Persecution purifies. Sadly, it does sometimes get to us. When one's parish, or diocese even, seems to have gone off the rails, it is hard not to fall in with fellow-baptized who hold fast to the faith as they understand it, in more depth and detail than is good for a Catholic. This holds good for traditional Catholics and for those in movements sneered at as "the Pope's army" - in both cases I have observed this effect of persecution from within the church: suffering faithful taking up some nutty ideas as they flounder. The present is about one minor manifestation thereof: Cathilics taking up the full-blown picture of Monolingual North American Creationism.
Would that my files retained a copy of an excellent adress, no longer on internet, by a ukranian prelate in the USA to homeschoolers bewildered by persecution from within the church for such things as daring to object to "catholic " schools withunholy sex education, christianity taught in ways a moslem would agree with, and so forth. Error in this precis of the adress is mine .He urged them to be steadfast, but equally NOT to leave the church, giving the example of the Donatist schism in North Africa, which started on a very scandalous point, but ended in heresy, murder, and guerilla warfare. The scandal was the consecration as bishop of a man who in the very last roman persecution had not apostasized, true, but given in, in accordance with Diocletian's idea of stamping out even the memory of the faith , and being he who had been entrusted with the knowledge of where all the bibles and sacred literature of the area were buried or hidden, lead to their destruction. Who cannot sympathise with those who abandoned the fold to avoid communion with such a man, or a least toy with the idea? But where did it lead them ?
With the greatest respect for all my evangelical friends and aquaintances and any such who may read this blog, and however much closer we may be to creationists than to any airydairyfairy realtivists, Bultmanites and explainersaway from within our own fold, let alone the militant atheism stalking our society and our schools, Catholics need reminding that Creationism as we have it in English is a rather non-catholic proposition as it stands. As such a reminder, and in no way to represent holy mother church, w ith his permission, I reproduce below an article copyright C.L. Wale 2007 originally written for publication in 2008. The presentation and tricksy colouring is mine, the text his.
NO TO EVOLUTION? JUST SAY “NO” TO DARWINISM
Most noncatholic creationists, and their catholic followers, argue for a complete repudiation of all evolutionary ideas.
Much of what they say is true, but they go too far. It is sufficient to repudiate Darwinism, though that repudiation has to be complete and total.
It is easiest to explain this by describing the historical development of evolutionary ideas:
Philosophers in the ancient world from Thales of Miletus to St Augustine of Hippo speculated about possible change from one animal type to another. Speculation restarted on a sounder foundation in the 18'th cent owing to the continuing discovery of fossils, related to modern species but not identical.
The first person on record to propose the complete development of all life, plant and animal, from one single primitive organism is Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin. The theory of Evolution is perhaps the only major scientific theory originally put forward in a poem -“The Temple of Nature” first circulated 1798.
E Darwin put many of his ideas in poetry He was a distinguished mediical practitioner and scientist who refused to treat GeorgeIII, but treated the poor free.. Among his many feats he discovered the principle of artesian wells and used it to provide his house in Lichfield with running water.
Soon after 1798, another great scientist, Lamark (Le Chevalier de la Mark) started to add detail to Erasmus Darwin’s theory. After a couple of false starts in life Lamark had taken a medical degree and was appointed Curator of the Royal Herbarium in Paris, just two years before the Revolution.
The revolutionary government appointed Lamark Director of the newly formed “Vermes Laboratory”.
Vermes, or Worms, was the term then used for creepy crawlies. Lamark had no scientific knowledge of creepy crawlies. This did not matter, since no-one else had either. He set to work to find out.
He coined the term “Invertebrate” and set up new Phyla to fit invertebrates into Linneus’ system of classification. The modern classification of invertebrates is essentially that of Lamark.
It was when he was at the “Vermes” laboratory that he started publishing on evolution.
Lamark and Dr E. Darwin both believed evolution was a direct response to need,
though Lamark naturally used the French word besoin, which includes the English concept of desire with that of need.
This became important in some later developments of Lamarkian theory, eg that of Bergson.
(Much of the Christian criticism of Teilhard de Chardin comes from considering him a Darwinist. He was really a Lamarkian.)
Lamark’s theory spread.
When Charles Darwin was studying medicine at Edinburgh almost the entire faculty were Lamarkian.
As his notebooks show, he thought of his particular theory some time before 1851. He decided to publish when he learnt that Alfred Wallace was about to publish a similar theory of natural selection. (Charles Darwin & Alfred Wallace are often descibed as “hatching their theory of natural selection” in 1858. Each man thought of natural selection independently. They came together solely for publication in 1850- 8 yrs before a commonly quoted date.)
They published together.
Charles Darwin then published the “Origin of Species”
Both men added significantly to the experimental evidence for evolution.
So the scientific theory of evolution had four founders: Erasmus Darwin, Lamark, Wallace, & Charles Darwin .
(It is historically outrageous to suggest Charles Darwin was the founder of the theory of evolution. But this is JUST what many popular science articles, textbooks and websites do.)
Dr E.Darwin was an 18th cent. Deist, but definitely not a materialist.
Lamark was a Catholic,
& Wallace an Anglican.
When CHARLES(From this point Charles Darwin will be referred to as “Darwin” where context permits ) Darwin’s atheism became open, Darwin & Wallace in their old age had a public controversy about the religious implications of evolution.
It is commonly said Darwin became an atheist because of the implications of his theory and out of grief at the death of his daughter.
There is documentary evidence, in the public domain -but rarely quoted-
THAT
Darwin knew that his theory supported atheism,
desired that consequence,
but deliberately dissimulated about it
to avoid opposition from the Victorian public.
Charles Darwin’s atheism was the cause, not the consequence, of the atheism in his theory - as Christians have always suspected.
Darwin and the Darwinists have never put the argument for atheism clearly, nor analysed it in detail. Deliberate obfuscation? Very possibly. From the way it is presented it runs like this:
Evolution occurs by chance
Therefore man need not exist
God is said to have created man
But if man need not exist God cannot have created him
But man does exist
Therefore God does not exist
This argument is as full of holes as a colander.
The Darwinian misuse of the concept of chance in itself needs a long article.
Here we need to concentrate on the idea that evolution is without direction.
Consider Darwin’s paradigm of the finches in the Galapagos islands:
Birds from an island where the nuts are small fly to an island where they are large. Their small beaks have difficulty in cracking and eating the large nuts. By chance some of the offspring have larger beaks, They can eat more nuts. They have an advantage over those with smaller beaks. More with large beaks survive and in the end all with small beaks die out.
Possibly so,
but if so,
it is because matter is capable of sustaining birds with large beaks. Put more precisely, matter has the potency ( see potency further on in this article) to sustain large beaks. Without that potency, random chance could not produce large beaks.
If we consider the whole development of life from the most primitive organism to at least Neanderthal man, if evolution were due to random chance, the potency of matter would be the ratchet which would provide evolution with direction.
The medievals studied potency more than we do today and the idea that the potency of matter could provide direction to evolution would have delighted St Thomas Aquinas .
There is no logical reason to deduce atheism from Darwinism
The difference between “Darwinism” and the evolutionary theory of Erasmus Darwin & Lamark should be noted.
According to Charles Darwin the second generation of finches also included individuals with smaller beaks than their parents. There has never been any experimental evidence for this. The E.Darwin/Lamark theory simply postulated descendants with larger beaks, to meet the need for larger beaks to crack the bigger nuts.
The Abbé Mendal’s theory of genetics, which became widely known at the end of the 19'th cent,. showed that the random chance on which Darwin relied was selection from the gene pool. A characteristic cannot be shown if it is not in the gene pool .No-one has yet produced a truly black tulip. Black genes are not found in the tulip gene pool.
Biologists turned against evolution, though Lamark’s theories survived in France. About 1910 the discovery of gene mutations resurrected Darwinism, but with a difference. All gene mutations observed were useless. Most were harmful. Some were neutral, that is neither helped nor hindered the species (useful gene mutations were not directly observed until about 1980, and still only in a limited range of species.)
Darwin’s assumption that useful and useless mutations were equally probable was experimentally disproved. This should have caused Darwinists to question the assumption that useful and useless mutations had the same mechanism.
It didn’t.
The only honest answer would have been“We haven’t a clue!” This colloquialism is literally true. There was no scientific clue whatsoever to the mechanism of mutations. The failure to question the assumption shows how Darwinism was starting to acquire the hold on the scientific imagination it has today. The duality of Darwinism as a scientific theory and a religion substitute was spreading.
It was soon discovered that ionizing radiations (X rays etc) caused harmful mutations such as cancers. There was still no experimental evidence as to the mechanism of genetic damage.
Nevertheless, it was again assumed by the Darwinists that the useless and the unknown, but small, proportion of useful mutations had the same cause.
It was further assumed that what is called “background” radiation was the immediate cause of evolution. (Background radiation is the low level of natural radiation due to natural radioactivity in the soil, cosmic rays, etc.)
Given Darwinist assumptions this was a reasonable working hypothesis.
There was no direct evidence for it.
From about 1920 onwards there was a steady stream of science fiction stories about radiation-induced characteristics, such as two headed monsters, giants, telepaths, people without aggression, etc etc etc.
(One interesting to traditional Catholics is “Canticle for Liebowitz” written pre Vatican II by J Walter Miller Jr. Miller was, then, a rigidly orthodox Catholic. His novel inter alia finely describes the history of the Church retold from the imaginary new dark ages to their own future. )
But the science in all these stories remained what it started as:
fiction.
Time went by. The above is the theory of evolution which my biology master in 1941 unsuccessfully attempted to teach me.
The atom bomb was dropped. It gradually became apparent that the type of mutation attributed to radiation was not appearing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plenty of cancers-yes, but the change in characteristics assumed by Darwinism-no.
Nor did the type appear after the Chenobyl disaster.
With little in the way of scientific discussion the radiation hypothesis of evolutionary advance was steadily dropped, although radiation as one cause of cancer was necessarily retained because it was experimentally proven. Darwinism as a whole was not questioned.
The double helix was discovered, which opened the way to a direct attack on the problem of mutations .
It was found that occasionally DNA was not copied exactly. This was called a “mistake”. Despite their professed belief that biology has no purpose, the Darwinists cannot avoid assuming purpose!
It was then found that there is a biochemical mechanism which corrects these biochemical mistakes. It was named the “Proof-reading mechanism!!”. A very few mistakes creep past the proof reading mechanism.
Yet again it was assumed that evolution was due to a small proportion of the mistakes not corrected by the proof reading mechanism.
Some 10 yrs ago Dr Behe published “Darwin’s Black Box”. Behe is Professor of Biochemistry at LeHigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and a loyal Catholic.
He took a commonsense yet original approach to the idea that evolution is due to very improbable biochemical events.
The Darwinian idea of gradual approximation to new biological structures would not work.
Consider a mousetrap constructed from a piece of cardboard, a watch hair spring, and bits of copper flex. It will not catch many mice!
But if the base, by itself, is changed from cardboard to the usual wood, in stages, via veneer, thin plywood, etc
it will still not catch mice.
A mousetrap possesses “Irreducible Complexity”Every part has to be suitable to its function.
The same is true of many biological structures. If their components are produced by improbable events then all the parts have to be produced simultaneously and the improbability of the whole is obtained by multiplying the improbabilities of each component.
Multiply tiny numbers- not that the Darwinists have ever attempted to measure the numbers- gives overall an excessively tiny number. In practice “highly improbable” multiplied 6 or 7 times gives “totally impossible”: Darwinism is bogus.
If we delete Darwinism, what have we left?
In the first place we still have the entire fossil record, which depends upon direct observation NOT Darwinist theory.
There is a sequential record of fossils, which resemble contemporary species more and more.as the fossils become more recent. The resemblance both in plants and animals is in the finest detail. Such things as dinosaur running speed are calculated.. The fossils completely fit in with the geology of the rocks they occur in.
The natural conclusion -natural both in the sense of reasonable and in the sense of following from natural causes- is:
a process of evolution.
The “a” is underlined and highlighted because the fossil record does not indicate any one particular process of evolution.
It does disprove ONE part of Darwinism. Charles Darwin assumed evolution proceeded by such small steps it was effectively continuous. This seems to have been part of his efforts to show evolution had no direction. The fossils record therefore should show continuous change.
In 1851 it did not.
Darwin claimed this was because so few rocks had been excavated, and future excavations would show continuous change. They have obstinately failed to do so. With less and less plausibility Darwinists have continued to claim future research will show continuous change.
(Readers familiar with creationist literature will note that the absence of continuous change has long been a creationist objection to evolution. Scientifically they have been proved correct, but it is an argument against Darwinism by itself, NOT against evolution as a historic process.)
Finally a few yrs ago two Darwinist paleontologists Jay Gould (Until his recent death Jay Gould was America’s most prominent Darwinian publicist. He was always a firm but courteous controversialist.) and Elderedge bit the bullet, and admitted that the fossil record genuinely does not show continuous change. They coined the phrase “Punctuated Equilibrum”
to describe the way relatively small but real discontinuities always occur in the fossil record.
In fact the fossil record completely agrees with modern molecular biology
which, in turn, agrees with Behe.
Evolution takes place by rearrangement and simultaneous expansion of DNA.( Mike :the painstaking reader is invited to check over original papers published over the last 30-odd years in any serious university library)
As Behe argued, all the parts of an irreducible complex structure have to be produced simultaneously, and so they are when DNA is rearranged.
Most curiously, Jay Gould ignored molecular biology.
Instead Gould noted that the boundaries between strata correspond to about 40,000 yrs, during which time fossils are not formed..
so
Evolution by random chance occurred when strata changed., so that continuous change happened, but was not recorded in the fossil record. Darwinism, so he said, was still true.
He did not explain how chance knew that strata were about to change, so that Darwinian evolution occurred at the times, and only at the times, when it was unobservable.
And Dawkins calls Christians irrational!!
Behe also reintroduced (MIKE:cf the century or so old “Paley’s Paradox”: on finding a watch in the country one deduces intelligence at work, dismissing the plants under it , degrees of magnitude more complex, as ONLY “nature” , hence a mocking Dawkin’s booktitle”The blind watchmaker”!) the idea of Intelligent Design.
The way many have taken it up is most unfortunate.
Most creationist accounts are misleading. The starting point of the scientific evidence for Intelligent Design, as explained in “Darwin’s Black Box”, is the impossibility of Darwinism
Professor Behe explicitly says he does not challenge evolution as a historic process.
Intelligent Design is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the development of living things.
Put differently, God could intelligently design His creatures in more than one way. Those who assume intelligent design and supernatural creation throughout geological time are one and the same sadly do not see God in action in natural causes.
The continuous action of natural causes shown in the fossil record does not totally disprove this concept of continuous supernatural creation but it does render it implausible.
The Universe is clearly designed to support human life. (We know a related purpose: to reflect His Glory. He may well have had further purposes He has chosen not to reveal )
For example, if the force of gravity was different by 1 part in 10 to the 40'th (1 followed by 40 0's) in the early stages of the Big Bang then stars and galaxies would not have formed.
(Atheist Cosmologists have copied Darwinism and claimed that an infinity of universes exist. We live in the universe which, by chance, is compatible with human life. Needless to say,there is no experimental evidence for this statement.)
The design of the universe is expressed in the clumsily named “Cosmic Anthropopic Principle” .
The simplest and most rational understanding of Intelligent Design is that it is part of the Cosmic Anthropopic Principle.
If God created the external conditions of the universe so that it supported life, would not God at the same time create matter with such POTENCY that it either produced life from its own inner nature, or at least has and has had the potency to sustain, be the substrate of, life and its processes and mechanisms, including adaptation and inherited adaptation, having been “ given a law which shall not pass away” (psalm 148) ?
It is true our current knowledge of chemistry does not explain this. Human
beings hate suspending judgement, but this is a case where we have to.
Meanwhile we need to remember that God is just as much in charge when He uses natural causes as when He uses supernatural ones.
Natural causes are His Creation.
- --------------- ----------------- ------ ------
We now turn to the creation of man
It is not obvious where creationists mean to lead us with statements such as “Genesis is not a mere allegory”.
Genesis is certainly not a purely HUMAN allegory (an aesop's fable or a "roman a clef," worthy unhistorical moralizing.)
Genesis is a part of the infallible Word of God.
The Church in the Catechism tells us that Genesis gives us historic truth in figurative language (Aquinas says there are 4 ways in which Scripture can broadly speaking be symbolic. His analysis is not necessarily exhaustive. By using the term “figurative language”it appears the Church at this stage does not wish to distinguish these different ways).
In other words Genesis is a sequence of Divine metaphors ( Mike: accepting one of the church's timehonoured wordings of inspiration in bible writing : that the human author(s) wrote down, that which, and only that which , HE wished ,for our salvation " - and in "common wording according to our sensible appearances" )
Taking this seriously causes most creationist arguments to evaporate.
Nevertheless some points need discussion.
For example, it is pushing at an open door to object to polygenism. It was always purely theoretical, and has been scientifically dead and abandoned these ten years and more. It is now beyond question that homo sapiens started in the plains of E Africa, rather than simultaneously over the whole world.
The atheists do not give up. We have instead what might be called “Multigenism”. Mankind is said to originate in a tribe of some thousands of hominids.
This number is at the upper end of a reasonable . but not highly precise genetic analysis. The lower end is two individuals .
ie Adam & Eve.
We cannot expect science necessarily to prove Adam & Eve. It is sufficient if science does not disprove them.
Pius XII cautiously said “It is difficult to see how polygenism can be reconciled with Original Sin”. His caution paid off, and will again if we let it.
Finally we have the creation of the human soul.
We know, apart from evolution, that God gives every human being an immortal soul at the moment of conception. This is not pouring an immortal soul into an empty body, as into a sack, which the ridiculous word “ensoulment” implies.
Suppose God chose not to give a particular individual freewill and immortality. We would be left with a hominid with the biological nature of man. It would still have a vegetable and animal soul, in the Aristotelean meaning of “soul”.
The gametes, haploid(A technical term which means the ovum and spermatozoan have half the number of chromosomes of the adult, which is described as diploid. Their souls, in the Aristotelian sense, are necessarily different) individuals of the species homo sapiens, have their own animal souls, which include the vegetable component.
In all animal species, the fusion of gametes produces the animal soul of the individual.
In Man, at the moment of the fusion of gametes, God simultaneously gives the
animal soul free will, self consciousness, and immortality.
What is the problem with admitting as possible that the creation of Adam is the first time God carried out this process? One need simply suppose that God, using natural causes, had put in place that last mutation which allowed the hominid body to exercise free will(Was this the Chomsky style potential for language?).
The creation of Eve presents some problems.
Although mistaken in taking Genesis II v21&22 as meaning word for word their translation into English , creationists may well be right in regarding the image, the "figure " as important.
What might God’s metaphor mean? What is the figure for us ?
Consider the formation of “identical” twins. The splitting of an embryo at the two cell stage is not random but genetically controlled.
The twins are not absolutely identical. There are observable differences in the fingerprints, for example
Whatever other people may do, no mother ever mistakes them. God presumably leaves the soul in one cell immortal and unchanged, and gives the other immortality.
Suppose now God should have taken a male embryo twinning at the two cell stage. By natural or supernatural causes, as He saw fit, He made one daughter
cell female. This highly speculative suggestion preserves the formation of Eve’s body from Adam’s.
But not every detail in a metaphor contributes to the final meaning. Perhaps the formation of Eve from Adam’s rib is one which does not. The Church in due course will tell us. (MIKE INTERPOLATES: The pat, glib, English easy-reading of much, not all, creationism may well lose figures for us in genesis. I am indebted to Father Vivian of Santa Ana parish for the following reference, from courses on the concept of marriage in the OT at The Instituto Juan PablO II, the John-Paul II Institute, in Spain, any mangling of which is mine: The hebrew which we mostly translate as "rib" equally was used in the sense of "half, symettrical side of," as in the sides of beef we see delivered at a butcher's. This, (along with prepositional uses which are rather unrenderable in English), gives an image in itself of Eve "wholing Adam" as it were, and viceversa, to which Jesus' first hearers on divorce's minds should have gone , and ours also, on Hearing "it was not thus in the beginning" . Obviously, this is not defined doctrine as far as I know. More could be said, and Holy Mother church does say much and may say more yet in defence and explanation of this sacrament. To repeat, this is merely an example of the loss that the well-meant closing of doors without the prudence of the magisterium might cause.)
To sum up:
evolution as a historic process is one of the best founded scientific theories.
Darwinism, as the explanation of evolution by random chance, nowadays is scientifically untenable, maintained only by the faith of its adherents.
The reason to disbelieve Darwinism is not the way it is alleged to support atheism,
but
the positive incompatibility between the experimental evidence and random chance.
Intelligent Design is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for life.
The involvement of natural causes in geological processes makes it difficult to interpret species change as supernatural,
although at present we have no evidence-based scientific theory to explain evolution . Uncongenial though it may be, we have to suspend judgement.
Meanwhile we know that God is in complete control of evolution, whether He uses natural or supernatural causes to do so.
There is no conflict between the Faith and those parts
of evolutionary theory which are soundly based on experimental evidence.
Copyright C.L.Wale 2007
