In the Pacific Voice, 10/29/2000
It’s a question that has caused great consternation in some quarters of the believing world for almost two centuries.
And one man’s answer has led to the destruction of an inestimable number of human beings.
The question was this: “If God made the world in seven days, when did He make the dinosaurs?”
The question was, once again, the classic conflict between the literal account of Genesis and the findings of modern science.
I think most Catholics understand that we do not believe in a literal “seven days”. After all, the sun wasn’t even created until the third “day”, so how could there be a “day” in our understanding of the word, if there was no sun to rise or set the first two days?
What’s important for us is not how God created the universe, or how long He took doing it, but that He DID it...by whatever means He chose.
Unfortunately, our license to overlook the literal interpretation of Genesis has opened the door of our Catholic schools and textbooks for Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection.
I say unfortunate, because though these theories technically remain only theories, they have entrenched themselves in our curriculums as plausible if not fact and we find ourselves unwittingly teaching our children a lie. A lie, that as I said, has led and continues to lead to the destruction of an inestimable number of human beings.
I will explain the destruction thing in a minute. But first, before the academicians unload their professional wrath upon this layman, allow me to recommend that they and all teachers and parents read the book Did Darwin Get It Right-Catholics and the Theory of Evolution by George Sim Johnston.
Mr. Johnston simply brings out what scientists have known all along: that there is simply no empirical evidence for Darwin’s theories either in the fossil record or in laboratory experiments.
Both give evidence to certain mutations within a species, but after more than 160 years of paleontological research since the “Voyage of the Beagle” there is not a single fossil record, as Johnston says, that can convincingly document a single transition of one species to another.
Fish stubbornly remain fish. Or as Chesterton said, “Darwinists seem to know everything about missing links except for the fact that they are missing.”
I would love to go into all the scientific stuff that the book puts forth, but space won’t allow and I want to get to my point.
What’s rarely discussed about Darwin was that he was first a philosophical materialist, an agnostic with an agenda to rid the universe of a Creator, and then a scientist. I will refer my critic to the above-mentioned book for supporting arguments of this.
One can trace Darwin’s hostility towards religion back through two generations of his family tree. My leap backward to Henry VIII and forwards to RU-486 is purely imaginary. But it looks something like this.
As you know Henry canned his marriage in an act of pure defiant disobedience and “un-poped” himself. In effect, this paved the way for every member of his church to do the same. And, by the time Charles Darwin was born a few centuries later, a large segment of the English population had “un-poped” themselves right out of any faith at all.
Darwin’s theory of evolution as documented in his Origin of Species was the perfect scientific antithesis to Genesis, and it was un-scientifically pounced on and promulgated by atheists, agnostics, materialists, and other scientists with an anti-religious agenda.
Within the Origin of Species are the theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest, neither of which is there the least empirical evidence for, but nevertheless became the mantras of irreligious ideologues from which were spawned such perverted thinkers as Marx, Hitler, and Stalin.
Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest were natural rationales for Hitler’s genocidal attack on the Jews and Stalin’s reign of extermination (neither of which, by the way, come close to the number of murdered pre-born’s in this country alone as sanctioned by our own Supreme Court).
I again make another leap forward to RU-486. The theory of natural selection seems to have “evolved” into just plain “selection." Abortion, by whatever means, allows us to select who will live and who will die and survival of the fittest now reads survival of what is personally convenient and economically feasible.
Is it any wonder that the same company (IG Farben) which manufactured the poison gas Zyklon B used in the Nazi concentration camps invented RU-486
I’m not going to argue against RU-486 for I would be preaching to the choir, at least in this publication, but I am arguing for an intellectually honest review of the inclusion of the Darwin’s theory of evolution in our Catholic curriculums as a plausible explanation for the created world.
Could it be that our unquestioning embrace of Darwinism and natural selection has actually provided the rational platform for the increasing (now 33%) number of Catholics who believe a woman should be allowed to have an abortion for any reason?
If Mr. Johnston is correct, and I believe he is, then there is simply no scientific evidence for Darwinism, and it should be taught as such.
However, Mr. Johnston points out that there is plenty of scientific evidence for what he calls the “abrupt introduction of species”, a theory that fits perfectly with Genesis.
Will get to that another time. Meanwhile, it’s just nice to know that some distant uncle wasn’t a monkey.
