Catholics who believe that Evolution can be reconciled with Christian doctrines invariably assume that the modem world view of educated unbiased people is based on the incontrovertible data of scientific research. Correctly arguing that the Faith and true Facts cannot be in opposition, they must then modify those aspects of theology which are logically contradictory to the current scientific orthodoxy, starting with the Genesis account of Creation.

But the theory of evolution poses a real problem - as a scientific explanation of origins, it can only allow natural causes from the material world, not supernatural acts of creation. Modern science claims to explain the entire cosmos, even its ultimate origin, entirely from the operation of chance and natural selection working with the laws of nature. The attempt to synthesise supernatural with natural causation by the expression "creation by evolution" is mere sophistry, and confuses the issue. [1]

Any catechism or basic theology text will show that Divine Creation means the direct action of God as primary cause, willing something into being, causing it to exist, ex nihilo - out of nothing. This must be an instantaneous, timeless, immeasurable act - there can be no half way stage - as also in the case of a miracle. Nor can it be subjected to any physical experimentation, or described by chemistry or physics.

Creation by God cannot mean a change within nature, which works with already existing matter, or like a human act of creation, such as a potter with clay. Evolutionary change involves altering existing beings through secondary causes, not by God's direct intervention as 'Creator'. If it were possible, God could have created a world in which natural processes caused the slow development of different material beings, one from another, but this could not be the meaning of Creation in the theological sense always understood in Genesis and in the Christian Creeds. [2]

Evolution provides a story of our origins, a creation myth, supposedly based on science, without the need for a personal Creator. Hence, without a God, Evolutionism can reject moral and social principles based on the absolute authority of the commandments of the Supreme Being, and replace them with merely human standards. Claiming to explain our past and predict our future, Evolution has really become a religion in itself, and is widely perceived as opposed to the doctrines of Christianity. Many moral and social evils of modern times have thrived through its influence, and it has even been recognised as harming Science on which it depends for credibility.

Evolution damaging to Science

Anthropologist Dr. Loren Eiseley wrote:

"After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past." [3]

Or, as Prof. Louis Bounoure put it more succinctly:

"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless." [4]

Blunt, indeed, but rather mild and generous compared with the remarks of Dr. John Durant, who in 1980 told the British Association for the Advancement of Science that the secular myths of evolution have had - "a damaging effect on scientific research', leading to "distortion, to needless controversy, and to the gross misuse of science." [5] In other words, worse than useless!

In passing, it may be noted how much time, energy and money is being spent by scientists now in various quests, such as supposedly to recreate the conditions at the 'Big Bang'. They try to detect messages from outer space - surely fruitless for communication if they be found to come from places claimed to be millions of light years away!

They want to send multi-milliondollar spacecraft to the planet Mars to search for dead bacteria they believe might be hiding somewhere on its barren surface. How is this huge expenditure justified, when there are so many more pressing needs on Earth? One answer is that those in control of these projects are desperately seeking real evidence to convince us that evolution really happened, and that the Bible and the Catholic Church are wrong about God, Creation and Man.

Harmful effects on Society

After "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859, Social Darwinism quickly developed in England, and later in America, to justify the monopolistic practices of industrialists, their exploitation of labour, and "laissez-faire" capitalism in general. Having been used by Darwin to explain biological evolution, the ideas of "the struggle for existence", a term borrowed from Malthus's essay on Population, "natural selection," and "survival of the fittest" became slogans to apply to business, industrial and political life, and considered justified methods of progress.

John D. Rockefeller, oil magnate, said,

"This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God." [6]

Andrew Carnegie wrote of the "law of competition", by which - "Not only had I got rid of theology and the supernatural but I had found the truth of evolution." [7]

William Sumner, Professor of political and social science at Yale between 1872 and 1909, "influenced vast numbers of students with his doctrines that the principles of social evolution negated the traditional American ideology of equality and natural rights." [8] This ideology, of course, had been founded on Christianity.

Darwin's book was subtitled "The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," and with the backing of Thomas Huxley, evolutionism gave racism scientific plausibility and respectability. Negroes were viewed by scientists as a lower sub-species, irredeemably inferior to Caucasians. Indoctrination in these ideas led to institutionalised racism in Germany in the 1930's. It was also the cause of the rejection of belief in the origin of humanity being a single pair (monogenism) for belief in many separate origins (polygenism).

Evolutionism was not only applied to races but to social classes. Marx and Engels wrote of "The part played by Labour in the transition from ape to man," and their ideas of the Class Struggle were worked out through Marxist dialectical materialism. When Communist troops overran China in 1940, Bishop Cuthbert O'Gara reports that the propaganda corps rapidly followed, with a week of seminars indoctrinating everyone in Communism.

But initially to his amazement, the very first lesson was, not the economic principles of Marx, but man's descent from the ape. He realised later in jail that this was because the primary purpose of the Peking Government was to destroy all religious belief. "Darwinism negates God, the Human soul and the after life, and leaves a vacuum to be filled with Communism." [9]

Effects on Morality

If "natural selection" is a good and necessary force in the biological world, and artificial selection to improve domesticated plants and animals is morally acceptable, then if humans are merely evolved animals it is reasonable to apply selection to humans, in other words controlling who are allowed to survive and reproduce. Thus developed the science of Eugenics, the flavour of which can be experienced from a short quotation from Major Leonard Darwin's book in a chapter entitled: 'The Men we Want':

"We can at all events assert that there are many kinds of men that we do not want. These include the criminal, the insane, the imbecile, the feeble in mind, the diseased at birth, the deformed, the deaf, the blind, etc., etc. How to lessen their numbers will be considered in later chapters." [10]

These chilling conclusions follow from his premise that man is cousin to the lower animals, as seen from fossil remains and vestigial aquatic features in the embryo, "relics indicating the kind of life lived by our remote ancestors." He recognises that "the strongest opposition to this belief in the lowly ancestry of man is based on religious scruples," and argues that:

"Each one of us developed before birth into something shaped like an animal which could not be distinguished from a pig or a sheep when at the same early stage of development. After birth we were for a time far more helpless and far less intelligent than a monkey." [11]

The term "not fully human" comes to mind, although the evidences Leonard Darwin used in support of this idea are now scientifically disproven. Yet such views have been enthusiastically used by the birth controllers and population planners to foster the contraceptive mentality, abortion on demand, sterilization programmes and by extension the euthanasia movement. [12]

Evil fruits indeed - but who has recognised the need to attack the evolutionary tree from which they continue to grow?

While none would claim that the modern ubiquitous emphasis on evolution is the root of all evils, there is undoubtedly a significant connection with greatly increased crime rates and falling moral standards, as the proscriptive authority of the Bible and the Church have been increasingly denied. Practices such as adultery, divorce, pre-marital sex, homosexuality, prostitution and pornography, once widely considered wrong, publicly shameful and often illegal, are condoned or even accorded "rights", as free 'lifestyle choices' for the individual, and personal private matters.

In fact, they are sins against Divine commandments relating to family life and relationships, and society at large. Other commandments of God are also ignored, with widespread disrespect for others' rights, cheating, lying, slander, blasphemy, stealing, violence, drunkenness, even murder - if the individual can benefit and get away with it, why not?

Philosopher Will Durant wrote in 1980:

"By offering evolution in place of God as a cause of history, Darwin removed the theological basis of the moral code of Christendom. And the moral code that has no fear of God is very shaky. That's the condition we are in ... I don't think man is capable yet of managing social order and individual decency without fear of some supernatural being overlooking him and able to punish him." [13]

Effects on Christianity

Many Christians today try to accept the science of evolution but maintain belief in creation by God through interpreting Genesis allegorically. They may attempt to retain some notion of Original Sin, and reject the immoral implications previously described.

These "theistic evolutionists" may claim that atheistic scientists have failed to recognise the Supernatural Cause of the process, and even argue that Evolution really expresses the Christian doctrine much better than the simple traditional belief in Special Creation. This latter-day 'Gnosticism' seems more likely to provoke scorn than respect, as witness the following responses to it:

Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, interviewed in 1976, said:

"And why would God have to have chosen this extremely complex and difficult mechanism? When, I would say by definition, He was at liberty to choose other mechanisms, why would He have to start with simple molecules? Why not create man right away, as of course classical religions believed'? ... [natural] selection is the blindest, and most cruel way of evolving new species ... The struggle for life and elimination of the weakest is a horrible process, against which our whole modem ethics revolts ... I am surprised that a Christian would defend the idea that this is the process which God more or less set up in order to have evolution." [14]

Philosopher Bertrand Russell, in 1961, put it thus:

"Religion, in our day, has accommodated itself to the doctrine of evolution ... we are told that ...evolution is the unfolding of an idea which has been in the mind of God throughout. It appears that during those ages when animals were torturing each other with ferocious horns and agonizing stings, Omnipotence was quietly waiting for the ultimate emergence of man, with his still more widely diffused cruelty. Why the Creator should have preferred to reach his goal by a process, instead of going straight to it, these modem theologians do not tell us." [15]

Atheistic Scientists are not even prepared to allow a supernatural origin of the soul, as they have already denied its very existence. Francis Crick, Nobel laureate, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA in 1950, in a recent book argues that science has shown that human personality can be entirely understood through the behaviour of nerve cells and molecules. It is revealing that he introduces his book with a definition of the soul - source, our Catholic penny catechism!

He points out that this belief was plausible when people thought that the earth was the centre of the universe, and relatively young -less than 10,000 years old - but: "we now know its true age is about 4.6 billion years." So now the cards are on the table - replace geocentnsm with heliocentrism, and recent creation with billions of years, and we lose our souls. Modern science, he says, has made spectacular advances that have given us a very different picture of the world today. True, but he goes on to infer that, until Darwin's theory of natural selection,

"The argument from design appeared to be unanswerable ... yet this argument has collapsed completely. We know that all living things... are related .. and have changed over billions of years... We can watch the basic process of evolution happening today, both in the field and in our test tubes." [16]

Of course, he is referring here to micro-evolution within species, which no-one is questioning. Macro-evolution between basic kinds is what is claimed, and everyone agrees that this has never been observed to happen at all!

The materialistic neuroscientist sees no need for the soul concept. There is no personal life before conception or after death. Crick even suggests an evolutionary explanation for religious beliefs and a scientific explanation of free will, and expects that future research will explain other human mental activities as well. Science is all you need to explain the world - God has become redundant.

Australian Professor Hiram Caton wrote in 1987 these telling words:

"The long evolutionary past removes the Judeo-Christian God to an infinite distance and finally extinguishes Him in the belief that our species is the chance product of blind natural forces. We are on our own and consequently we may do what we will, free of ancient prohibitions and divinely sanctioned codes." [17]

And long, long ago, a serpent said to a woman: "No, you shall not die the death... Your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil." Gen. 3:4,5

Humanists are particularly forceful in rejecting a coalition between evolution and religion. The American "Humanist Manifesto II" (1973) begins:

"As non-theists, we begin with humans, not God, nature, not duty... But we can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us; we must save ourselves." Its second tenet includes the following: "Promises of immortal salvation or eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful ... Rather science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces. As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organisms transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body." [18]

We should be aware of the fact that over 260 people signed this Humanist Manifesto, all of them holding influential positions in education, government, industry or religion. These include key people in control of schools, publishing of books and programming the media, and their influence is world-wide.

We might wish to compromise with evolutionists, but they do not! The editor of American Atheist, 1988, wrote:

'When the theory of evolution was advanced, that was the date that the Judeo-Christian religion began the decline in which it now finds itself in the West. The two theories are point-blank in contradiction one to the other. Any scientists, any educators, any religious persons who state to you that there is no conflict simply want to hang on to both worlds because they have not been able to divest themselves of the infantile belief system which was programmed into them when they were children. They want a foot in each camp. Religion is their emotional security blanket. Science is facing a world of reality which - in the final analysis - they cannot face. They are too cowardly to see religion should be abandoned so they stand there one foot in and one foot out." [19]

G. Richard Bozarth, in an article "The Meaning of Evolution" wrote:

"Christianity has fought, still fights, and will fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus' earthly life was supposedly necessary ... If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing!

"What all this means is that Christianity cannot lose the Genesis account of creation like it could lose the doctrine of geocentrism and get along. The battle must be waged, for Christianity is fighting for its very life." [20]

Pope Pius XII warned us in 1950

He wrote of the "deadly fruit" of novel theological opinions arising from Evolution, in his encyclical Humani Generis, which begins:
"Disagreement and error among men on moral and religious matters have always been a cause of profound sorrow to all good men, but above all to the true and loyal sons of the Church, especially today, when we see the principles of Christian culture being attacked on all sides." [21]

He is not surprised at discord and error outside the Church, and points out that the human intellect is hampered in knowing divine truths - "by the activity of the senses and the imagination, and by evil passions arising from original sin. Hence men easily persuade themselves in such matters that what they do not wish to believe is false or at least doubtful." [22]

If systems of belief based on evolution are thus in error, they must be resisted - this obviously includes the pantheistic New Age Movement, heavily indebted to the writings of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, which atheist scientist Sir Peter Medawar honoured with the epithet "pious bunk".

Catholics who have ignored Papal warnings may personally believe they have no problem with Evolution, but the implications described above prove that this is not merely a matter of private opinion. Should not these evolutionists be concerned about the effects of the issue on others, and seriously consider the consistency of their position in relation to the Church's constant teachings?

While other issues such as abortion, crime, divorce, education, catechetics, the liturgy - may seem much more important to Catholics on a practical level than Evolution, are they aware of the wide-ranging and deep influences it has had on society, morality and religion? While many laudably attack the evil fruits, they so often fail to appreciate the significant extent to which the fruits are fed from the evolutionary tree, and hence the need to support the attack on its roots if long-term progress is to be made in fighting these evils.

References

1. "We cannot say: creation or evolution. The proper way of putting it is creation and evolution." Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning, Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1990, p. 65
2. See Fr. F J. Ripley, Creation, CTS, 1962. p. 17.
3. "The Secret of Life", in The Immense Journey, Random House, New York, 1957 p. 199.
4. The Advocate, 8 March 1984, p. 17.
5. "How evolution became a scientific myth", New Scientist, 11 Sept. 1980, p.765.
6. Quoted in The Long War Against God, Dr. Henry Morris, Baker, 1989, p.56; an invaluable resource on the subject of this article.
7. ibid.
8. ibid. p.57
9. "Darwinism, Secularism, Communism", Daylight No 16, Summer 1995, p. 12, 13.
10. "What is Eugenics?", Watts & Co., 1928, p. 25.
11. ibid. p.7.
12. "How I agree that the Darwin myth is at the root of all our problems" - Mrs Phyllis Bowman, S.P.U.C., in Man and the Evolution Myth, Fr. Peter Lessiter. Also see 'Is Darwin "Gospel" Truth?', Theresa Croshaw, Daylight No.5, Sept. 1992, reprinted from Human Concern, No 7, Spring 1981.
13. Dr. John Durant, quoted in 'How evolution became a scientific myth', New Scientist (11 Sept. 1980, p.'765).
14. Jacques Monod, "The Secret of Life," Interview with Laurie John, Australian Broadcasting Co. (June 10, 1976) - quoted by Morris, op.cit.
15. Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 73, quoted by Morris, op.cit.
16. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis - the scientific search for the soul, 1995.
17. Hiram Caton (Professor of Politics and History, Griffith University, Nathan, Qld 4111, Australia) "The Biology Battlefield", Quadrant, May 1987. Quoted in The Atheism of Evolution (Newman Graduate Education,) June, 1996.
18. American Humanist Association, "Humanist Manifesto II," The Humanist 33 (Sept./Oct. 1973).
19. "Genesis and Evolution", answer by Editor in American Atheist 30 (Jan. 1988).
20. G. Richard Bozarth, "The Meaning of Evolution," American Atheist 20 (Feb 1978)
21.Humani Generis para. 1.
22. ibid. 2.

Theotokos Catholic Books - Creation/Evolution Section - www.theotokos.org.uk