Book Review: "Creation, Evolution, and Catholicism" by Thomas McFadden

Some time ago I was graciously provided with a review copy of Creation, Evolution, and Catholicism: A Discussion for Those Who Believe by Thomas McFadden.

There are many resources out there addressing the question of evolution and its fundamental incompatibility with the Catholic Faith; Mr. McFadden's book, while broad in its scope and addressing many issues, centers in on the question of theistic evolution and Catholic teaching.

At the heart of Creation, Evolution, and Catholicism is the idea that, while theistic creation "works" for some Catholics, it certainly does not "work" for everybody. Because many mainstream Catholics have adopted the position that there's "no contradiction" between evolution and Catholic theology, it has become accepted to assume there are no real problems with theistic evolution. Consequently, there is little real discussion about the question, and Catholics who do not find an easy harmony between Scripture and evolution are left with little to go on.

It is into this breach that Mr. McFadden steps with his book. Creation, Evolution, and Catholicism is dedicated to examining the concept of evolution - especially theistic but also atheistic - addressing the issue from a point of view of science but also theology. The 149 page book is easy to read, broken up into seventeen chapters with many small subheadings addressing various points of science and theology. The Big Bang, DNA, vestigial structures, fossil remains, and much more are all covered, as are the theories of major evolutionary proponents, both Catholic and secularist. This alone would make this book very helpful, although it should be pointed out that none of these topics are covered in an extremely exhaustive manner; the author addresses them by summarizing the main arguments and then pointing to additional resources for further study.

Thus the book is a kind of helpful "go to" guide to find resources on each particular issue. It demonstrates that the fundamental problem is that most Catholics have adopted the premises of naturalism; even when engaging the Faith with an intent to defend it, they often begin with assumptions taken from naturalism (for example, Cardinal Pell's embarrassing exchange with Richard Dawkins). Naturalism has become a kind of monkey on the Church's back, related directly to a continued loss of faith. McFadden presents some convincing statistics demonstrating the relationship between acceptance of evolution and loss of faith. Again, it is clear that just because theistic evolution "works" for some does not mean it "works" for everyone; in fact, based on the statistics McFadden presents, it does not "work" for the majority of Catholics.

But I think the greatest asset of this book was in its chapter on Humani Generis. It is widely known that Humani Generis, Pius XII's 1950 encyclical, remains the last authoritative statement of the Magisterium on evolution. It is often repeated that this encyclical "allowed" Catholics to believe in theistic evolution of a preexisting human body so long as they maintained some other points (reality of original sin, special creation of the soul). This encyclical allegedly "opened the door" for the acceptance of theistic evolution within Catholicism.

Mr. McFadden strongly disputes this point. Through a rigorous analysis of the text and the meanings of different terms employed by Pius, he demonstrates that Pius XII never intended the broad acceptance of theistic evolution among Catholics, nor did he "permit" it to be held as a viable theory of human origins. I will not recapitulate Mr. McFadden's arguments here, but it suffices to say that it was refreshing to read something that actually dug into the text of Pius XII rather than just repeating what others have said.

The book is written in the form of a handbook. It is not what one would call publisher grade printing; it is a very hardy spiral bound, good for duplication, study, and note taking. Mr. McFadden has told me that he hopes this book will find its way into the hands of pastors and catechists - that is, that it will become a tool to be used at the parish level to equip those tasked with passing on the Faith with the answers they need to teach the Church's doctrine uncontaminated by naturalist assumptions. To this end, Mr. McFadden is making his book available at cost ($10 for a hard copy, $4 for a digital copy via CD); I do not know if he is making PDF versions available. There is no website for the book; it must be requested and ordered by contacting the author at: scienceandcatholicism@gmail.com. Mr. McFadden has also organized the book printing and distribution through a 501(c)(3) group called the Institute for Science and Catholicism, so donations for the book can be written off.

There's also a really nice appendix on John Paul II and the Galileo case, which McFadden believes (rightly, in my opinion) is one of the historical episodes that cripples Catholics and makes them too tentative to engage naturalism.

If there is one issue I took with the book - and I say this tentatively because there is so much other good stuff in here - it is that the author will often cite Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as a support for traditional Creationism against evolution. It is my opinion that McFadden misunderstood what Benedict is saying (which is easy to do, as Benedict is extremely nuanced in his verbiage). Benedict does oppose the kind of evolutionary compromise represented by Humani Generis; but this is not because Benedict supported Creationism, rather because he affirmed something more Teilhardian and more evolutionary than the Humani Generis compromise. Theistic evolution was not too evolutionary or Benedict; rather it was not evolutionary enough. We have documented this in our article Pius XII, Teilhard, and Ratzinger.

But, as the author pointed out to me when I discussed this with him, even if this is the case, the statements of Benedict against evolution still hold value on their own, even if Benedict's own position is problematic. Benedict is a potent adversary against a simplistic theistic evolution, despite his own theological baggage. I would certainly still recommend the book. Mr. McFadden has done the Church an excellent service. Anyone interested in the debate about evolution should get a copy of this work, especially those involved in catechesis at the parish level. I plan on hanging on to this book and have already pulled it out for reference in my private reading several times.

I also recommend our article Solemn Enthronement of Evolution, as well as James Larson's article The Quintessential Evolutionist.

The Increasingly Non-Committal Christmas Proclamation

Christmas is almost upon us. Whether you go to the Traditional Latin Mass or the Novus Ordo, most of us will hear some form of the traditional Christmas Proclamation. The Christmas Proclamation is not part of the 1962 Missale Romanum (being originally associated with the Divine Office and the hours of Prime), but a many EF Masses include a reading of the Proclamation prior to the midnight Mass.

The Christmas Proclamation is meant to situate the Incarnation of our Lord in the context of salvation history by relating it to other important events and persons of the Old Testament and emphasizing how Christ's Incarnation happened "in the fulness of time" (Gal. 4:5).

The Traditional Christmas Proclamation as used in the Latin rite reads:

The twenty-fifth day of December.
In the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world
from the time when God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth;
the two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seventh year after the flood;
the two thousand and fifteenth year from the birth of Abraham;
the one thousand five hundred and tenth year from Moses
and the going forth of the people of Israel from Egypt;
the one thousand and thirty-second year from David's being anointed king;

It is interesting to see how this Proclamation has changed with the coming of the Novus Ordo. It was not promulgated in NO Masses until 1980, when John Paul II restored it to the Christmas liturgy. In the revised English Christmas Proclamation, as adopted by the USCCB in 1994, we see that some changes were made to the traditional dating [bolded]:

Today, the twenty-fifth day of December,
unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth and then formed man and woman in his own image
Several thousand years after the flood, when God made the rainbow shine forth as a sign of the covenant.
Twenty-one centuries from the time of Abraham and Sarah;
thirteen centuries after Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt.
Eleven hundred years from the time of Ruth and the Judges;
one thousand years from the anointing of David as king;

We have moved from asserting the Incarnation happened "in the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world" to saying that this happened "unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth." And, "two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seventh year after the Flood" has become, "several thousand years after the Flood."

The current version of the Christmas proclamation is even more watered down. Here is the official 2004 version in the Novus Ordo as listed on the website of the USCCB for Christmas of 2014:

The Twenty-fifth Day of December,
when ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world,
when God in the beginning created heaven and earth,
and formed man in his own likeness;
when century upon century had passed
since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood,
as a sign of covenant and peace;
in the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith,
came out of Ur of the Chaldees;
in the thirteenth century since the People of Israel were led by Moses
in the Exodus from Egypt;
around the thousandth year since David was anointed King;

"Unknown ages" from the Creation has now become "ages beyond number." I thought the amount of ages was "unknown"? Apparently the committees who decide these things thought that, despite stating that the amount of ages since the beginning was "unknown", we have now learned (just since 2004) that it was actually "ages without number." Whereas the 1994 amendment places the flood "several thousand years"  ago, the newer amendment says "century upon century", which is an even more indeterminate amount of time - "century upon century" could mean ten centuries or ten thousand centuries.

A few other quirks: Notice that the traditional "one thousand and thirty-second year from David's being anointed king" in 1994 was changed to the more general "one thousand years from the anointing of David as king" and then at last in 2004 to the extraordinarily non-committal "around the thousandth year since David was anointed King." What is "around the thousandth year"? Is that give or take a decade? A century? Two centuries? Also Ruth and the Judges briefly appear in the 1994 version only to disappear in the 2004 version.

I think we can infer two things from these changes.

Some time ago, I noted in my article "The Solemn Enthronement of Evolution" that it is totally incorrect when people say the Catholic Church has 'never had a problem with evolution.' When evolution was first proposed back in the mid-1800's, the Church had a huge problem with it; Catholic publications sympathetic to Darwinism were condemned and placed on the Index. The Church's objections had to do with the concept of substance. If evolution is true, even theistic evolution, then there really is no underlying Being that undergoes accidental change but is not itself changed. Being is becoming. Everything is in a state of flux. In short, there can be no concept of substance with an evolutionary model. This has striking implications for a number of things, including human nature and transubstantiation. I recommend the article linked above for a more thorough treatment of this problem.

The Christmas Proclamation demonstrates that, yes, the Church traditionally did assume a literal, historical reading of Genesis and the Creation. This is not to say that the Church has infallibly taught that the world was created in 5199 B.C.; and the Christmas Proclamation is not even formally part of the Missale Romanum, so we are not asserting anything infallibly or suggesting that opinions to the contrary are heresy. But this does suggest that the Church's Tradition has strongly favored a literal reading of the Genesis account. Remember, the according to Msgr. Agius in The Church and Tradition, the Church's prime constitutive tradition is her liturgical practices. So while the literalism favored by the Christmas Proclamation does not establish anything with absolute authority, at the same time,the dating in the Proclamation is not meaningless.

The second thing we can infer is the Church authorities are less and less comfortable with chronology when it comes to the Old Testament. The first date to be abandoned was the Creation, and then the Flood date was abandoned in favor of "several thousand years." While "several thousand years" is less specific than "two thousand nine hundred fifty-seven years", it still commits us to a time-frame of more or less a few millennia. "Several thousand years" would rule out, say, five-hundred thousand years or a million. "Several thousand" basically limits us to 2,000-5,000 years before Christ, in my personal opinion. Still, quite a bit of leeway.

But the 2004 revision is not even comfortable with that, so we get "century upon century" since the Flood, which could mean anything from 5,000 years ago to four billion years ago.

By now the dating of Abraham and Moses is called into question, too. The 1994 version gives us broad ranges of "twenty centuries" for Abraham and thirteen for Moses. The traditional date for Moses is the year the people of Israel "went forth" out of Egypt while the 1994 version gives us the date the people were "led" by Moses, which was really a period of forty years at least, again, creating more wiggle-room.

David is also adjusted from the more specific 1032 B.C. to 1000 B.C. in the 1994 version. In the 2004 version, its as if the uncertainty about chronology has seeped right up to the time of the Davidic kingdom, as the 2004 text says David ruled "around" a thousand years ago. Who knows what "around" a thousand years ago means?

My point here is not to say that one date is "wrong" and the older ones infallibly correct. My point is to establish that the Church is increasingly uncomfortable maintaining chronology when it comes to the Old Testament. This is no doubt influenced by the general acceptance of the Documentary Hypothesis, which assumes the patriarchs are fables and questions the historicity of David (see my article "Deconstructing the Documentary Hypothesis" for a thorough dismantling of this faith-destroying theory). The modern Magisterium is less and less willing to hold the line on the traditional timeline for Old Testament events.

Eventually we may see uncertainty on any dating prior to the Exile - many Documentarians have already reached this point. Perhaps a future edition of the Proclamation will look like this:

The Twenty-fifth Day of December,
thousands of eons since the creation of the world,
when God in the beginning created heaven and earth,
and formed man in his own likeness through a gradual evolution of pre-existing matter which was later ensouled at a certain point;
when tens of thousands had passed
since the pre-Camrbian age,
tons of thousands of years since Abraham may or may not have actually wandered out of Ur of the Chaldees;
in the tenth century since a few hundred Israelites were led by Moses across the six-inch deep Reed Sea in what Jewish religious experience would later call the Exodus from Egypt;
around the thousandth year - give or take three centuries - since the vagabond warlord David was anointed King over a United Kingdom that probably never existed.
Two or three centuries since the post-Exilic works known as J,E,P and D were compiled into the Torah...

Merry Christmas from Unam Sanctam Catholicam.

Special Creation and the State of Completion

Some time ago I did an article on the Church's reservations about the theory of evolution pertaining to the concept of immutable substance. In discussions in person and in Catholic forums that followed, the argument came up that evolution simply explains the 'evidence' better than special creation and that affirming special creation would involve too great a divergence between what the science is telling us and what we are affirming as true. To explain the point better, I will reproduce an objection to special creation from one such forum which argues that to affirm special creation involves us in too many conundrums and effectively makes God a liar:

"With evolution, it's much easier to explain that all animals are related to each other, especially when we see the genetic evidence corroborating the degrees of physiological variance from one species to the next. For the critical thinker, accepting special creation as true would require an explanation for the evidence we see that contradicts it. Evolution explains what we are seeing. Special creation contradicts what we are seeing, and on such a grand scale that if it is false evidence, the only thing powerful enough to put it there is God himself. So if special creation is true, one must necessarily come to the conclusion that God has actively placed false evidence in the way to throw us off on the wrong course, presumably as a test to see if we will believe what the Bible says as opposed to what we can objectively measure. But it then begs the question, if God can distort all of reality to test our faith, if He is really willing to lie to us in his creation to get us to have faith, how then can we place any hope in what the Bible says as not being likewise a lie from God? There are just too many logical conundrums for a person to accept that are tied to special creation."

This is a common objection to special creation. In case the argument above is a little obtuse, allow me to provide a concrete example of what I'm talking about:

I was recently debating with friend about this - a good Catholic man who nevertheless has allowed modern ideas to soak in a little too deeply on certain subjects. He was saying that God could not have created the universe by special creation because the light from some of the stars takes billions of years to get to earth, which presumed an evolutionary time-span for the origin and development of the universe. I objected that God could have created the universe instantly with the light en route, such that all the light that was necessary was created exactly where it needed to be without having to actually traverse that distance. My friend countered by saying that this would make God into a "liar" because all our empirical observation suggests that the light has actually traveled that far and that it would be a kind of "false evidence" if the light looked like it traveled millions of light years but in fact was created en route.

Would creating the light "en route" make God into a liar or constitute "false evidence"? It is my contention that it would not. In fact, to say it is begs the question, as we shall see.

As a classic example of this, I always refer back to the creation of Adam and Eve. Tradition and Scripture are unanimous in affirming that Adam and Eve were created as adults; that is, God did not create infants, but a full grown man and woman with all the necessary perfections needed to sustain adult life. I do not know how "old" they were created to be; some Scholastics speculated that Adam was created as a 33 year old man since this was the age of perfection, based on the length of years of our Lord. Who knows. The point is, Adam and Eve were created fully formed, at least according to the Tradition.

However, what would an uninformed spectator assume if he were to encounter Adam? Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you were to come walking around a corner and run into Adam only ten minutes after he was created. Having not witnessed his creation, you would look at his stature and presume him to be a man who has been around for several decades. He is tall, he is strong, he has adult teeth and perhaps a full grown beard. Yet in fact he is but ten minutes old.

Furthermore, there is no way to tell the difference. Aside from the accidental fact that the newly created Adam would have not had any imperfections due to years of labor, wrinkles, etc., you would not be able to know one way or another. God created him complete, and that completeness entails every characteristic proper to a full grown man.

Now, my question is this - was God "lying" or providing "false evidence" to you in creating Adam like this? Is the fact that Adam is created full grown a "deception"? Is the fact that when he is one second old he already has adult stature and adult teeth a kind of "distortion of reality"?

Obviously not. It is none of that. Rather, it is simply that God willed to created Adam complete.

The fact that God wills to create him complete means that he looks the same as any other person would who was born of woman. Did God similarly will to create the entire cosmos in some sort of state of completion? Looking at the light in the universe that is constantly bombarding the earth from millions and billions of light years away, can we really tell that it has actually been traveling for billions of years as opposed to being created en route not so long ago? Again, there is no way to tell the difference.

We know that rivers were formed by the cutting away of rock by running water. We know that this can happen slowly over a very long period of time, but we also know that raging waters can carve a gorge over a mile long and 22 feet deep in only a matter of days (don't believe me? See here). If God wanted to create a river in a state of completion, the creative process which brought that river into existence could certainly have been quick and catastrophic, which would leave behind similar physical evidence (carving and erosion) as a slow formed riverbed. We know that God created the universe out of nothing, but we do not know what the act of creation looked like, or the acts of subcreation by which He ordered the raw matter He had brought into existence. Some of these things were created in a state of completion, others not.

Now, we know that the cosmos in totu was not created in a state of total completion; Genesis and Catholic Tradition affirm that there was a sequential creation - certain elements of the world were created first, moving from the more general to the more particular. Water was the primal element of life, and the water creatures came about first, the land creatures following after, and finally, mankind. So the world was not created in a state of total completion. However, the various elements within it were - each created thing was established in a state of completion with its own substance. This was taught definitively at Vatican I:

"If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God; or holds that God did not create by his will free from all necessity, but as necessarily as he necessarily loves himself; or denies that the world was created for the glory of God: let him be anathema" (Vatican I, Session 3, Canon 1:5).

When God creates the light en route, or the river already in place, or the elephant whole according to its substance, we are not seeing God creating "false evidence" as much as God creating these things in a state of completion.

Now you may say that this explanation presupposes a special creation - that it is a form of question begging. Perhaps, but not any more so than the question begging implied in the rejection of the concept. To say that light cannot have been created en route presumes the evolutionary time frame, while saying that it was created en route fits with a special creation. Let us acknowledge that neither argument proves anything in the strict sense, though both offer explanations for what we see in the universe.

Jimmy Akin once attempted to rebut this by stating that, while God had a rationale for creating Adam as an adult - the need for him to be able to make rational decisions and take care of himself - there existed no similar rationale for doing this with the rest of creation, and therefore theories like the light being created en route are unreasonable. But again, this begs the question by assuming that God did not will to create the components of creation in a state of completion. If God did in fact will to do so - which Vatican I seems to suggest - then the same rationale exists for God to create other aspects of the material universe in a state of completion just as He did with Adam and Eve.

I know the "state of completion" argument does not solve every difficulty; no doubt many of you will post examples in the com box that do not fit with the state of completion concept. But my point here is not to argue away or explain every question relating to special creation, but merely to argue the more limited point that special creation does not "contradict what we are seeing" and make God the creator of "false evidence." To create things in a completed state is not to create false evidence any more than creating Adam as a mature adult when he is only ten minutes old is "false evidence." In many cases, we need to ask what assumptions we are bringing when we look at the universe, as well as that there may be multiple explanations for any phenomenon.

Other articles on evolution

Cardinal Pell, Richard Dawkins, Adam & Eve

I have been reflecting on the now infamous debate between Cardinal Pell and Richard Dawkins that took place on April 9th, trying to find some positive spin to put on it, thinking that perhaps the reports were skewering the truth or that there was some fundamental misunderstanding of the Cardinal's words. But there wasn't, and there isn't any positive spin. It was a debacle. To put it frankly, Cardinal Pell has made Catholics look like idiots.

In case you may not know what I am referring to, Cardinal George Pell of Australia recently agreed to an online debate with famous atheist Richard Dawkins. Basically, Dawkins dominated the terms of the debate and kept Pell on the defensive. Pell, perhaps trying to sound sophisticated or philosophical, hemmed and hawed on several important points of Catholic doctrine; he stated that atheists could go to heaven (not atheists who convert, mind you, but atheists qua atheists), stated his adherence to Balthasar's doctrine that hell exists but is "probably" empty, and then, in the most discussed aspect of the evening's discussion, went on to explain that Adam and Eve were entirely mythological and affirmed his belief that mankind was the product of evolution.

Pell admitted that human beings "probably" evolved, which earned him a round of applause from the audience. At this point, Tony Jones, the moderator, asked a very reasonable question: "But you accept that humans evolved from non-humans, so at what point did the soul come about?”

Cardinal Pell responded: “The Soul is the principle of life. Whenever the soul was able to communicate then we had the first human. But if there are humans, there must be a first one.” By the way, this is essentially the position that Benedict XVI took when, as Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote that "matter signifies a moment in the history of spirit...spirit is created and is not the mere product of development, even though it comes to light by way of development" in a 1973 essay on Creation (see here).

Jones: “Are you suggesting a sort of Garden of Eden scenario with an actual Adam and Eve?”

“Well Adam and Eve are terms that mean ‘life’ and ‘earth’. Like an Everyman. It’s a beautiful, sophisticated, mythological account. It’s not science. But it’s there to tell us two or three things. First of all that God created the world and universe. Secondly that the key to the whole universe is humans. And thirdly it’s a very sophisticated mythology to try to explain the evil and the suffering in the world….It’s a religious story told for religious purposes.”

Now Richard Dawkins, who proved himself more astute than Pell in seeing the implications of Pell's denial of a historic Adam and Eve, retorted with this question: “Ah, well, I’m curious to know, if Adam and Eve never existed where did Original Sin come from?” It's painful to watch the Cardinal's sullen, silent expression after this question. He is unable to come up with any answer.

Dawkins is spot on here: No original parents, no original sin. No original sin, no explanation for sin in the world. No explanation for sin, no need for a savior. Christianity, apart from the reality of original sin, does not make any sense. It's a shame that Dawkins understands this better than the Cardinal. That is very troubling.

What is equally troubling is that the Cardinal does not seem aware of Pius XII's teaching in Humani Generis. In that encyclical, Pius XII specifically condemns the opinion known as polygenism, which is the belief that Adam "represents a number of first parents." The pope states:

"When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own" (HG, 37).

Notice that the very reason why Pius XII condemns this opinion is because of the objection that Dawkins brings up - original sin. Belief in original sin necessitates belief in first parents, and "a sin actually committed by an individual Adam," as Pius XII teaches. As much appalling as it is that an atheist understands the coherence of Catholic truths better than a Cardinal, I think it is even more appalling that the Cardinal either deviates from the clear teaching of Pius XII or else appears ignorant of it. I do not presume to judge the reason for the Cardinal's statements other than to say that they were unacceptable.

Some have come forward and tried to save original sin in spite of a denial of a historic Adam. For example, Michael Potemra of the National Review made the following argument:

"The fact of the existence of Original Sin does not depend on the historical existence of Adam and Eve. To say that it does seems to me the equivalent of declaring that if Mrs. O’Leary’s cow was not, in fact, responsible for the Great Chicago Fire, then the Great Chicago Fire must not have happened at all. Original Sin is a fundamental choice in which man declares his prideful rebellion against God, and we see that choice in our own hearts" (source).

The problem with this thinking is that Potemra is stating that original sin is basically the existence of sinful tendencies within every man in the present without any account for its origin. Let's follow Mr. Potemra's line of thinking here - so, we need not have an historic Adam because the sinful desires we have in our own hearts prove original sin. Okay, so, where do these sinful desires come from then? Potemra has already ruled out a historic Adam who introduced sin into humanity. What is the genesis of sin, then?

Presumably, the only answer is that Original Sin is "part of human nature", something inherent in every human being and that we all experience intimately in our own hearts. I think this is what Potemra is getting at. Unfortunately, it is not theologically viable explanation. Despite the common parlance that sin and evil are "part of human nature", Christianity tells us that, no, they are not part of our nature. Our nature was created in a state of harmony with God, in a state of natural perfection. Sin was not part of man's nature. To say otherwise is to say that God created sin, and to say that man's current state is the one God envisions for him. This is untenable for a Christian.

One could say that the Chicago Fire can be accounted for without Mrs. O'Leary's cow, but one must admit that the Chicago Fire had some cause. To apply Potemra's logic to the Chicago Fire, we would have to say that we don't need to hypothesize a historical cause for the fire in the past because it is in the nature of cities to burn, and just because the present city is on fire does not mean that that fire had a historical origin. Utter nonsense. The presence of an effect in the present implies a cause in the past, and that cause if either God or man. And to say it is God would be the heresy of stating that God created evil and sin. We are left, therefore, with a first sin committed by man.

If our leaders are going to take the approach of trying to look sophisticated to impress atheists and secularists, they'd better just knock it off. The true tragedy of this was summed up in a great article in the Remnant:

"A few million viewers of the Pell-Dawkins debate walked away wondering since when have Catholics become so eager to debunk their own Scriptures and discard their own theology. Outright enemies of the Catholic Faith couldn’t invent more expedient ways to baffle (and thus alienate) non-believers than those the Modernist leaders of the Catholic Church have come up with all on their own."

This dialogue probably should not have happened; Cardinal Pell could have done more for the world and the Church had he spent that hour in Adoration praying for the conversion of poor sinners. It reminds me of a story I have referenced elsewhere in the life St. Louis IX. Apparently, a discussion panel had been set up by a local abbot between some rabbis and some monks to debate the Christian faith. After the rabbis said something amiss against Christ and the Virgin Mary, an knight watching the debate struck the rabbi. The abbot rebuked the knight, but the knight had an interesting retort:

"The abbot went up to the knight and told him he had acted most unwisely. The knight retorted that the abbot had been guilty of even greater folly in calling people together for such a conference, because there were many good Christians there who, before the discussion ended, would have gone away with doubts about their own religion through not fully understanding the Jews."

It is good to have dialogue for the purpose of defending our faith and giving an answer to the heathen. But if the result of the debate is going to be that Christians go away more confused than before, then it becomes folly. Trying to present sophisticated, modern interpretations of the Faith that explain away or mythologize the Scriptures do not help Catholics strengthen their faith; it simply confuses them and makes us look like idiots.

Knock it off, Cardinal Pell!

Hawking: Heaven a "fairy story"

Atheist windbag Stephen Hawking was popping off again this week on  his opinion that the universe does not "need" a creator God to explain its existence or complexity. He made sure to blast the Christian belief in heaven, which he said was "a fairy story" He stated:

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first...I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark" (source).

The interesting thing about Hawking's comment is what it reveals about the way people tend to interpret the human person. Ideally, technological advancement should give us the tools and  insight to get a  more accurate and objective view of the world around us, including (and especially) the human person. Instead, what happens too often is  the reverse - people get enamored of a new technological or scientific advancement and start to see the human person in terms of the technology.

In the Middle Ages, when a spiritual view of the cosmos pervaded society, man was seen as an enfleshed spirit - an organic unity of body and soul. When the Industrial Revolution came along and technology started to change, mankind was seen as a complex machine made up of interworking parts. When atheistic evolution became popular around the turn of the last century, man was seen as another beast (albeit a very advanced one), competing against his beastly competitors in the merciless march of Social Darwinism. Now that we are in the computer age, the human person is viewed as a kind of super-computer, and the brain as a vast and complex Internet. This is how Hawking has apparently allowed the computer to affect his view of the human brain, which he sees fundamentally as "a computer."

But just for fun, let us grant Hawking's premise that the brain is ultimately a big computer. Even if we grant this, it should be evident that computers can have a sort of "eternal life" after their own nature. First, observe that, while the actual computer hardware is certainly important, what really gives a computer its value is what programs or software it has installed, that is, the data contained on or in the computer. This data could be likened, in our analogy, to the soul of the computer; just like what is most important about a human is the immaterial part of him, so a computer's most important part is the data it contains, the software.

Typically, this data "dies" when the hard drive it is contained on crashes or dies. Even though in this scenario the hard drive and the data are lost simultaneously, we make a logical distinction between the hard drive itself and the data, the stuff "on" the hard drive. Because we understand this distinction, we know that the data contained on a hard drive can go on "living" after the hard drive's demise. This is why we email things to ourselves, make back-up hard drives and put things on a flash drive. When your computer goes the way of all hard ware, you know that the data (the most important stuff) can go on living by transferring them to a new computer, a new "body."

Now, all hard drives eventually crash, and so in real life data never gets to a "final destination"; it actually kind of gets reincarnated over and over again on different systems. But suppose we posit a theoretical "perfect hard drive" that would never crash; a piece of equipment that could store an infinite amount of data forever without ever suffering from material depreciation, a hard drive where "moth and rust do not destroy" and from where we would never need to remove our files again. If such a thing existed, our files could indeed enjoy a kind of "eternal life" forever in a perfect hard drive. It is theoretically possible. Now, if we can see the logic of this in the world of computers, than why is it so hard to admit it's possibility for human beings, who according to Hawking, are nothing but biological super-computers?

But back to the common atheist assertion that we no longer "need" God to "explain" the universe. This is kind of a canard - since when have we had any Christians out there seriously asserting that we needed strictly supernatural explanations for any of the biological, physical, chemical or other natural processes that go on in the world? I think the debates about "spontaneous generation" were the last time any Christians seriously asserted that. I suppose some strict, young-earth creationists might fall into this category, but do they really represent the majority of Christians? Our belief in God is not based on any sort of "god of the gaps" mentality where we insert God simply because we don't understand a natural process. I don't understand how Jupiter got its big red storm or why sharks in a tank always swim clockwise, but I bet there are natural explanations for both without having to say "God does it miraculously."

There is one conspicuous place where I do think God is necessary, however, but this is not anything to do with the natural processes within the universe; rather, it has to do with the very existence of the universe. Since nothing comes from nothing, and since nothing that is generate itself, the only alternative is a Creator who brought forth being out of non-being, and to go from non-being to being, a Creator is necessary - a Being  powerful enough to call forth being from nothing, "something that everybody calls 'God.'"

This gives a teleological framework to the universe- it answers the great "why" which man has always asked. It is interesting that, when these atheist scientists say that science has all the answers to the mysteries of the universe, when presented with the question of why the universe or any individual exists at all, their response is to scoff and say that asking "why" about life is a meaningless, useless question. Since all that is is the product of pure randomness, any questions as to its teleological purpose are baseless and ultimately meaningless, so says the atheist evolutionary.

If that is the case, then why is man, the pinnacle of biological evolutionary seem programed by evolutionary development to ask "why"? If evolutionary developments favor the most helpful traits that give a species an advantage, why did the most advanced species ever to walk the face of this earth evolve with the trait to ask and ponder the meaningless question of "why", and why has this question been so central to man's existence? I would say the ability to ask "why" is what distinguishes men from beasts. Dogs and other animals can ask "what" in their own way; whenever a dog sniffs a new visitor to the home, he is, in his own way, asking "what is this?" Animals can ask "how". When a rat cleverly finds a way through a lab maze to get to a piece of food, or performs other feats of stunning complexity, his brain is answering the question "how do I get this food?" But no animal can contemplate "why" or surmise a teleological end to his existence. This is reserved to humans alone and sets them apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But why should a trait so central to man's existence be at the same time "meaningless" and "useless" and yet be bestowed upon him by the same evolutionary development that supposedly only permits useful and meaningful adaptations to endure? If why is a meaningless question, why did evolution allow for the highest creature (man) to ask this meaningless question? It doesn't make any sense. It sounds like something out of a fairy story.

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Evolutionary Christianity

Last time we dug into a questionable program or seminar, it was Just Faith. This time Evolutionary Christianity is on the chop-block. So have you ever heard of Evolutionary Christianity? Evolutionary Christianity is a website established to make an online seminar series available on the topic of seeing Christianity through an evolutionary world view. “Join thirty-eight of today’s most inspiring Christian leaders and esteemed scientists,” it explains on the home page, “for a groundbreaking dialogue on how an evolutionary worldview can enrich your life, deepen your faith, and bless our world.”

The goal of the talks and discussions is to present a path between what its participants call “science-rejecting creationism and faith-rejecting atheism.” They find “no conflict between faith and reason, heart and head, Jesus and Darwin. For us, religious faith and spiritual practice can be strengthened and deepened by what God/Reality is revealing through science.”

The explanation continues: “Evolutionary Christianity points to those who value evidence, in a very real sense, as ‘divine communication.’ Whatever our [i.e., referring to those committed to the ideas of Evolutionary Christianity] fascinating and at times infuriating differences, we all have deep-time eyes and a global heart—that is, we are all enriched by the evolutionary history of the universe and we are all committed to a just and healthy future for humanity and the larger body of life.”

The differences among the thirty-eight leaders participating in the Evolutionary Christianity tele-series are important to the group. One section of the website divides them into categories that include two Nobel Laureate scientists, two Templeton prize-winners, and a soup of thinkers speaking about process theology, the “emerging” church, eco-theology, progressive and integral Christianity, and evolutionary Christian mysticism. Four of the thirty-eight identify themselves as Evangelicals and six as Roman Catholics. The labels aren’t particularly useful, as one might reasonably argue that all participants embrace the “inclusive” philosophy of Evolutionary Christianity and are therefore coming from a similar perspective. It is basically a Teilhard de Chardin fanclub.

The better known in the group are Matthew Fox, a Roman Catholic priest who switched to Episcopalianism in the early 1990s after being expelled from the Dominican order for teaching Creation Spirituality; Sr. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine religious who has participated in the dissenting movement Call to Action and is an advocate of women’s ordination; John Shelby Spong, homosexual Episcopal bishop emeritus who has called for a new Reformation to reformulate basic Christian doctrine “[s]ince God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms…;” and perennial new age heretic Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan who, over the years, has promoted a host of programs that make one wonder why he calls himself a Catholic at all.

Father Rohr is not so much an originator of these programs (among them the Enneagram and male spirituality) as a brilliant popularizer of them, able to articulate their complexities and make them available to wide audiences. Therefore, as an introduction to some of the ideas espoused by the proponents of Evolutionary Christianity— at least as they will be sold into Catholic circles—it is profitable to take a closer look at Father Rohr’s interview with Michael Dowd, the evangelical minister who founded the Evolutionary Christianity project.

Interview of Fr. Richard Rohr by Michael Dowd, Dec. 18th, 2010: " Radical Grace and Evolutionary Spirituality"

Dueling Dualism

Father Rohr begins the interview with a bit of personal background, explaining that the mission of his Albuquerque-based Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) is to help people on both the right and left to transcend the dualistic thinking that divides the world into “bad guys” and “good guys.” The contemplative mind, he argues, rejects that dualistic thought.

"Again and again," says Fr. Rohr,  "I saw the tremendous social needs of our time and our world. And yet, to be perfectly honest, I often was disappointed in some of the responses, which I would now call “dualistic thinking”…“either/or thinking”… “all or nothing thinking.” I found dualistic thinking to be as much on the left as it was on the right. Different vocabulary, but such thinking still split the universe into the good guys and the bad guy — totally right or totally wrong."

Dowd interjects that the contemplative mind is “non-dogmatic.” Father doesn’t correct that description but develops the idea that the spirituality of youth, whether in individuals or institutions, is engaged in creating a self-identity – a container. The spirituality of age is more concerned about what’s in the container, such as patience, inclusion, and the forgiveness of reality for not being perfect. God, Rohr says, is comfortable with a diversity that follows different sets of rules. That’s creative and is the sort of thinking that allows one to be compassionate and forgiving.

Pause. What makes this line of discussion particularly difficult is that the term dualism has been used in several different ways. As a philosophical or theological worldview that sees the universe locked in an eternal struggle between the equal powers of good and evil, dualism is clearly an unchristian perspective and has been dogmatically rejected by the Church as heresy. However, not every discussion of contrasting positions comes from a dualistic perspective. To call one line of reasoning “true” or “real” and another line of reasoning “false” or “not real” isn’t dualism – it’s descriptive. Remember the "Two Ways" mentioned in the early Church manual the Didache? How about the City of God and the City of Man from Augustine's Civitas Dei? How about the beginning of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Humanum Genus on Freemasonry, which begins by dividing the world into two categories:

"The race of man, after its miserable fall from God, the Creator and the Giver of heavenly gifts, "through the envy of the devil," separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth, namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ; and those who desire from their heart to be united with it, so as to gain salvation, must of necessity serve God and His only-begotten Son with their whole mind and with an entire will. The other is the kingdom of Satan, in whose possession and control are all whosoever follow the fatal example of their leader and of our first parents, those who refuse to obey the divine and eternal law, and who have many aims of their own in contempt of God, and many aims also against God."

To say that conceiving of the world in terms of right and wrong, true and false is dualism is a foolish misunderstanding of what dualism is. But I digress.

Changeless Change

Dowd asks Father Rohr, “How has an evolutionary understanding of reality, an evidential understanding of reality, made a difference in your own faith walk?” 

Father answers: "It’s become almost foundational. If what’s happening is evolving, then of course you’ve never got it. So an evolutionary understanding keeps you with a beginner’s mind. It keeps you with that kind of humility — an expectation of an open horizon. I think the bane of religion, and not just Christianity, has been a closing down of such openness way too early, because of the assumption that ‘I understand; I know.’ And I think this is the arrogance that so many people have come to resent in religious people."

The “evolutionary understanding” of reality, which Dowd defines as science-based understanding, may believe that what has been revealed by God about Himself may evolve to “reveal” something quite different – say, that the personal One, Creator God of yesterday is today revealed to be the universe itself - is as much an “I understand; I know” position as any other. Knowing certain truths, however, doesn’t mean one has exhausted their meaning nor does rejecting what little one can know guarantee freedom from arrogance. Having true knowledge about a thing does not mean we have come to the end of the mystery.

Incarnation

Here's where Fr. Rohr really demonstrates his ignorance of what the Incarnation means. The topic of Incarnation (materialized deity) affords some of Evolutionary Christianity’s greatest departure from traditional Christian thought. The incarnation, Father Rohr says, is the big trump card of Christianity:

"The mystery of the Enfleshment of Spirit began 14.5 billion years ago, approximately. That’s the real birth of Christ. When I say that to Christians, they’re shocked. So I point them to the prologue to John’s gospel and to the hymn in the beginning of Colossians, the hymn in the beginning of Ephesians, the first chapter of the first letter of John. These passages all say, without any equivocation, that Christ existed from all eternity."

Is he serious? Does he not understand what the Incarnation is, or does he not know the difference between our Lord's eternal preexistence and His coming as a man in time? To say that Christ existed from all eternity isn’t to say that he was enfleshed from all eternity. Nothing in the scripture passages mentioned, or in any other scripture passages for that matter, suggests that he was; quite the contrary, scripture is clear that he existed before creation. (Col 1: 15-20).

Father Rohr continues that the material world is the “hiding place,” the “revelation place,” of God:

"So to get to your notion of deep time, you’re right on. Deep time is not just taking my moment as if it’s the reference point — the be-all and end-all. Rather, I must look to how I fit in to past and future. How am I connected to this universal history, this geological history, this history of civilization? How do I situate myself inside of all of that history? This seems to me to be the real appreciation for incarnation. Incarnation is planted inside the very nature of the world that God created and through which God is revealing God’s self in every creature. Every creature is a word of God. St. Bonaventure was a philosopher. He took the experience of Francis and made an entire philosophical system out of it, in which he made the point that every step of creation and every piece of creation is another word of God. Each is another footprint, another fingerprint, another revelation of the mystery. So the whole distinction between sacred and profane just doesn’t work anymore. It’s not helpful. It’s not true. There is only one universe. It’s all sacred, and it’s all revealing the divine."

The confusion of God with His creation as expressed by Father Rohr, has been addressed by the Vatican document on the New Age, Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life: “For New Age the Cosmic Christ is seen as a pattern which can be repeated in many people, places and times; it is the bearer of an enormous paradigm shift; it is ultimately a potential within us. According to Christian belief, Jesus Christ is not a pattern, but a divine person whose human-divine figure reveals the mystery of the Father's love for every person throughout history (Jn 3:16); he lives in us because he shares his life with us, but it is neither imposed nor automatic. All men and women are invited to share his life, to live “in Christ” (3.3). Later in the Vatican document, some brief formulations about New Age thought are detailed, including the idea that the “new consciousness” – sounding rather like the “evolutionary understanding” above – “demonstrates itself in an instinctive understanding of the sacredness and, in particular, the interconnectedness of all existence. This new consciousness and this new understanding of the dynamic interdependence of all life mean that we are currently in the process of evolving a completely new planetary culture” (7.1). 

At one point in the interview, Dowd says that his dualism collapsed when he realized the universe had started to become conscious of itself (though he doesn't explain how this is evident in anyway). Rohr responds that when one isn’t operating on the mystical level, all one is left with is a "low-level morality."

The Inclusiveness of Evolutionary Christianity

Dowd asks Father Rohr how Christianity relates to other faiths in light of evolution. Rohr calls for a “vocabulary” for the “relational truth of the universe”:

"If God is Trinity, then God himself, herself, itself is relationship. This is my foundation — that God is not a noun. God is a verb. God is an eternal circle dance. The Cappadocian Fathers in the third and fourth century said this — that God is a circle dance. Once that becomes your template for the very shape of the divine, and therefore the very shape of creation, then there’s nothing that can be understood outside of relationship."

"God is an eternal circle dance." I'm not sure if the Cappadocians ever said that, but even if so, that phrase used in this context makes me want to puke.

In that "circle" relationship, then, Rohr argues, one is not believing things or judging things but simply participating with “the mystery” and honoring the divine expression in all people, because humanity’s survival depends on not excluding one another with sectarian “truths.” The new, emergent, participatory religion is entirely inclusive, rejecting a Jesus who is the exclusive son of God for an inclusive son of God. Rohr quotes Thomas Merton as saying that if this is the sacred dance, it’s always the general dance and if you’re not in the general dance you’re not in it. If you’re compassionate only for your own self, or your own group, you’re not compassionate.

"Compassion can’t be just for my group or my political party or my baseball team or my religion.That’s the very thing Jesus was critiquing in his own Jewish brothers and sisters. So I say, “Why was Jesus inclusive in his lifetime, and then afterwards we created an exclusive religion in his honor?” It doesn’t make a bit of sense."

Even “truth” must be inclusive, it seems, encompassing contraries and contradictions. Dowd remarks that one can’t expect everyone to have all the truth but everyone has something useful to offer, even atheists who help others to evolve their own religious expression. Father Rohr develops that thought, adding that religious people can’t build on their superiority but must build on commonality of humanity.

"There are billions of us on this planet. If we can’t start honoring the divine presence in all people, all religions, and all things, I don’t know what hope there is for the world."

As indebted as Father Rohr and his cohorts may be to the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, its roots go much deeper. Rather than being an evolutionary step in religious thought, if one considers evolutionary steps to be progressive, positive developments, Evolutionary Christianity is constructed from quite ancient ideas, such as incarnated by the Hindu greeting “Namaste,” meaning the divine in me greets the divine in you. Not that this fact would bother an Evolutionary Christian. These people seem positively proud of their pagan associations. I know that Catholics are free to believe in evolution if they want, but it is interesting to me that the folks who are on the cutting edge of promoting evolution within the Church, people like Rohr and de Chardin (and Fr. Ron Rohlheiser, too, for that matter), are always huge heretics and progressives as well. In my opinion, this is what you get when you start mixing evolution up in your theology.

Thanks to the Los Pequenos Pepper, who did most of the research for this and where most of this post was lifted from. 

Pius XII, Teilhard and Ratzinger

Teilhard de Chardin's theory of the evolution of the cosmos towards the Omega Point. To what degree does this cosmology, which the Holy Office said 'offends Catholic doctrine',  influence our current pontiff's thought on the question of evolution?

In the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, "On Human Origins," Pope Pius XII allows us, by way of concession, to believe in the possibility that the human body could have evolved from preexisting biological material, so long as we adhere to the immediate creation of the soul by God in our first parents.

I have never ben entirely comfortable with this concession and have always opted for a more traditional, creationist view of things (though that doesn't mean I am necessarily a "Young Earther"). As I was explaining Pius' concession to a Sacred Scripture class I teach for high schooler's this week, I noted, too, that many of them were uncomfortable with it because they felt it introduced too much duality into man's nature. 

I recalled that Cardinal Ratzinger had once expressed a similar reserve in a book he wrote back in 1973 entitled Dogma und Verkundigung. If you are wondering how I came across this essay, it is because Ignatius Press somewhat disingenuously reproduced it, along with a series of other essays, in a book called Credo for Today: What Christians Believe. I say it is disingenuous because the book, which is a collection of Ratzinger's essays dating from the 70's and 80's, is marketed as if it were the writings of Pope Benedict. The cover shows a picture of Benedict as pope (not as a professor at Regensburg) and says "Pope Benedict XVI" on the cover. Those who didn't know better would think the book's contents were the pope's current thought and writings; one has to go all the way to the appendix before you find out that these are actually essays written over twenty years ago, for the most part. Furthermore, despite the subtitle of the book saying "What Christians Believe," the book contains some of Ratzinger's most speculative theology, stuff that can hardly be said to be what most Christians believe.

Anyhow, back to evolution. I cite this book because both Ratzinger and I have difficulties with Pius XII's concession in Humani Generis, but whereas I go one way to get around the difficulty, Ratzinger goes another.

Ratzinger begins his essay on creation with the very important point that theologians cannot simply ignore the question of the origins of life and issues surrounding evolution - they have to be dealt with. As an example of how modern theology can ignore the question of the origin of man, he cites those who say that how man was created is superfluous anyway; those who, when confronted with alleged contradictions between Genesis and Darwin, will shrug and paraphrase Augustine: "The Bible is meant to tell us who made the heavens, not how the heavens were made." It is certainly true that the Scriptures are meant to lead us to salvation, but that does not in any way mean that everything else it says is superfluous, or that things like the creation narrative are not also ordered to our salvation in various ways.

Ratzinger says this position of "it doesn't really matter how we take Genesis 1" is especially disingenuous since only a little more than a century ago there were a good many theologians, and even regional synods, insisting that the fixity of species and a literal reading of Genesis 1 were de fide. Ratzinger condemns those who "make a dishonest compromise and for tactical reasons declare the terrain that has become untenable as superfluous anyway, after having so short a time before insisted loudly on situating it as an indispensable part of the faith" (pg. 34). Therefore, the issue of creation and evolution must be dealt with somehow.

Where I diverge from Ratzinger is in his automatic assumption that the traditional view is "untenable." I wish he would not have brushed it aside so easily. But in any case, he goes on to the compromise permitted by Pius XII in Humani Generis, that the body could be the product of evolution but the soul could not. I personally have always been uncomfortable with Pius's compromise; I know the pope allows Catholics to maintain this position, but it is only by way of concession, as if saying that accommodating evolution to creation is an exception, not the norm. I also thought that this idea introduced too much duality into the human person - to say that the physical part of man was the process of evolution but the soul infused by God at a later time, whenever the human anatomy had reached a sufficient stage of evolutionary growth. In this view, God basically took one of the advanced primates already in existence and ennobled it by the infusion of a soul, not unlike what God did when He granted Balaam's ass the powers of speech and reason momentarily.

Ratzinger, too, finds a problem with the Humani Generis compromise. He says;

"Now some have tried to get around the problem by saying that the human body may be a product of evolution, but the soul is not by any means: God himself created it, since spirit cannot emerge from matter. This answer seems to have in its favor the fact that spirit cannot be examined by the same scientific method with which one studies the history of organisms, but only at first glance is this a satisfactory answer. We have to continue the line of questioning: Can we divide man up in this way between theologians and scientists--the soul for the former, the body for the latter? Is that not intolerable for both? The natural scientist believes that he can see man as a whole gradually taking shape; he also finds an area of psychological transition in which human behavior slowly arises out of animal activity, without being able to draw a clear boundary...Conversely, the theologian is convinced that the soul gives form to the body as well, characterizing it through and through as a human body, so that a human being is spirit only as body and is body only as and in the spirit, then this division of man loses all meaning for him, too" (p. 38).

The compromise that Pius XII allowed by way of concession holds little value for Ratzinger, even though many eminent modern theologians hold precisely this opinion. But Ratzinger is an honest theologian and will not admit of a concept so dualistic and problematic as the theory of the evolutionary creation of the body from preexisting matter. At this point, however, instead of reverting to a more (in my opinion) traditional understanding of the immediate and special creation of man, Ratzinger instead opts to go in a direction even further in the line of evolutionary thought than the concession allowed in Humani Generis.

To Ratzinger it seems that it must be one or the other - spirit must evolve along with matter, or spirit and matter both must be created apart from evolution. Since Ratzinger has already found the non-evolutionary arguments to be "untenable," he now turns to none other than the condemned Jesuit modernist Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, he whose works the Holy Office declared "abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine" (source). From Teilhard Ratzinger takes the idea that the universe represents the "self-actuation" of the Logos in time and space - that "the world as a whole, as the Bible says, comes from the Logos, that is, from the creative mind and represents the temporal form of its self-actuation...the world of becoming as the self-actuation of creative thought" (p. 44). From this Teilhardian idea, Ratzinger will build up his conclusion that spirit can, in a sense, involve from matter, since the developments we witness in the unfolding of the cosmos should not be seen as unguided evolution but as the self-actuation in time of a timeless Logos.

Don't think I'm connecting dots between Ratzinger and Teilhard that aren't there; Ratzinger cites Teilhard by name a little further on in this passage, saying that Teilhard's idea of spirit as the "goal" of an evolutionary "process" is "ingenious" and "quite accurate" (pp. 44-45). He is very clearly, unapologetically and enthusiastically in debt to Teilhard for some of these ideas. I know that just because Teilhard's writings have been condemned does not mean he may not have some valuable things to say; we still quote Origen and Tertullian despite some of their issues. But, really, could not the man who would become the Prefect of the CDF find a  more weighty authority to cite other than Teilhard de Chardin? Ratzinger borrows more from Teilhard later in the book, adopting Teilhard's terminology of the end of history as an "omega point" in his essay on the Second Coming (p. 113)

Anyhow, back to matter and spirit. So, if the world is in a process of "self-actualization" in relation to the Logos, then the emergence of spirit into the world of matter can be seen as an inevitable part of this development. This leads Ratzinger to posit "matter as the prehistory of the spirit" and he formulates his idea of spirit emerging out of matter in Hegelian terms of matter as a "moment" in the development of spirit:

"It is clear that spirit is not a random product of material developments, but rather that matter signifies a moment in the history of spirit. This, however, is just another way of saying that spirit is created and is not the mere product of development, even though it comes to light by way of development" (p. 45).

So the spirit is not simply infused into the ready biological material, as Pius XII allowed for, but neither is the human body created uniquely and infused with a soul. Rather, as the whole cosmos is tending towards a universal development towards spirit, the emergence of spirit into matter is something that is latent within the cosmos from the beginning, even if initially we see no traces of spirit. Spirit does not evolve out of matter, but is truly, in a sense, in potency with relation to matter, so that when matter has reached the proper developmental stage in its self-actuation, spirit is enabled to "emerge." Just as an acorn does not evolve into a tree, but rather, the tree is latent within the acorn; the emergence of the tree is the self-actualization of the acorn, not its evolution. He says:

"The appearance of spirit, according to the previous discussion, means rather that an advancing movement arrives at the goal that has been set for it" (p. 46).

It is this advancement that Ratzinger calls the "rise of the spirit." Thus, through this Teilhardian logic, we are able to at once affirm that spirit is not the product of evolution while maintaining that spirit can indeed emerge out of matter "by way of development" , as Ratzinger says. This is, says Ratzinger, how "the special creation of man can coexist with an evolutionary world view, or what form it must assume within an evolutionary world view" (p. 45).

So, how does this emergence of the spirit occur with reference to the human person, who would undoubtedly be the locus for the spirit's emergence? Having already discarded out of hand the traditional idea that God formed man immediately from dirt and infused him with life, as well as casting doubt on Pius XII's concession that God allowed man's body to evolve from preexisting matter, Ratzinger goes on to explain the emergence of spirit within man in the following terms:

"The clay became man at that moment in which a being for the first time was capable of forming, however dimly, the thought "God." The first "thou" that -- however stammeringly -- was said by human lips to god marks the moment in which spirit arose in the world. Here the Rubicon of anthropogenesis was crossed" (p. 46-47).

So, man becomes man as soon as man is capable of formulating the idea of God, "however stammeringly." Here we have Ratzinger's theory of the emergence of spirit out of matter and how non-human life forms crossed the ontological Rubicon from non-human into human existence.

On the one hand, Ratzinger is a much more intelligent person than I am, and so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt, keeping in mind as well that this essay was written in 1973 and obviously carries no papal authority nor even any magisterial authority. But on the other hand, I know when something smells fishy, espcially when Teilhard is invoked.

My first problem with Ratzinger's thesis is that, if we deny that spirit can develop from matter but admit that it arises out of matter by way of development, the fact is that it still evolves from matter. It is irrelevant whether the cause for the emergence of the spirit is extrinsic (somekind of random modification in biological matter that allows for the emergence of spirit), or intrinsic (an inherent principle of "elasticity" within matter that allows it to give way to spirit at a certain point, just as an acorn becomes a tree), the fact is we still have matter evolving into spirit. It doesn't matter (pun intended) whether the we say spirit evolved from matter or whether we say matter is a "moment" in the history of spirit. However you slice it, you still have spirit "emerging' out of matter, whether or not you say the change is blind evolution or a movement towards a goal. To me, this is still quite troubling.

Second, and more problematic, is the contrast between Ratzinger's conception of the first concept of God and Catholic theology on the state of our first parents before the Fall. Ratzinger states that spirit first enters the world at the moment that the first being, "however dimly" and "however stammeringly" uttered the word "God." This would coincide with the moment in the Genesis account when God breathes the breath of life into the nostrils of Adam and makes him a "living being."

However, is there not a problem here? According to the doctrine of Original Sin, man originally existed in a state of perfect justice and preternatural glory. Humani Generis reminds us that we must believe in the existence of two literal first parents who were created in grace but fell into sin. Thus, our first parents would have been brought forth in a state of natural perfection with their minds enlightened by grace and an infused knowledge of God; not simply of His existence, but of His perfections and of the fact that man is created to be in relation with Him. In short, our first parents had a very clear and unmistakable notion of God (otherwise how could have been guilty of sinning against Him?) - created fresh from His hands, enlightened in their intellect by grace and unmarred from sin, their understanding of Him in their perfected natural state was greater and clearer than most of us will ever experience. Can this vision of God which our first parents enjoyed prior to Original Sin be reconciled with Ratzinger's comments that the first conception of God emerged in the human species "dimly" and "stammeringly"? It seems to me that the first conception mankind ever had of God was a glorious vision, full of clarity and infused knowledge, that is unrivaled except by some of the holiest saints.

Well, Ratzinger wrote this stuff back in 73' and I haven't heard much on this by way of him since; for all I know, he may repudiate all this Teilhardian stuff. So don't accuse me of bashing "the Pope" or being a dissenter or anything; I can certainly voice my apprehensions about an essay written by Ratzinger twenty-five years before he ascended to the Chair of Peter. It bothers me that, when faced with dilemmas about reconciling evolution and creation, the tendency seems to be to grant more and more ground to evolutionary biology and relegate the creation story more and more to the realm of allegory, until it is, as Tolkien said, "tucked into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the house, don't you know, when the bright clever young people called" (see here). If we are finding out, as Ratzinger did, that the concessions allowed by Pius XII in Humani Generis are too dualistic for Catholics to be comfortable with, then why not just go back to something more traditional instead of going further ahead into modernist evolutionary-theological hypotheses about "emergent spirit" "omega points" and the "Rubicon of anthropogenesis"? I don't know...I'm sure some will just say that I'm not a theologian and that I shouldn't try to apply my mind to these things. I don't deny that I am not a theologian. But like I said, I know when something stinks, and if I want to have a conversation about Creation and someone starts talking Teilhard, I definitely start to smell something.

More on Death Before Sin

A few weeks back I had an interesting discussion with several of my readers about the concept of death before sin as it pertains to the question of theistic evolution. Catholic theology teaches that death came into the world through the sin of Adam, and that death originates from sin. There are two ways to take this truth. First, one can take it in the absolute sense, as I do, which would mean that before Adam sinned there was no death of any kind; no animals died, no plants died, nothing experienced death whatsoever, and that when the first man experienced the death brought on by sin, not only the human race but all creation, of which he was the head, was brought under death as well. Or one could interpret it in a restrictive sense: that the death that Adam's sin brought about was human death only, and that prior to the Fall everything else in the world was still dying as they do today - animals were still eating each other, plants still dying, and everything going on according to the cycles of nature we currently witness, with the exception of an immortal man in the midst of it.

Both of these positions, as far as I can tell, are perfectly acceptable, their only real difference being that the restrictive interpretation allows for the possibility of theisticly directed evolution to have occured, while the former absolute interpretation does not.

This Sunday in the NO readings we heard from Wisdom 2:23-24 which had this to say about death:

For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are in his possession experience it.

This verse has the same difficulties as the other verses (Rom. 5:12, 1 Cor. 15:21), in that it simply says that death, generically, came through sin, without making any distinction as to whether it refers to human death or death in general. Though the general word "death" is used without qualification, the surrounding context lets us know that it is emphasizing the reality of human death specifically.

Rabbinic tradition at least seems to have viewed Adam's fall as the source of death for all creation, not just the human race, so that, as the rabbis taught in the Talmud (Sanh. viii. 4-9):

Why was only a single specimen of man created first? To teach us that he who destroys a single soul destroys a whole world and that he who saves a single soul saves a whole world.

I'm not pretending to prove my position by appealing to the Jewish Talmud, which is in so many other ways a despicable book to Christians by virtue of its many blasphemies, but I think it does show at least a historical witness that some of the earliest commentators on Genesis saw the corruption of not only man but the whole world as bound up in Adam's Fall.

St. Augustine, when treating of the question of death is mainly concerned with refuting the errors of Pelagius, who said that Adam incurred death only for himself, dedicates most of his writing on the topic to human death alone, which he of course says is a result of sin. I found an interesting passage from City of God Book XIII.6 in which he reflects that death afflicts the good and the evil alike, but that even for the good the experience of death is never good:

Wherefore, as regards bodily death, that is, the separation of the soul from the body, it is good unto none while it is being endured by those whom we say are in the article of death. For the very violence with which body and soul are wrenched asunder, which in the living had been conjoined and closely intertwined, brings with it a harsh experience, jarring horridly on nature so long as it continues, till there comes a total loss of sensation, which arose from the very interpenetration of spirit and flesh. And all this anguish is sometimes forestalled by one stroke of the body or sudden flitting of the soul, the swiftness of which prevents it from being felt.

While I assume he is talking about human death, since he mentions the soul and later on talks about the sin of Adam later in the chapter, he makes an interesting point here: death is "good unto none." The experience of dying is "harsh" and jars the nature of a thing horribly. If it is never good, or "good unto none," then would it make sense to say that God, who created all things "good" and "very good", willed as part of His creation that anything should of its own nature be subject to an experience which is so harsh and jarring upon that nature?

St. Augustine goes on in chapter 17 of the same book to assert that it is possible for God to render anything, even animals, to be immortal if He so pleases:

But earth, say they, must return to earth, out of which the terrestrial bodies of the animals have been taken. For this, they say, is the reason of the necessity of their death and dissolution, and this the manner of their restoration to the solid and eternal earth whence they came...What, then, hinders God from ordaining the same of terrestrial bodies? And since, indeed, Plato acknowledges that God can prevent things that are born from dying, and things that are joined from being sundered, and things that are composed from being dissolved, and can ordain that the souls once allotted to their bodies should never abandon them, but enjoy along with them immortality and everlasting bliss, why may He not also effect that terrestrial bodies die not? Is God powerless to do everything that is special to the Christian's creed, but powerful to effect everything the Platonists desire?

Although Augustine is of course using this point to frame an argument in favor of the Resurrection of man, he is making an important speculative argument that there is no reason to assume that God couldn't hold any terrestrial body in a state of immortality, even an animal, if He so wanted to. We also have to keep in mind that when he says "animal", he is referring to man and beast together, anything that is animated. I also cite this passage because he is reminding us that there is nothing inherent in the nature of animals or lesser beings that makes their death a necessity. Therefore, it is not against reason to postulate that animlas before the Fall enjoyed an existence of earthly immortality.

I am not presenting a cogent argument in this post, but merely thinking out loud. I still maintain that there was no death before the first sin, but I am open to other ideas. I don't base my rejection of evolution on this fact alone, but I do think that postulating millions of years of animal death before the creation of an immortal man, who enjoys his immortality only briefly before falling from it, is not as satisfying as believing in a unified vision of a glorified and immortal creation, with man at its head, which fell in a domino-like effect with man: Adam rebelled against God, man's lower passions revolted against him, the natural world under man rebelled against his leadership and everything was subject to "futility" (Rom. 8:20). This, to me, makes better sense of St. Paul's statement in Romans 8:19-22:

For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now.

If creation is awaiting its freedom from slavery and corruption, we have to assume that it is therefore corrupted or fallen in someway, and if it is fallen or corrupted, I think we can safely assume that its corruption consists in its subjection to death. Is there ever any other implication for terms such as "corruption" in Scripture when discussing sin? (e.g., Psalm 16:10, 55:23). This is why when man is ultimately redeemed and the children of God enjoy the Resurrection, the world itself will experience a kind of resurrection to life along with us - if it awaits our glorification because within it is found its own glorification, doesn't it stand to reason that our fall is the reason for its subjection to death and futility?

My view of Creation

When I last posted on the topic of evolution, I was challenged by commentator Mr. Timothy Mullgan to provide what was my own personal opinion of how the origin of man occurred on this earth. He also said he expected my question to not be "fundamentalism," which he later equated with literalism.

Before I answer this, let me make a few points. First, understand that the question of how man came to be on this earth is separate from how long ago it happened. I am not going to deal at all with the age of the earth or how long man has been around, merely how I think he got here.

Second, I would strenuously deny that literalism equals fundamentalism. No Catholic can ultimately say that we shouldn't take biblical texts literally - our faith is founded upon a very literal interpretation of many texts ("Thou art Peter, and upon this rock..." "This is My body"..."Whosever sins you forgive are forgiven..." "Unless you are born again by water and the spirit..."). We absolutely cannot rule out simple literalism as a way to intepret Scripture. Especially when, as the CCC and longstanding tradition maintain, all interpretations of Scripture rest upon the literal (CCC 116).

When Catholics scoff at taking the Bible literally (and I'm not saying Mr. Mulligan does, but some people certainly do), what they are really saying is that there are some parts of the Bible that it is okay to take literally and other parts where it is not. I do not deny this is sometimes the case, but by and large I think the Bible is best taken literally in all its parts, if for no other reason than I would rather err in taking Genesis too literally than in not taking it literally enough. Some parts of Scripture certainly are allegorical - but where does Genesis fall? Is Genesis 1-3 to be taken literally or not?

Though this is not the proper topic of this post, it is a fitting aside. The Catechism, while admitting symbolic elements in the Genesis story, does not commit itself either way. It says that that Genesis 1-3 contain many "truths":

Among all the Scriptural texts about creation, the first three chapters of Genesis occupy a unique place. From a literary standpoint these texts may have had diverse sources. The inspired authors have placed them at the beginning of Scripture to express in their solemn language the truths of creation - its origin and its end in God, its order and goodness, the vocation of man, and finally the drama of sin and the hope of salvation. Read in the light of Christ, within the unity of Sacred Scripture and in the living Tradition of the Church, these texts remain the principal source for catechesis on the mysteries of the "beginning": creation, fall, and promise of salvation (CCC 289).

This passage is relatively non-committal- it leaves room for divergent views: so long as one does not deny the "truths" of creation, the CCC seems to leave it open as to how literal or figurative the narratives of those truths are. It does say plainly that Adam and Eve were real people:

The Church, interpreting the symbolism of biblical language in an authentic way, in the light of the New Testament and Tradition, teaches that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were constituted in an original "state of holiness and justice". This grace of original holiness was "to share in. . .divine life" (CCC 375)

The last authorative declaration on evolution from the Magisterium was Humani Generis (1950), in which the following positions were clarified with regards to evolution:

Evolution can be said to have occurred with the material from which the human body comes, but it can by no means be taught as certain and must be put forth as only a theory (36).

The human souls of Adam and Eve, and of all subsequent humans, are immediately created by God; the soul did not evolve (36).

All human beings take their origin from an original pair or two human beings (Adam & Eve) and that Adam and Eve were real, historic individuals (37).

Genesis 1-11, though containing metpahoric imagery, are nonetheless to be taken as historical accounts of true events (38).

As you can see, the Church is making allowance that, under certain conditions, one can accept evolution. People today treat it as if it is the other way around, that there is an allowance to believe in immediate creation if you are ignorant and want to cling to how most people have always understood Genesis. John Paul II wrote some letter to scientists during his pontificate in which he speculated that evolution was "more than a theory," but a letter written to a certain academy doesn't hold the same weight as an encyclical, of course, so as far as I know, Humani Generis is the last binding declaration the Church has made on the matter, and that document says it is acceptable to believe in evolution, but only under certain conditions and by way of concession, not admission of its truth. Indeed, the tone of Humani Generis is very sceptical of the theory of evolution as a whole.

So, how do I think it happened? Well, here is my belief. I think (of course) that the world was completed and finished prior to the arrival of man. When everything was ready, I imagine God forming a body out of the sand or mud, kind of like it would look if you were to bury yourself in sand at the beach. Then I think the sand-dirt form was sculpted until it looked perfect, just like a real man, kind of like a statue or perhaps the terra cotta men found in the tombs in China. Then, when it was perfectly formed, I think God breathed on it and the dust became flesh, life came into the nostrils of the man and he became alive. I think Adam was fully grown when he was created, and leapt up with a sudden realization of consciousness and self-awareness, to gaze about and behold the unfallen creation for the first time straight from the hand of God. What a sight it must have been! I believe he had an immediate awareness of God that was infused and an unhindered communication with Him. I think the whole process was very quick, perhaps but a few moments or several minutes (groundless speculation, of course).

So, I guess you could say that I literally believe he was formed out of the dirt and given life. Again, I don't know how long ago this happened, but this is what I think it looked like. This is just my imagination, of course - who really knows what it "looked" like.

So there you have it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time defending my imaginative vision of the creation, but I know that many saints and doctors have believed in an immediate creation of man. Some have speculated that each "day" of creation was 1,000 years, but I don't know of any who explicitly taught that man himself evolved over a long period of time.

An interesting point regarding the age of things. If Adam was created full grown (as most theologians who believe in an immediate creation would agree to), then suppose that five minutes after he was created, a doctor walked up to him and took a look at him. Suppose I asked the doctor, "How old does this man look to you?" The doctor would look at Adam's full stature, his developed limbs and (possibly) facial hair, and taken altogether might say, "Thirty years old." Indeed, he would appear that old, and perhaps he would have the height and stature of a thirty year old man. Medical tests of his biological systems might even confirm that he was an extraordinarily healthy thirty year old man. But he would be only five minutes old.

In the same way, the fact that light from a star supposedly takes billions of years to reach here or a certain strata of rock is supposed to be one hundred million years old doesn't concern me - if God created things complete, they would look complete. Light would be created in viae from the star, so that it doesn't necessarily need a billion years to get here. A star a billion light years away could have been created with its light already in course, so that it would have been visible to the first man the moment of his creation - mountains are created complete, so that if you were to ask how long it would take for the continents to push them up, well of course millions of years if they were created that way, unless they came forth from the hand of God immediately and completed to their smallest detail at the moment they were brought forth. This doesn't have to do with evolution, but the age of the earth, so I won't go much more into it. I just think it is interesting.

Back to theistic evolution. I think an even bigger problem for evolution is the concept of "sin before death." It is a truth of the faith that, as it says in Romans:

Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned (Rom. 5:12, Douay).

Now, let's say we adopt the theistic evolutionary point that the human body has evolved from preexisting material. That "material" presumably means other organic bodies that were born, grew up, and died. Evolution is all about slow change over time as things are born and die. But if evolution produced the first human body(which God then presumably 'ensouled'), doesn't it require that thousands upon thousands of previous sub-human beings were born and died to get to that stage? And if it was the sin of the first man that brought forth death, how could death have been present and active in the world before sin? And if death was already happening before the first man sinned, what was so different about man's punishment after the Fall? That he would die? If his body evolved from preexisting non-human bodies, then there would have already been death for thousands upon thousands of years, and Genesis and Romans clearly say that death came about originally through the sin of Adam.

To put it simply, it is a truth of the faith that death entered the world through sin. Theistic evolution asserts that death entered the world prior to sin. Therefore, theistic evolution is not compatible with the faith.

This is just my opinion. Disagree if you want to.