body, emerged finally from the spontaneous continuous change of imperfect nature to the more perfect, is clearly opposed to Sacred Scripture and to the Faith.”

It also suffers from a common sense problem as well.  This “accident” would also need to be met with a simultaneous “accident” of the creation of another (wo)man that would allow for reproduction or else this first human would have to mate with another non-human.  To accommodate to this position, rather than synthesizing faith and reason, is destructive of the Faith and requires further setting aside of the perennial teachings of the Church related to the Special Creation of Eve and polygenism.

Special Transformism

Special Transformism is usually presented as Evolution preparing the body of some brute and then God infuses a soul into it.  To at least discuss this as a possibility is not out of the question.  In the most authoritative teaching on Evolution, Pius XII’s Humani Generis, the Holy Father said that it was licit to make inquiries “into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter… However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.” 

Most read this freedom to discuss as freedom to assert it as true.  The Holy Father was quite clear that this was not the case: “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.”  Using this as a guideline, let us see what we can say about Special Transformism and what we can’t.

First, we cannot say, without falling into some form of dualism that the body of the primate did not also undergo a transformation.  The soul is not some add-on to a body, but its form (see CCC 365), making it what it is.  We have spoken previously about this type of change as a substantial change, but this position creates a metaphysical Catch-22 such that before the matter that was the primate’s body can take on the form, it must already be a human body.  The only way for this to happen would be if God intervened and changed the body such that it was capable of receiving the human soul.

How this “miraculous” intervention is any different than holding a literal interpretation of Genesis 2:7 is not clear.  Whether God used inanimate matter (the slime of the earth) or previously animate matter (the body of the primate) really makes no practical difference.  Both stretch the limits of scientific explanations for our origins and strike down any concession that involves evolution preparing a body for man.  It is probably better to stand with Moses, St. Peter, Augustine, Chrysostom, St. Basil, Aquinas, and more and stick with a literal interpretation of Genesis.

Theistic Evolution, then, rather than appearing to be an enlightened compromise, actually turns out to look really dumb.  The problem is that Evolution and Christianity are completely incompatible and any attempt to reconcile them simply enables the Scoffers to keep on scoffing.  Moses said one thing about our origin, Darwin said another and the two shall never meet.  You are either a creationist or an evolutionist, but you can’t be both.

Misogyny and Misbegotten Males: On the Creation of Woman

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The account of the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis has often been labeled as the genesis of misogyny by feminists.  The opening account in the Bible has become for many the point where they close the book.  Therefore it behooves us to know how to respond to such a charge.  In so doing, we will, like Adam who found an unlikely “helpmate” in Eve, we will turn to what many would consider a more unlikely helpmate—St. Thomas Aquinas.

Using St. Thomas as a helper to dismiss the charge of misogyny require some explaining.  For many people this would be like asking David Duke to help defend proper race relations.  But there is good reason to turn to the Dumb Ox for help on this.  Too often skeptics will dismiss the entire corpus of his teaching because the Angelic Doctor is a “misogynist.”    Following the teachings of Aristotle, St. Thomas saw women as “misbegotten males.”

It bears mentioning however that if he was wrong about women, then this does not mean he was wrong about everything, or even anything else.  All this would prove is that he was not infallible and was capable of making mistakes.  Like all of us, he too was prone to unquestionably accept some of the prevailing views of his day.  To have a blind spot, does not make one blind.  Should the entire economic theory of Adam Smith be thrown out because “woman are emotional and men rational.”?  What about John Locke’s political theory because he justifies slavery?  Living in the glass house of a multitude of errors in our own day, we should be careful to throw stone.

St. Thomas Aquinas: Patron Saint of Misogyny?

This particular case is worth examining however because St. Thomas does not wholly swallow the prevailing viewpoint.  While he wrote about women (including his great esteem for Our Lady) in numerous places, he is usually, as mentioned above, accused of misogyny because of what he wrote in a single place when called woman a “misbegotten male.”

In seeking to examine the origin of woman, St. Thomas first asks should the woman have been made in that first production of things (ST I, q.92, art.1)?  He answers in the affirmative, but the first objection he mentions is that of the Philosopher, that is Aristotle:

“For the Philosopher says (De Gener. ii, 3), that ‘the female is a misbegotten male.’ But nothing misbegotten or defective should have been in the first production of things. Therefore woman should not have been made at that first production.”

Note first that this he has listed as an objection to his own viewpoint.  Obviously it was not his own.  In his reply to this objection he shows why he does not agree completely with Aristotle.  It is worth citing the entire response in order to put the myth of his woman hating to rest.

“As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher observes (De Gener. Animal. iv, 2). On the other hand, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature’s intention as directed to the work of generation. Now the general intention of nature depends on God, Who is the universal Author of nature. Therefore, in producing nature, God formed not only the male but also the female.”

Notice that he agrees with Aristotle about the “misbegotten” part, but only on a biological level.  The prevailing view of reproductive biology was that the sperm produced only male offspring, and that when this did not happen it was because something interfered with it.  But St. Thomas goes to some length to say that woman is not a mistake of any sort, but directly willed by God.  Men and women, in St. Thomas’ view, are equal in dignity, even if there are some accidental inferiorities (such as physical strength) between the two.  We shall return to this idea in a moment when we speak of Eve’s origin.

Eve and Adam’s Rib

In the second chapter of Genesis, speaks of the mysterious origins of man and woman.  The man, Adam, is made from the dust of the ground infused with a spirit.  The woman is “built” from the rib of the man.  (Gn 2:21-22).

Much of the creation account uses metaphorical or mythical language, but that does not mean it is entirely composed of metaphor.  In fact, the Church is quite insistent that we understand Eve being formed from the rib of Adam literally.   This is one of the three truths of man’s origins from revelation that the Church insists must be safeguarded from any encroachment by a Theory of Evolution.  Strictly speaking, if creatures are always evolving, there is always a relationship of inferior to superior.  If woman and man evolved from different individuals, evolution would lead them eventually away from each other.  Survival of the fittest would mean that one would necessarily become superior to the other.  But if they share one common origin, one common nature, then they will necessarily be equals.  By insisting that woman is taken from man, the Church is affirming this essential equality between man and woman; equal dignity such that any differences are not essential but only accidental.

This view is pretty much what we saw in St. Thomas’ explanation of why the understanding of woman as a misbegotten man is inadequate.  He goes on to further say that,

“It was right for the woman to be made from a rib of man…to signify the social union of man and woman, for the woman should neither “use authority over man,” and so she was not made from his head; nor was it right for her to be subject to man’s contempt as his slave, and so she was not made from his feet” (ST I, q.92, a. 3).

By removing the rib from Adam, God also would have exposed Adam’s heart to Eve, a truth that becomes clear when we examine the act of creation of the bride of the First Adam, with the bride of the Second Adam.  Just as Adam fell asleep and the raw material of his bride came from his side, so too when the Second Adam fell asleep that the raw material that God would form into His Bride came forth.

This exposure of Adam’s heart has not just a mystical meaning, but a natural one as well.  It is an expression of the truth that “it is not good that man should be alone.”  Pope St. John Paul II mentions this when he discusses the meaning of Adam’s rib during his catecheses on the Theology of the Body.  In naming the animals, man experiences what the Pope calls Original Solitude, in recognizing he is fundamentally alone among creation.  In the creation of Eve, he ecstatically experiences that he was made for another, that is, he was made to love—“this at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!”  In other words, Eve being taken from the rib of Adam reveals that the two ways of being human somehow complete each other.  As John Paul II puts it, the rib reveals  masculinity and femininity as “two complementary dimensions…of self-consciousness and self-determination and, at the same time, two complementary ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body” (TOB 11/21/79).  Adam’s recognition of Eve as somehow his equal and yet wholly other is a summons to love.

There is certainly a rich symbolism attached to the idea of Eve created from the rib of Adam, but must we really interpret it literally?  Literal interpretation affirms another very important, and very Catholic, principle related to God’s Providence.  God, being totally free, could have fashioned Eve in any manner He wanted.  But He chose this way not because it was a symbol, but because it was a sacrament.  It brought about and revealed the things that it symbolized—the unity, equality and love that each of the symbols we mentioned pointed to. All of creation including the human nature of Christ is meant to reveal God to us.  Therefore nothing that He has made can be taken at face value as “only this” or “only that.”  Everything that is, means something.  God does not need to use symbolic language because everything that He creates is in some sense a symbol.

The accusation of misogyny in the origins of man and woman is really an accusation of Christianity not being Christian.  Prior to the “evolution” of Christian culture, women were always viewed as somehow inferior to men.  It is only when Christianity became the prevailing worldview that the essential equality of men and women became the norm.  Now, revisionists would have us believe that the hand that fed us, actually poisoned us, by feeding us healthy food.  The account of the creation of Eve reveals the dignity of woman and is not misogynistic.

 

 

Evolutionary Bait and Switch

Science

A recent Gallup poll found that 38% of Americans hold to the Creationist view of human origins.”  The remaining 62% believe that evolution (either guided or unguided) played a part.  In the court of public opinion, evolutionists appear to have won the day.  The problem however is that the debate suffers from a lack of precision in terms.  “Evolution” means different things to different people.  In general we know that it refers to some transformation of a species of living beings but most discussion occurs without making that definition more specific.  This is why the first (and most important step) in any discussion is to define your terms. Evolution falls into two main categories, microevolution and macroevolution.  As the name suggests, microevolution explains the changes that lead to variation within a given species.  Macroevolution refers to the large-scale changes that lead to increasingly more complex species.  The failure to make a distinction between these two categories is the source of most of the confusion in the current debate between so-called creationists and evolutionists.

Microevoltion and Macroevolution

As the “experts” in the scientific fields, the evolutionary philosophers, that is, those who treat evolution as a philosophy such that it explains all of reality rather than as a scientific theory that explains part of reality, are only too happy to have these two lumped together.  Microevolution seems to be self-evident and it doesn’t take an expert to see this.  Anyone who has had to take multiple antibiotics for an infection knows that bacteria can evolve such that they are resistant to certain antibiotics.  With the self-evident quality of microevolution, the evolutionists can perform a bait and switch of sorts lumping macroevolution in and selling it as “evolution.”  Opposing something that seems so obvious makes one look like an unreasonable religious nut.  We must insist then that swallowing the microevolutionary slice doesn’t mean we must eat the whole evolutionary pie.

Many insist that there ought to be no distinction between micro- and macro-evolution because macroevolution is simply an extrapolation over time of the same processes that drive microevolution.  This viewpoint is scientifically problematic for at least three reasons.

First, there is the problem of the Missing Link in the fossil record.  “The problem is”, as GK Chesterton pointed out nearly a century ago, “that the missing link is still missing.”  The use of the term “missing link” is considered archaic, but the idea I think is still valid even as we find more and more examples of intermediate species  within the fossil record.  These intermediate species are often labeled as “transitional” but the problem is that this implies that the jump from one to the other is very short.  If macroevolution based on microevolution is true, then there ought to be something like a linear or gradual progression between species.    Instead there are still jumps, and even if the jumps are getting smaller, they are still pretty large.

Too often the “missing link” became an argument from silence, but I think it is still valid because the gap of say 400,000 years between two related species is non-trivial.  The fossil record really appears to show something like fits and starts.  A species is stable and then abruptly a new species appears.

If science truly is allowed to go where the data takes it, then it is far from definitive that macroevolution has occurred based on the fossil record.  In fact in a controversial paper in 1972 as Stephen Jay Gould points out the exact opposite,

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism:

(1)Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.

(2) Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and ‘fully formed.'”

Second there is the problem of time.  Extrapolation from micro to macro-evolution we are told, happened slowly over time.  If a chasm is so wide that it cannot be crossed without a bridge, no amount of time is going to make it crossable.  The macroevolutionist might say that there were small stepping stones that arose that made the crossingpossible, but that those stepping stones disappeared.  Again one would have to ask where the data is that suggests that such stones actually appeared, especially when there is a simpler and much more reasonable assumption that they were carried across.  That is unreasonable, if you have not already presupposed that no such carrier existed.

The third problem is related to the mechanism by which evolution is said to occur, namely natural selection.  This ought to be obvious from the name, but Natural Selection is selective and not productive.  It does not bring new creatures into being, but instead is a mechanism by which certain individuals are favored because of their adaptations to some environmental condition.  It cannot create those individuals but draws from those who already exist in the population.  Many treat Natural Selection as a creative force; as if it somehow causes the favorable mutation rather than just selecting based on it.

An Edge to Evolution?

As we continue to study the genetic basis of mutation, Natural Selection seems not to be a mechanism by which this jump from microevolution to macroevolution could have occurred.  In his book, The Edge of Evolution, biologist Michael Behe documents a study in which about 30,000 generations, or 1 million years of E. coli have been manufactured and what they have found is “ Mostly devolution.”  It will advance to a certain stage and then throw away chunks of genetic patrimony because it costs too much energy to maintain.  What Behe claims is that this is one example among many of the edge to evolution.  There is a barrier beyond which selective breeding will not pass because either sterility occurs or genetic variability is exhausted.  Although Behe is not popular among some of his colleagues, it is mostly on ideological and not scientific grounds.  Even scientific giants like Richard Dawkins could only resort to ad hominem  arguments to refute Behe.

None of this, of course, proves that macroevolution does not offer a true explanation of the variety of species.  But it does show the need for intellectual honesty that starts by using terms properly.  We should not fall for the evolutionary bait and switch that many neo-Darwinist philosophers try to sell us.  Evolution, especially macroevolution is an open question and ought to be treated as such.