Evolution compatible with the Bible?

An Enquiry

by Jonathan Ekene Ifeanyi

Before we say any word on this topic, it is important to first understand what today’s Western academic community officially believes and teaches—with regards to the story of Creation as recorded in the Bible, and Evolution as taught by today’s science—,that is,  what is officially believed and taught as “Truth” by the academic community in today’s Western world. Without a waste of time, I take you to the Encyclopaedia Britannica—a “reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner”, the oldest and longest continually published English-language general print encyclopaedia, (print version: 1768–2012, retired in 2012 in favour of its electronic versions). In a topic treating the “Creation Myth” the Encyclopaedia Britannica says:

“The myth of creation is the symbolic narrative of the beginning of the world as understood by a particular community. The later doctrines of creation are interpretations of this myth in light of the subsequent history and needs of the community. Thus, for example, all theology and speculation concerning creation in the Christian community are based on the myth of creation in the biblical book of Genesis and of the new creation in Jesus Christ. Doctrines of creation are based on the myth of creation, which expresses and embodies all of the fertile possibilities for thinking about this subject within a particular religious community.”[1]

“Myth of Creation”? All “speculation” in the Christian community are based on the “myth of creation” as recorded in Genesis? And what is a myth? The same Encyclopaedia says a myth is “a symbolic narrative, usually of unknown origin and at least partly traditional, that ostensibly relates actual events and that is especially associated with religious belief. It is distinguished from symbolic behaviour (cult, ritual) and symbolic places or objects (temples, icons). Myths are specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience. The term mythology denotes both the study of myth and the body of myths belonging to a particular religious tradition.”[2]

It goes further:

“As with all religious symbolism, there is no attempt to justify mythic narratives or even to render them plausible. Every myth presents itself as an authoritative, factual account, no matter how much the narrated events are at variance with natural law or ordinary experience. By extension from this primary religious meaning, the word myth may also be used more loosely to refer to an ideological belief when that belief is the object of a quasi-religious faith; an example would be the Marxist eschatological myth of the withering away of the state.

“While the outline of myths from a past period or from a society other than one's own can usually be seen quite clearly, to recognize the myths that are dominant in one's own time and society is always difficult. This is hardly surprising, because a myth has its authority not by proving itself but by presenting itself. In this sense the authority of a myth indeed “goes without saying,” and the myth can be outlined in detail only when its authority is no longer unquestioned but has been rejected or overcome in some manner by another, more comprehensive myth.

It continues: “The word myth derives from the Greek mythos, which has a range of meanings from “word,” through “saying” and “story,” to “fiction”; the unquestioned validity of mythos can be contrasted with logos, the word whose validity or truth can be argued and demonstrated. Because myths narrate fantastic events with no attempt at proof, it is sometimes assumed that they are simply stories with no factual basis, and the word has become a synonym for falsehood or, at best, misconception. In the study of religion, however, it is important to distinguish between myths and stories that are merely untrue.”[3] (All emphases are mine.)

         BUY HERE.

Mythology, of course, is a part of my studies as a classicist, so I have merely quoted the above for the sake of readers who don’t know what it means, and in case you still haven’t gotten that, the Encyclopaedia is saying that a mythical narrative is an imaginary or unverifiable or unfounded or false account, and that what is written in the Bible is just a mythical narrative, meaning that what is written in the Bible is just an imaginary or false account.

Typical examples of mythical narratives are the stories told in Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, where we see gods and goddesses like Greek Zeus (Latin Jupiter), Pluto (Dis), Pallas Athene (Minerva), Artemis (Diana), Hera (Juno) and others playing wonderful roles. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, in effect, categorises the biblical stories with these ancient mythical stories.

It is interesting to note that this same Encyclopaedia, in other places, says many good things about Christianity. That’s just the “method” modern intellectuals use to destroy the Christian Faith — say good things about it when the matter isn’t a serious one, but deny it altogether when it is.

Human Evolution

Human evolution is the process by which human beings are believed to have developed on Earth from now-extinct primates. We humans, according to zoologists, are Homo sapiens, a culture-bearing, upright-walking species that lives on the ground and first evolved in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. We are now the only living members of what many zoologists refer to as the human tribe, Hominini, but there is abundant fossil “evidence” to indicate that we were preceded for millions of years by other hominins, such as Australopithecus, and that our species also lived for a time contemporaneously with at least one other member of our genus, Homo neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals). In addition, we and our predecessors have always shared the Earth with other apelike primates, from the modern-day gorilla to the long-extinct Dryopithecus. That we and the extinct hominins are somehow related and that we and the apes, both living and extinct, are also somehow related is accepted by anthropologists and biologists. Yet the exact nature of our evolutionary “relationships” has been the subject of debate and investigation since British naturalist Charles Darwin published his monumental books On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).

We have already quoted the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the so-called “creation myth.” Now, on evolution, the same Encyclopaedia says:

“...theory in biology postulating that the various types of plants, animals, and other living things on Earth have their origin in other pre-existing types and that the distinguishable differences are due to modifications in successive generations. The theory of evolution is one of the fundamental keystones of modern biological theory.

“The diversity of the living world is staggering. More than 2 million existing species of organisms have been named and described; many more remain to be discovered—from 10 million to 30 million, according to some estimates. What is impressive is not just the numbers but also the incredible heterogeneity in size, shape, and way of life—from lowly bacteria, measuring less than a thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, to stately sequoias, rising 100 metres (300 feet) above the ground and weighing several thousand tons; from bacteria living in hot springs at temperatures near the boiling point of water to fungi and algae thriving on the ice masses of Antarctica and in saline pools at −23 °C (−9 °F); and from giant tube worms discovered living near hydrothermal vents on the dark ocean floor to spiders and larkspur plants existing on the slopes of Mount Everest more than 6,000 metres (19,700 feet) above sea level.

“The virtually infinite variations on life are the fruit of the evolutionary process. All living creatures are related by descent from common ancestors. Humans and other mammals descend from shrewlike creatures that lived more than 150 million years ago; mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes share as ancestors aquatic worms that lived 600 million years ago; and all plants and animals derive from bacteria-like microorganisms that originated more than 3 billion years ago. Biological evolution is a process of descent with modification. Lineages of organisms change through generations; diversity arises because the lineages that descend from common ancestors diverge through time.

“The 19th-century English naturalist Charles Darwin argued that organisms come about by evolution, and he provided a scientific explanation, essentially correct but incomplete, of how evolution occurs and why it is that organisms have features — such as wings, eyes, and kidneys — clearly structured to serve specific functions. Natural selection was the fundamental concept in his explanation. Natural selection occurs because individuals having more-useful traits, such as more-acute vision or swifter legs, survive better and produce more progeny than individuals with less-favourable traits. Genetics, a science born in the 20th century, reveals in detail how natural selection works and led to the development of the modern theory of evolution. Beginning in the 1960s, a related scientific discipline, molecular biology, enormously advanced knowledge of biological evolution and made it possible to investigate detailed problems that had seemed completely out of reach only a short time previously—for example, how similar the genes of humans and chimpanzees might be (they differ in about 1–2 percent of the units that make up the genes).”[4]

And the evidence for all this? It goes on:

“Darwin and other 19th-century biologists found compelling evidence for biological evolution in the comparative study of living organisms, in their geographic distribution, and in the fossil remains of extinct organisms. Since Darwin's time, the evidence from these sources has become considerably stronger and more comprehensive, while biological disciplines that emerged more recently—genetics, biochemistry, physiology, ecology, animal behaviour (ethology), and especially molecular biology—have supplied powerful additional evidence and detailed confirmation. The amount of information about evolutionary history stored in the DNA and proteins of living things is virtually unlimited; scientists can reconstruct any detail of the evolutionary history of life by investing sufficient time and laboratory resources.

“Evolutionists no longer are concerned with obtaining evidence to support the fact of evolution but rather are concerned with what sorts of knowledge can be obtained from different sources of evidence.”[5]

And so on! In other words the issue of “evidence” for evolution has been settled, says the Encyclopaedia—we are rather now concerned “with what sorts of knowledge can be obtained from different sources of evidence.” Notice how the Encyclopaedia explains carefully that mythical narratives—including the account of creation as recorded in the Bible—“are at variance with natural law or ordinary human experience” but teaches dogmatically that evolution, a doctrine suggesting that it is possible human beings evolved from animals, is not at variance with natural law or ordinary human experience! And how, also, it says that “Myths are specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified” but pretends as if the time humans actually evolved (some say it was millions of years ago, others billions of years ago) is specific! Ladies and Gentlemen, that is modern Western society and its Western education in action!

It is important to note that the people writing and saying all this are not just atheists or agnostics or secularists or members of other religions, the majority of them are in fact “good” Christians.

And how does the Catholic Church respond to Evolution?

I need not say much on this. Evolution is a modern phenomenon which became prominent in the twentieth century. In fact, the first pope to talk about it was Pope Pius XII (1949-1958), in his 1950 encyclical, Humani Generis. In Humani Generis Evolution is mentioned in two places, paragraphs 5 and 36. In paragraph 5 the pope writes:

“If anyone examines the state of affairs outside the Christian fold, he will easily discover the principal trends that not a few learned men are following. Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution, which has not been fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences, explains the origin of all things, and audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic opinion that the world is in continual evolution. Communists gladly subscribe to this opinion so that, when the souls of men have been deprived of every idea of a personal God, they may the more efficaciously defend and propagate their dialectical materialism.”[6]

In paragraph 36 he writes:

“For this reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions on the part of men experienced in both fields take place with regard to the doctrine of Evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic Faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favourable and those unfavourable to Evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgement of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith. Some, however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of Divine Revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.”[7] 

A careless reading of the above quote can lead one to an easy conclusion that Pope Pius XII has taught an excellent Catholic doctrine—“for the Catholic Faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God”! But a careful observation shows the pope in this same statement vomited one of the greatest poisons in human history! In June (2017), I republished Doug Linder’s 2004 article, The Vatican's View of Evolution: The Story of Two Popes. In it, Doug rightly comments on this encyclical:

“The document makes plain the pope’s fervent hope that evolution will prove to be a passing scientific fad, and it attacks those persons who “imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution …explains the origin of all things.”  Nonetheless, Pius XII states that nothing in Catholic doctrine is contradicted by a theory that suggests one specie might evolve into another — even if that specie is man.  The Pope declared:

“The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.

“In other words, the Pope could live with evolution, so long as the process of “ensouling” humans was left to God...”

In case you still haven’t gotten the point, Pope Pius XII is here saying it could be possible that human body actually evolved from animals and then—wonder of all wonders—at a certain period in history—perhaps two million years after that evolution—was “ensouled” by God!  This statement, coming from a Roman Pontiff, is just horrible. Where did he get such a teaching? It certainly wasn’t from Scripture because there is nothing like that in Sacred Scripture. For example, the Bible describes in easily understood language how God created woman by transforming a rib of the first man, Adam, into Eve, the first woman (Genesis 2:21, 22). And in case you don’t know what a rib is, it is one of the curved bones round the chest. So Adam’s rib is a part of his flesh, a part of his body and not a part of his soul! Here then, the Bible makes it very clear that Eve’s body—and not her soul as implied by Pope Pius XII!—originated from Adam’s body. In other words, Eve’s body did not evolve from animal or other species. So where did the pope get this “ensoulment” theory?

Pius XII

Doug Linder goes on:

“In 1951, interestingly, Pius XII (who so grudgingly acknowledged the possibility of evolution) celebrated news from the world of science that the universe might have been created in a Big Bang.  (The term, first employed by astronomer Fred Hoyle was meant to be derisive, but it stuck.)  In a speech before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences he offered an enthusiastic endorsement of the theory: "…it would seem that present-day science, with one sweep back across the centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to the august instant of the primordial Fiat Lux [Let there be Light], when along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, and the elements split and churned and formed into millions of galaxies."  (ME, 254-55)

  

“But the Pope didn’t stop there.  He went on to express the surprising conclusion that the Big Bang proved the existence of God:

“Thus, with that concreteness which is characteristic of physical proofs, [science] has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator.  Hence, creation took place.  We say: therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!”

Doug Linder adds, interestingly: “The man who laid the groundwork for the Big Bang theory, astronomer Edwin Hubble, received a letter from a friend asking whether the Pope’s announcement might qualify him for “sainthood.”  The friend enthused that until he read the statement in the morning’s paper, “I had not dreamed that the Pope would have to fall back on you for proof of the existence of God.”  (ME, 255).”

The point to note here is that Pope Pius XII, despite his seemingly “attack” on evolution, actually believed in it just like other innumerable Western men and women do currently. Hence, he it was who laid the foundation for the future Vatican II popes—in particular John Paul II—to consecrated the doctrine of Evolution.

On John Paul II’s endorsement of the doctrine, Doug Linder writes:

“When the pope came to the subject of the scientific merits of evolution, it soon became clear how much things had changed in the nearly fifty years since the Vatican last addressed the issue.  John Paul said:

“Today, almost half a century after publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis.  It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge.  The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favour of the theory.” (Emphasis mine.)

Doug  goes on:

“Evolution, a doctrine that Pius XII only acknowledged as an unfortunate possibility, John Paul accepts forty-six years later “as an effectively proven fact.”  (ROA, 82)

“Pope John Paul’s words on evolution received major play in international news stories.  Evolution proponents such as Stephen Jay Gould enthusiastically welcomed what he saw as the Pope’s endorsement of evolution.  Gould was reminded of a passage in Proverbs (25:25): “As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.”  (ROA, 820)  Creationists, however, expressed dismay at the pontiff’s words and suggested that the initial news reports might have been based on a faulty translation. (John Paul gave the speech in French.)  Perhaps, some creationists argued, the pope really said, “the theory evolution is more than one hypothesis,” not “the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis.”  If that were so, the Pope might have been suggesting that there are multiple theories of evolution, and all of them might be wrong.

“The “faulty translation” theory, however, suffered at least two problems.  Most obviously, the theory collapsed when the Catholic News Service of the Vatican confirmed that the Pope did indeed mean “more than a hypothesis,” not “more than one hypothesis.”  The other problem stemmed from a reading of the passage in more complete context.  In the speech, the Pope makes clear in his speech that he understood the difference between evolution (the highly probable fact) and the mechanism for evolution, a matter of hot dispute among scientists.  John Paul said, “And, to tell the truth, rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution.”  He recognized that there were “different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution” and different “philosophies” upon which the theory of evolution is based.  The philosophy out of bounds to Catholics, the pope indicated, is one which is “materialist” and which denies the possibility that man “was created in the image and likeness of God.”  Human dignity, the pope suggested, cannot be reconciled with such a “reductionist” philosophy.  Thus, as with Pius XII, the critical teaching of the Church is that God infuses souls into man—regardless of what process he might have used to create our physical bodies.  Science, the Pope insisted, can never identify for us “the moment of the transition into the spiritual”—that is a matter exclusively with the magisterium of religion.

“Most scientists would be content to let Pius and John Paul have their “ensoulment” theory and walk away happy.  Not Richard Dawkins, however.  In an essay on the Pope’s evolution message called “You Can’t Have it Both Ways” the controversy-loving biologist accused Pope John Paul of “casuistical double-talk” and “obscurantism.”  (SAR, 209)  Dawkins took issue with the Pope’s declaring off-limits theories suggesting that the human mind is an evolutionary product. In his address the Pope said: "[I]f the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God…Consequently, theories of evolution which…consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man."

“In his essay, Dawkins paraphrased the Pope’s statement:  “In plain language, there came a moment in the evolution of hominids when God intervened and injected a human soul into a previously animal lineage.”  Dawkins expresses mock curiosity as to when God jumped into the evolution picture: “When?  A million years ago?  Two million years ago?  Between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens?  Between ‘archaic’ Homo sapiens and H. sapiens?”  Clearly, Dawkins finds the divine intervention implausible.  He suggests that the ensoulment theory becomes a necessary part of Catholic theology in order to sustain the important distinction between species in Catholic morality.  It is fine for a Catholic to eat meat, Dawkins notes, but “abortion and euthanasia are murder because human life is involved.”

“Dawkins contends that evolution tells us that there is no “great gulf between Homo sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom.”  The Pope’s insistence to the contrary is, in the biologist’s opinion, “an antievolutionary intrusion into the domain of science.”

John Paul II

“Dawkins makes no secret of his disdain for the distinction so critical to the Pope John Paul’s 1996 speech on evolution:

“I suppose it is gratifying to have the pope as an ally in the struggle against fundamentalist creationism.  It is certainly amusing to see the rug pulled out from under the feet of Catholic creationists such as Michael Behe.  Even so, given a choice between honest-to-goodness fundamentalism on the one hand, and the obscurantist, disingenuous doublethink of the Roman Catholic Church on the other, I know which I prefer.  (SAR, 211)”.

As for Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI), we see his endorsement of Evolution is his scandalous 1981 book In The Beginning—an evil work which he hasn’t repudiated even till date. In the book, Joseph Ratzinger writes:

“...for science has long since disposed of the concepts (Genesis: l-49) that we have just now heard...we hear of the Big Bang, which happened billions of years ago....it was rather in complex ways and over vast periods of time that earth and the universe were constructed. We cannot say: creation or evolution. The proper way of putting it is: creation and evolution...the progress of thought in the last two decades helps us to grasp anew the inner unity of creation and evolution and of faith and reason.”[8]

Ratzinger (Benedict XVI)

 Again, In the Beginning:

“All of this is well and good, one might say, but is it not ultimately disproved by our scientific knowledge of how the human being evolved from the animal kingdom? Now, more reflective spirits have long been aware that there is no either-or here. We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—realities.’”[9]

Then came the anti-pope, Jorge Bergoglio—Francis! As I wrote in my article, Nigerian Clergy Following a Manifestly Heretical anti-pope, “Francis”!:

“Francis also doesn’t believe in the Bible—but he fanatically believes in evolution. On October 27, 2014, “Pope” Francis said, in a speech to members of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, that Evolution and the Big Bang are real. (See: Pope Francis declares Evolution and the Big Bang theory are real and God is not a magician with a magic wand ).”

Francis

“…Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve,” he said. But on the Bible: On June 29, 2014, when asked about misogyny and women in the Church, Francis—referring to the biblical account of God’s creation of woman, Gen. 2: 21-23, said:“The fact is that woman was taken from a rib … (then he laughed strongly). I’m kidding, that’s a joke. I agree that the question of women must be explored more deeply, otherwise one cannot understand the Church herself.” (ILMESSAGGERO). Similarly, on June 2, 2013, “Pope” Francis, speaking about Jesus multiplying the bread and fish, said: “Here’s the miracle, that it is more a sharing than a multiplying”!

As I cautioned in that article, “Carefully note that even when Francis talks about “Jesus”, it is NOT the Jesus of Scripture we all know but a radically different one. His “Jesus” is not God but man. For example on October 28, 2014, “Pope” Francis said: “Jesus prays to the Father for us”. (NEWS.VA). This statement is subtly blasphemous. Jesus is God, so He doesn’t pray for anybody, rather we humans pray to Him, and the saints and the Virgin Mary pray to the Father, to Jesus, and to the Holy Spirit for us.”

I remember, years ago while I was in secondary school, (in SS1 to be precise), the reaction of students and even the teacher himself the first time the doctrine of evolution was introduced to us by our biology teacher. Everybody, including the teacher himself, laughed. Of course, we all laughed because we had not the slightest doubt that it was false. But that is not the case with many of today’s Westerners. Now putting aside the teachings of Vatican II popes regarding Evolution, I mean Vatican II popes believed by some to be “false popes”, the above statements from Pope Pius XII—believed to be “a true pope”—Pius XII who wasn’t even supporting but “opposing” Evolution—serve to demonstrate how powerful the influence of Evolution is currently on Western minds—I mean, both the good and the bad.

Compatible with the Bible?

In the very chapter one, verse one, of the Book of Genesis, we read: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.” God Himself put this great truth in the very first verse of the Bible. He wanted us to know, right from verse 1 of the Bible, that He had created. The Bible further makes it clear that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were each personally involved in creation—“let us...” (Gen. 1:26).

This record of creation found in the Bible cannot be reconciled with the theory of evolution, which holds that the world and its living species have evolved over millions or billions of years ago; in other words, that neither is a static creation of God, but are both instead constantly changing. 

As for the time frame in which that creation took place, no problem. The six days of Creation Week as recorded in Genesis must be of the same length as our days—despite the fact that the Hebrew word yom, translated “day,” can have a variety of meanings, including an indefinite period of time, which has led some to suggest that these six days might then be equated with the billions of years claimed by geologists.

But whenever a word in Scripture can have a variety of meanings, we must go to the context to determine what it does mean and not be content with what it might mean. When we do, we discover that the first time yom is used, it is defined as a solar day—Genesis 1:3—and then a total day/night cycle (1:3).

Again, yom is modified by evening and morning, which in Hebrew can only mean a literal day. It is also modified by an ordinal number (first, second, etc.), a construction limited in Hebrew to that of a literal day. Elsewhere the six days of creation are equated with the six days of our work week (Exodus 20:11), a formula incorporated in the fourth of the Ten Commandments regarding the Sabbath rest. We should mention that the use of a numeral to modify “days,” in this case “6,” is again reserved for a literal day in Hebrew, as is the use of the plural word “days.”

As Dr John Morris rightly points out (in his article, How Old Is The Earth According To The Bible?):

 “Suffice it to say that no one could conclude that Scripture specifically places Creation any longer ago than a few thousand years, and to my knowledge no one does. Many do hold to an older position, but not for Scriptural reasons. They are convinced by radioisotope dating, perhaps, or maybe the molecular clock of mutation rates, or some other line of thinking, but not from Scripture.

“Scripture teaches a young earth, and the time has come for Christians to stop twisting Scripture to fit the evolutionary and uniformitarian speculations of some scientists about the unobserved past. We suggest it's time for such Christians to stop calling themselves "Bible-believing" Christians and start using some such name as "world-believing" Christians.”

The language in Genesis is that used to set forth simple historical truths. It is neither allegorical nor poetical. The theistic evolutionist, biblically, has placed himself in an untenable position. How does one decide which portions of the Bible should be taken literally and which should be brushed aside as devoid of historical and scientific significance? The Virgin birth of Jesus Christ, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, the changing of water into wine were all miraculous events. None can be explained biologically. All involved instantaneous acts of divine creation. Did these events literally take place as described, or, as some liberal theologians assert, may we assume rather that these passages of Scripture were given only to establish certain spiritual truths? Some even question whether Christ literally rose from the dead! Are individual Christians at liberty to pick and choose which portions of Scripture describe real events and to which portions may be ascribed only spiritual significance?

We have already given an example of the Bible describing in easily understood language how God created woman by transforming a rib of the first man, Adam, into Eve, the first woman (Genesis 2:21, 22). This record of the creation of woman is fully confirmed in the New Testament: ‘For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man’ (1 Corinthians 11:8).

Many other direct contradictions between the biblical record of creation and the theory of evolution can be cited. Genesis says that things were made to reproduce after their kind. This rules out the transformations required by evolutionists. Again, Genesis 1:27 emphasises by repetition that man was created in the image of God. Surely this rules out evolution from a primate? Perhaps most significant for our present discussion, evolution of man from primate does not include a Fall from an initially perfect man, and if there was no Fall, then there would be no need of a Saviour from sin!

No evolutionist—theistic or atheistic—believes all I’ve just quoted from the Bible. All evolutionists believe that human beings evolved from ape-like beasts which had evolved from ‘lower’ forms of life millions or billions of years ago.

It is clear then, that theistic evolutionists, or “Christians” who are evolutionists, either haven’t read the Bible — at all—or they have read it but don’t believe what they read. The problem is that this people, having been brought up through Western State schools and secular universities where evolution is generally taught as an established fact, have been led to believe that evolution is true. They don’t believe that the record of creation in Genesis should be taken literally. Therefore they believe it is possible to accept evolution as God’s “method of creation.” While later studies of both the Bible and the facts of science have convinced some that the theory of evolution is just untenable, there are others who have also undertaken such studies but because of their love of evolution are unwilling to believe the Bible.

What theistic evolutionists must note is that the founders of evolution and contemporary secular scientists who succeeded them do not really believe in God—hence, their regarding of biblical narratives quoted above as myths.

Pre-history?

In the quotes above from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, we see the evolutionists talking about “millions of years ago.” Again, the Encyclopaedia says:

“The earliest creatures that can be identified as ancestors of modern humans are classified as australopithecines (literally “southern apes”). The first specimen of these hominins to be found (in 1924) was the skull of a child from a quarry site at Taung in what is now the North-West province. Subsequently more australopithecine fossils were discovered in limestone caves farther northeast at  Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai (collectively designated a World Heritage site in 1999), where they had originally been deposited by predators and scavengers.”[10]

The first specimen of these hominins was found “in 1924”! Interesting?

Well, evolutionary “years,”—I mean their “millions” or even “billions” of years—it should be noted, are not based on recorded history but on “prehistory”. The main source for “prehistory” is archaeology. The primary researchers into “human” prehistory are archaeologists and physical anthropologists who use excavation, geologic and geographic surveys, and other scientific analysis to “reveal” and “interpret” the nature and behaviour of pre-literate and non-literate “peoples”.

By definition, however, there are no written records from “human” prehistory, so dating of prehistoric materials is not really based on historical facts. Data about prehistory is provided by a wide variety of natural and social sciences—some of them newly conceived—such as palaeontology (a science dealing with the life of past geological periods as known from fossil remains), biology (a science dealing with living organisms and vital processes), archaeology (the scientific study of material remains, as fossil relics, artifacts, and monuments, of past human life and activities), palynology (a science dealing with pollen and spores), geology (a science dealing with the history of the earth and its life especially as recorded in rocks), archaeoastronomy (the study of the astronomy of ancient cultures), comparative linguistics (a comparative study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language), anthropology (the study of human beings and their ancestors through time and space and in relation to physical character, environmental and social relations, and culture), molecular genetics (a branch of genetics dealing with the structure and activity of genetic material at the molecular level) and many others. “Prehistory” differs from recorded history not only in terms of its chronology but in the way it deals with the activities of archaeological cultures rather than named nations or individuals. Restricted to material processes, remains and artifacts rather than written records, prehistory is anonymous. Because of this, reference terms that “prehistorians” use, such as the so-called Neanderthal or Iron Age, are modern labels with definitions—which are always subject to debate.

Palaeontologists claim to have recovered and studied the fossil remains of many thousands of organisms that “lived in the past.” This fossil record, according to them, shows that many kinds of extinct organisms were very different in form from any now living. It also shows successions of organisms through time, manifesting their transition from one form to another.

When an organism dies, they assert, it is usually destroyed by other forms of life and by weathering processes. On rare occasions some body parts—particularly hard ones such as shells, teeth, or bones—are preserved by being buried in mud or protected in some other way from predators and weather. Eventually, they may become petrified and preserved indefinitely with the rocks in which they are embedded. Methods such as radioisotope or radiometric or radioactive dating—measuring the amounts of natural radioactive atoms that remain in certain minerals to determine the elapsed time since they were constituted—are what evolutionists used to formulate the so-called “millions” or “billions” of years. This dating, according to them, makes it possible to estimate the time period when the rocks, and the fossils associated with them, were formed.

Radiometric dating, they assert, indicates that the Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. The earliest fossils resemble microorganisms such as bacteria and cyanobacteria; the oldest of these fossils appear in rocks 3.5 billion years old. The oldest known animal fossils, about 700 million years old, come from the so-called Ediacara fauna, small wormlike creatures with soft bodies. Numerous fossils belonging to many living phyla and exhibiting mineralized skeletons appear in rocks about 540 million years old. These organisms are different from organisms living now and from those living at intervening times. Some are so radically different that paleontologists have created new phyla in order to classify them. The first vertebrates, animals with backbones, appeared about 400 million years ago; the first mammals, less than 200 million years ago. In short, the history of life recorded by fossils presents “compelling evidence” of evolution!

However, as Don Batten et al point out in their article,

“There is plenty of evidence that the radioisotope dating systems are not the infallible techniques many think, and that they are not measuring millions of years. However, there are still patterns to be explained. For example, deeper rocks often tend to give older “ages.” Creationists agree that the deeper rocks are generally older, but not by millions of years. “Geologist John Woodmorappe, in his devastating critique of radioactive dating, points out that there are other large-scale trends in the rocks that have nothing to do with radioactive decay.[11] Bad” dates

“When a “date” differs from that expected, researchers readily invent excuses for rejecting the result. The common application of such posterior reasoning shows that radiometric dating has serious problems. Woodmorappe cites hundreds of examples of excuses used to explain “bad” dates.[12]

“For example, researchers applied posterior reasoning to the dating of Australopithecus ramidus fossils. Most samples of basalt closest to the fossil-bearing strata give dates of about 23 Ma (Mega annum, million years) by the argon-argon method. The authors decided that was “too old,” according to their beliefs about the place of the fossils in the evolutionary grand scheme of things. So they looked at some basalt further removed from the fossils and selected 17 of 26 samples to get an acceptable maximum age of 4.4 Ma. The other nine samples again gave much older dates but the authors decided they must be contaminated and discarded them. That is how radiometric dating works. It is very much driven by the existing long-age world view that pervades academia today.[13]

“A similar story surrounds the dating of the primate skull known as KNM-ER 1470. This started with an initial 212 to 230 Ma, which, according to the fossils, was considered way off the mark (humans “weren't around then"). Various other attempts were made to date the volcanic rocks in the area. Over the years an age of 2.9 Ma was settled upon because of the agreement between several different published studies (although the studies involved selection of “good” from “bad” results, just like Australopithecus ramidus, above).[14]

“However, preconceived notions about human evolution could not cope with a skull like 1470 being “that old.” A study of pig fossils in Africa readily convinced most anthropologists that the 1470 skull was much younger. After this was widely accepted, further studies of the rocks brought the radiometric age down to about 1.9 Ma—again several studies “confirmed” this date. Such is the dating game.”[15]

A.R. Williams, an expert in the environmental fate of radioactive elements, identified 17 flaws in the isotope dating reported in just three widely respected seminal papers that supposedly established the age of the Earth at 4.6 billion years.[16] 

Again, John Woodmorappe has produced an incisive critique of these dating methods.[17] He exposes hundreds of myths that have grown up around the techniques. He shows that the few “good” dates left after the “bad” dates are filtered out could easily be explained as fortunate coincidences.

In fact, clear techniques for all this “dating” were not well-developed until the 19th century!—a period of serious anti-religion forces! According to DictionaryReference.com, the word “prehistory” originated between 1850 and 1855, and is defined as: “of or pertaining to the time or a period prior to recorded history: The dinosaur is a prehistoric beast.”   MerriamWebster.com defines prehistoric as “of, relating to, or existing in times antedating written history.” Hence the definition for “prehistoric” refers to a time before recorded or written history—quite contradictory to Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

The Bible’s first written words are recording the very beginning of time and history.  So for true Christians, the term “prehistoric” has no valid meaning.  For a Christian to use “prehistoric’ is to reject Genesis 1:1.  To reject Genesis 1:1 is to reject the Word of God and to reject God at His Word.  To reject God’s Word is to reject the very nature and existence of God—which is atheism.

Before the nineteenth century, recorded or written history was the clear and accepted definition used by nearly everyone—even non-Christians. 

What is the origin of Evolution?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), a Catholic scientist, proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, which became the first fully formed theory of evolution. There was also Gregor Mendel, another Catholic! Born in 1822, Gregor, an Austrian monk, came up with “the basic principles of heredity through experiments in his garden”. Mendel's observations became the foundation of modern genetics and the study of heredity, and he is widely considered a pioneer in the field of genetics.

Darwin

However, evolution as commonly known today was born when in 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published their new evolutionary theory, which Darwin himself explained in detail in his 1859 work On the Origin of Species.

Unlike Lamarck, Darwin proposed common descent and a branching tree of life, meaning that two very different species could share a common ancestor. Darwin based his theory on the idea of natural selection.

Before this period, there was simply nothing like evolution as we know it today.

Some writers give the impression that some of the ancient Greek philosophers held an evolutionary view of things. Interestingly, these thinkers are often presented as pure secularists—like our “moderns”! That is, often the religious or spiritual side of their beliefs is never mentioned—as if they were just like modern atheistic intellectuals of our time.

Well, a few Greek thinkers held a similar view—but certainly not the type of evolution known to us today. Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610 – 546 BC) held a cyclic view of things, similar to evolution: the first creatures originated from the moist element by evaporation. 

There are three grades of existence in the philosophy of Anaximander. First, there are things (οντα), that is, the multiplicity of individual things we see around us. These are declared to perish into those things out of which they came into being. And those secondary things out of which natural objects came into being are the earth, air, water and fire—the primitive elements of which all bodies are composed, which were recognised long before philosophy began. The visible world groups itself into masses of comparatively homogenous stuffs, each occupying a region of its own. First, there is the great lump of earth, above it the water, then the space of wind and mist and cloud; beyond that we have the blazing fire of heaven, the aether. These are the secondary elements out of which individual things were born and into which they shall return.

However, the elements themselves are not eternal nor is their separation into distinct regions more than a transient arrangement. On the contrary, they themselves are destined to return into that from which they came—the third and ultimate stage of existence, which Anaximander identified simply as ‘‘incorruptible and undying, the limitless thing’’. Thus in the process of growth, first of all the formless, limitless, indefinite thing separates first into the elemental forms, distributed in their appointed regions, the elemental forms again give birth to the multiplicity of individual things and, when they die, receive them back again. And the process will continue in this way unto infinity.      

In a sole surviving fragment of Anaximander we read: 

“Things perish into those things out of which they have their birth, according to that which is ordained; for they give reparation to one another and pay the penalty of injustice, according to the disposition of time”.[18] 

Anaximander describes the secular process of birth and perishing in a moral language. He calls the passing away of things into the elements ‘making reparation’, ‘paying the penalty of injustice’. This implies that injustice was committed in the very act of things coming into existence. All things can only come into being by robbery and misappropriation. For instance, the proper substance of the animal body is earth, but for its formation it misappropriates portions of the other elements—water for its blood, air for its breath and fire for its warmth. The dissolution of death repays these robberies—each stolen portion rejoins its like: water to water, air to air, fire to fire. As it is with the animal or human body, so with all other things that came into being in the universe. Nothing can begin to exist without an infraction of this destined order. Indeed, birth is a crime and growth an aggravated robbery. Order comes into being when the four elements are shifted by the eternal motion into their distinct regions. If this separation of the elements were ever complete, then there would be a perfect order in the universe, and no individual thing would exist at all. Every step from this disposition of elemental provinces towards the multiplicity of particular things is a declension into the welter of injustice, and every step of this pilgrimage of wrong must be retracted ‘according to what is ordained’ (kata kreon). In these words are united the conceptions of fate and right. It simply means a power which ordains both what must be and what ought to be. It is the principle of fate and right that sets the bounds of the original elemental order, and it waits to exact the penalty of every transgression. 

Empedocles (c. 490 – 430 BC), “argued that what we call birth and death in animals are just the mingling and separations of elements which cause the countless "tribes of mortal things,” says Wikipedia. “Specifically, the first animals and plants were like disjointed parts of the ones we see today, some of which survived by joining in different combinations, and then intermixing during the development of the embryo, and where “everything turned out as it would have if it were on purpose, there the creatures survived, being accidentally compounded in a suitable way.” Here, as we can see, nothing is said about the “spiritual side” of the philosopher’s view—nothing, for instance, is said about the soul!

Well, in his principal philosophical poem, On Nature, Empedocles replaces the Parmenidean One with a universe whose changes are the recombination of the four basic and permanent elements—air, earth, fire and water—mixing and separating under the influence of two forces, attraction (Love), and repulsion (Strife). The universe moves through cycles according to whichever one of these elements is predominant. He proclaims the Pythagorean doctrine of the pre-existence and immortality of the soul and the contingency of its bodily existence. Souls are condemned to the cycle of birth and rebirth by a fall from heavenly ‘grace’, he maintains. This fall is a penalty for sin—the sin of flesh-eating and oath-breaking. Caught in the wheel of time, and preserving its individual identity, the soul passes through all shapes of life—both human and animal—which implies that human life is only one of the shapes it passes through. The substance of the soul is divine and immutable and is the same substance as all other souls in the world. Any difference between the two explanations?

Other philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics held views which are simply anti-Evolution. They disproved Anaximander and Empedocles, holding rather that the types of all things, not only living things, were fixed by divine design.

Plato was called by the biologist Ernst Mayr “the great antihero of evolutionism,”[19] because he promoted belief in essentialism, otherwise known as the theory of forms. This theory holds that each natural type of object in the observed world is an imperfect manifestation of the ideal, form or “species” which defines that type. In his Timaeus (Greek Τίμαιος, Timaios), Plato begins with a distinction between the physical world and the eternal world. The physical world is the world which changes and perishes: therefore it is the object of opinion and unreasoned sensation. The eternal world never changes: therefore it is apprehended by reason.[20] The speeches about the two worlds are conditioned by the different nature of their objects. Indeed, “a description of what is changeless, fixed and clearly intelligible will be changeless and fixed,”[21] while a description of what changes and is likely, will also change and be just likely. “As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief.”[22] Therefore, in a description of the physical world, one “should not look for anything more than a likely story.”[23]

Plato argues, in the work, that since nothing “becomes or changes” without cause, then the cause of the universe must be a Demiurge or a god, which he calls the father and maker of the universe. And since the universe is fair, the Demiurge must have looked to the eternal model to make it, and not to the perishable one.[24] Hence, using the eternal and perfect world of “forms” or ideals as a template, he set about creating our world, which formerly only existed in a state of disorder.

Plato

Thus Plato ascribes the creation of the universe to the handiwork of a divine craftsman—God. The Demiurge, being good, wanted there to be as much good as was the world. Plato has a character tell a story that the Demiurge created the cosmos and everything in it because, being good, and hence, “... free from jealousy, He desired that all things should be as like Himself as they could be.” The creator created all conceivable forms of life, since “... without them the universe will be incomplete, for it will not contain every kind of animal which it ought to contain, if it is to be perfect.”[25]

Aristotle, a student of Plato, was the most influential of the Greek philosophers in Europe during the Medieval period. He was the earliest natural historian whose work has been preserved in any real detail. His works on biology resulted from his research into natural history on and around the island of Lesbos, and have survived in the form of four books, usually known by their Latin names, De anima (On the Soul), Historia animalium (History of Animals), De generatione animalium (Generation of Animals), and De partibus animalium (On the Parts of Animals). Aristotle's works contain accurate observations, fitted into his own theories of the body's mechanisms. But “Nothing is more remarkable than [Aristotle's] efforts to [exhibit] the relationships of living things as a scala naturae,” Charles Singer is quoted to have said in a Wikipedia article. This scala naturae, the article goes on, described in Historia animalium, classified organisms in relation to a hierarchical “Ladder of Life” or “great chain of being,” placing them according to their complexity of structure and function, with organisms that showed greater vitality and ability to move described as “higher organisms.” Aristotle believed that features of living organisms showed clearly that they must have had what he called a final cause, that is to say, that they had been designed for a purpose. He explicitly rejected the view of Empedocles that living creatures might have originated by chance.

Aristotle

Other Greek philosophers, such as Zeno of Citium (334 – 262 BC) the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, agreed with Aristotle and other earlier philosophers that nature showed clear evidence of being designed for a purpose.

Fossils and DNA as evidences for evolution?

Our quotes above, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, reads partly: “Darwin and other 19th-century biologists found compelling evidence for biological evolution in the comparative study of living organisms, in their geographic distribution, and in the fossil remains of extinct organisms.” Again, “The amount of information about evolutionary history stored in the DNA and proteins of living things is virtually unlimited; scientists can reconstruct any detail of the evolutionary history of life by investing sufficient time and laboratory resources.”

In other words the DNA and fossils are two of the most compelling evidences for Evolution.

Evolutionist Loren Eiseley declared that “Man is a long chain of DNA accidents taking place over billions of years.” Carl Sagan was quoted in Time magazine as saying that “Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brain and all, here today.” These two statements incorporate two major features of the Darwinian mechanism of evolution: genetic mistakes and death—quite contradictory to the attributes of God.

Mutations, which are indeed random genetic accidents, followed by the extinction of the less well-adapted creatures, have supposedly converted the first microscopic form of life into all other forms of life, fossil and living, including man. However, mutations are best known by the defects they often cause. Several thousand genetic diseases in man, due to mutations, are now known. Thus evolution would be the most wasteful, inefficient, cruel method that one could conceive to create man. Would an omniscient, omnipotent, loving God use such a process to create man in three billion years when He could have created men instantaneously if He chose?

As one Mätt Lintzenich decried in a comment on Facebook sometime last year:

“...one of the most fundamental theological difficulties relating to the creation/evolution debate is the "problem of evil." If God is a perfect Being, omnipotent and totally loving, and He created everything, why is there evil, suffering, and death in the world? This question is, without a doubt, one of the most perplexing problems vexing the minds of Christians everywhere, and the number one intellectual reason that people use to justify agnosticism and atheism. It is hard to deny that Genesis 3 is an attempt to resolve this issue. In ...Romans, St. Paul explains that death entered the world because of sin—the sin of Adam, the first man, not the sin of animals! Evolution is a theory which embraces sickness, pain, and death as a mechanism for the development of all animal forms, including human beings. If evolution is true, does that make God, rather than man, the Author of suffering and death? The theory of evolution proposes that hundreds of thousands of animal species lived, suffered, and died millions of years BEFORE humankind even arrived on the scene! From whence comes evil? Who is responsible for all the suffering and pain? It does not come from the Fall of Man, if evolution is true, but rather directly from the Creator Himself! Evolution seems to malign the character of God and make Him the Author, not of sins, but of physical evils. You are asking me to believe that the very things which Scripture says are the results of sin and the Fall are the things which God used to evolve a single-cell creature into human beings over millions of years!”

Again, in his article, ‘New discovery makes Darwinists’ case even harder to make’, Eric Metaxas relates the old story about a chemist, a physicist, and an economist stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but a can of soup. “Puzzling over how to open the can, the chemist says, “Let’s heat the can until it swells and bursts from the build-up of gases.” “No, no,” says the physicist, “let’s throw it off that cliff with just enough kinetic energy to split it open on the rocks below.” The economist, after thinking a moment says, “Assume a can opener.” ”

He goes on: “There’s more than one trade that deals in assumptions. The way Darwinists approach the origin of life is a lot like that economist’s idea for opening the can. The Darwinian mechanism of mutation and natural selection explains everything about life, we’re told—except how it began. “Assume a self-replicating cell containing information in the form of genetic code,” Darwinists are forced to say. Well, fine. But where did that little miracle come from?

“A new discovery makes explaining even that first cell tougher still. Fossils unearthed by Australian scientists in Greenland may be the oldest traces of life ever discovered. A team from the University of Wollongong recently published their findings in the journal “Nature,” describing a series of structures called “stromatolites” that emerged from receding ice.

““Stromatolites” may sound like something your doctor would diagnose, but they’re actually biological rocks formed by colonies of microbes that live in shallow water. If you visit the Bahamas today, you can see living stromatolites.

“What’s so special about them? Well, they appear in rocks most scientists date to 220 million years older than the oldest fossils, which pushes the supposed date for the origin of life back to 3.7 billion years ago.

“This, admits the New York Times, “complicate[s] the story of evolution of early life from chemicals...” No kidding! According to conventional geology, these microbe colonies existed on the heels of a period when Earth was undergoing heavy asteroid bombardment, making it virtually uninhabitable. This early date, adds The Times, “leaves comparatively little time for evolution to have occurred…”

“That is an understatement. These life forms came into existence virtually overnight, writes David Klinghoffer at Evolution News and Views. “[g]enetic code, proteins, photosynthesis, the works.”

“This appearance of fully-developed life forms so early in the fossil record led Dr. Abigail Allwood of Caltech to remark that “life [must not be] a fussy, reluctant and unlikely thing.” Rather, “(i)t will emerge whenever there’s an opportunity.”

“Pardon me? If life occurs so spontaneously and predictably even under the harshest conditions, then it should be popping up all over the place! Yet scientists still cannot come close to producing even a single cell from raw chemicals in the lab.

“Dr. Stephen Meyer explains in his book “Signature in the Cell” why this may be Darwinism’s Achilles heel. In order to begin evolution by natural selection, you need a self-replicating unit. But the cell and its DNA blueprint are too complicated by far to have arisen through chance chemical reactions. The odds of even a single protein forming by accident are astronomical. So Meyer and other Intelligent Design theorists conclude that Someone must have designed and created the structures necessary for life”!

Meanwhile, says Metaxas, Darwinists, faced with a fossil record that theoretically pushes the origin of life back further into the past, “are forced to assume the metaphorical can opener. They just don’t know how these early cells came into existence, and the more we dig up, the more improbable—rather than likely—life becomes.”

Fossils

The primary resource for detailing the path of “human evolution” is and will always remain fossil specimens. For fossils, then, let’s look at the case of dinosaurs. Secular scientists (and never all scientists) are saying that dinosaurs have existed on this earth millions of years ago—meaning that they were not created by God. But we know that this is just a nonsensical assertion—because we know that whether one is an evolutionist or accepts the Bible’s account of history, the evidence for dinosaurs is just the same. All scientists have the same facts—they have the same world, the same fossils, the same living creatures, the same universe. If the “facts” are the same, then how can the explanations be so different? The reason is that scientists have only the present—dinosaur fossils exist only in the present. But some scientists, for whatever reason known to them, are trying to connect the fossils in the present to the past! They ask, “What happened in history to bring dinosaurs into existence, wipe them out, and leave many of them fossilized?” The science that addresses such issues is known as historical or origins science, and it differs from the operational science that gives us computers, inexpensive food, space exploration, electricity, and the like. Origins science deals with the past, which is not accessible to direct experimentation, whereas operational science deals with how the world works in the here and now, which, of course, is open to repeatable experiments. Because of difficulties in reconstructing the past, those who study fossils (palaeontologists) have diverse views on dinosaurs, and, as someone puts it, “palaeontology (the study of fossils) is much like politics: passions run high, and it’s easy to draw very different conclusions from the same set of facts.”

So how can any sensible person rely on the “evidence” gotten from such diverse—often quite contradictory—conclusions?

The past, as I said, is not and can never be open to the normal processes of experimental science, that is, repeatable experiments in the present. A scientist cannot do experiments on events that happened in the past. Scientists do not measure the age of rocks, they measure isotope concentrations, and these can be measured extremely accurately. However, the “age” is calculated using assumptions about the past that cannot be proven. There are many examples where the dating methods give “dates” that are wrong for rocks of known age. One example is K-Ar “dating” of five historical andesite lava flows from Mount Nguaruhoe in New Zealand. Although one lava flow occurred in 1949, three in 1954, and one in 1975, the “dates” range from less than 0.27 to 3.5 Ma.![26]

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4).

Big Bang: the world existing billions of years ago?

In the traditional view of the Bible, the world is about six thousand years old and was created in six days. Surely, modern “scientists” contradict this position, “proving” rather that the world is billions of years old and that man evolved through a process of evolution. This view is, at least, what the majority of “learned” men in this present age, including many of today’s Catholic clergy (late twentieth century and early 21^st century priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes), believe,—thus laying to rest the biblical story of Genesis.

The big bang, another type of evolution, is the widely held theory of the evolution of the universe. Its essential feature is the emergence of the universe from a state of extremely high temperature and density—the so-called big bang that occurred 13.8 billion years ago. Although this type of universe was proposed by Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann and Belgian astronomer Monseigneur Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître in the 1920s, the modern version was developed by Russian-born American physicist George Gamow and colleagues in the 1940s.

The big bang theory proposes that the universe was once extremely compact, dense, and hot. Some original event, a cosmic explosion called the big bang, occurred about 13.8 billion years ago, and the universe has since then been expanding and cooling. The theory is based on the mathematical equations, known as the field equations, of the general theory of relativity set forth in 1915 by Albert Einstein. The overall framework of the big bang theory—which is currently the accepted explanation of the beginning of the universe by the majority of learned men in the Western society, including many of the clergy—came out of “solutions” to Einstein’s general relativity field equations and remains unchanged, but various details of the theory are still being modified today. Einstein himself initially believed that the universe was static. When his equations seemed to imply that the universe was expanding, however, or contracting, Einstein added a constant term to cancel out the expansion or contraction of the universe. When the expansion of the universe was later “discovered”, Einstein stated that introducing this “cosmological constant” had been a mistake!

Einstein

After Einstein’s work of 1917, several scientists, including Monseigneur Georges Lemaître, (a Belgian Catholic Priest who is generally believed to be the main originator of the Big Bang!), Willem de Sitter in Holland, and Alexander Friedmann in Russia, succeeded in finding “solutions” to Einstein’s field equations. The universes described by the different solutions varied. 

In 1922 Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann provided a set of “solutions” to the field equations. These solutions have served as the framework for much of the current theoretical work on the big bang theory. American astronomer Edwin Hubble—the one who received a letter from a friend asking whether Pope Pius XII’s letter celebrating the big bang might qualify him for “sainthood”!—provided some of the greatest supporting “evidence” for the theory with his 1929 discovery that the light of distant galaxies was universally shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Once “tired light” theories—that light slowly loses energy naturally, becoming more red over time—were dismissed, this shift proved that the galaxies were moving away from each other. Hubble found that galaxies farther away were moving away proportionally faster, showing that the universe is expanding uniformly. However, the universe’s initial state was still unknown!

In the 1940s Russian-American physicist George Gamow worked out a theory that fit with Friedmann’s solutions in which the universe expanded from a hot, dense state. In 1950 British astronomer Fred Hoyle, in support of his own opposing steady-state theory, referred to Gamow’s theory as a mere “big bang,” but the name stuck, and, since then, not even the contest in the 1990s by Sky & Telescope magazine to find a better (perhaps more dignified) name could produce another.

The fact that this “myth” was not only believed but also preached by men who occupied the Chair of St. Peter is indeed an extraordinarily bad sign.

To be precise, just as the Bible tells us how the universe came into existence, the “big bang” is equally another story about how the universe came into existence. It proposes that billions of years ago the universe began in a tiny, infinitely hot and dense point called a singularity. This singularity supposedly contained not only all the mass and energy that would become everything we see today, but also “space” itself. According to the story, the singularity rapidly expanded, spreading out the energy and space.

It is supposed that over vast periods of time, the energy from the big bang cooled down as the universe expanded. Some of it turned into matter—hydrogen and helium gas. These gases collapsed to form stars and galaxies of stars. Some of the stars created the heavier elements in their core and then exploded, distributing these elements into space. Some of the heavier elements allegedly began to stick together and formed the earth and other planets.

This story of origins is entirely fiction. But many people claim to believe the big-bang model in the name of senseless “science”. It is particularly distressing that many professing Christians have been taken in by the big bang, perhaps without realising its atheistic underpinnings. They have chosen to reinterpret the plain teachings of Scripture in an attempt to make it mesh with secular beliefs about origins.

There are several reasons why we cannot just add the big bang to the Bible. Ultimately, the big bang is a secular story of origins. When first proposed, it was an attempt to explain how the universe could have been created without God. Really, it is an alternative to the Bible, so it makes no sense trying to “add” it to the Bible. The two—the Bible and the Big Bang—are radically different in virtually all ramifications.

The Bible, for instance, teaches that God created the universe in six days (Genesis 1; Exodus 20:11). It is clear from the context in Genesis that these were days in the ordinary sense (i.e., 24-hour days) since they are bounded by evening and morning and occur in an ordered list (second day, third day, etc.). Conversely, the Big Bang teaches that the universe has evolved over billions of years ago. So how compatible are the two?

It is interesting to note that while our popes are celebrating the big bang the same secular Encyclopaedia Britannica acknowledges this time around that the big bang is based on assumptions!

“The big-bang model is based on two assumptions,” it says. “The first is that Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity correctly describes the gravitational interaction of all matter. The second assumption, called the cosmological principle, states that an observer's view of the universe depends neither on the direction in which he looks nor on his location. This principle applies only to the large-scale properties of the universe, but it does imply that the universe has no edge, so that the big-bang origin occurred not at a particular point in space but rather throughout space at the same time. These two assumptions make it possible to calculate the history of the cosmos after a certain epoch called the Planck time. Scientists have yet to determine what prevailed before Planck time.”[27]

                                        

Don Batten et el rightly observe in their article that “of the methods that have been used to estimate the age of the Earth, 90 percent point to an age far less than the billions of years asserted by evolutionists. A few of them follow:

·         Evidence for a rapid formation of geological strata, as in the biblical flood. Some of the evidences are: lack of erosion between rock layers supposedly separated in age by many millions of years; lack of disturbance of rock strata by biological activity (worms, roots, etc.); lack of soil layers; polystrate fossils (which traverse several rock layers vertically—these could not have stood vertically for eons of time while they slowly got buried); thick layers of “rock” bent without fracturing, indicating that the rock was all soft when bent; and more. For more, see books by geologists Morris[26] and Austin.[27]

·         Red blood cells and hemoglobin have been found in some (unfossilized!) dinosaur bone. But these could not last more than a few thousand years—certainly not the 65 Ma since the last dinosaurs lived, according to evolutionists.[28]

·         The Earth's magnetic field has been decaying so fast that it looks like it is less than 10,000 years old. Rapid reversals during the flood year and fluctuations shortly after would have caused the field energy to drop even faster.[29]

·         Radioactive decay releases helium into the atmosphere, but not much is escaping. The total amount in the atmosphere is 1/2000th of that expected if the universe is really billions of years old. This helium originally escaped from rocks. This happens quite fast, yet so much helium is still in some rocks that it has not had time to escape—certainly not billions of years.[30]

·         A supernova is an explosion of a massive star—the explosion is so bright that it briefly outshines the rest of the galaxy. The supernova remnants (SNRs) should keep expanding for hundreds of thousands of years, according to physical equations. Yet there are no very old, widely expanded (Stage 3) SNRs, and few moderately old (Stage 1) ones in our galaxy, the Milky Way, or in its satellite galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds. This is just what we would expect for “young” galaxies that have not existed long enough for wide expansion.[31]

·         The moon is slowly receding for the Earth at about 4 centimeters (1.5 inches) per year, and this rate would have been greater in the past. But even if the moon had started receding from being in contact with the Earth, it would have taken only 1.37 billion years to reach its present distance from the Earth. This gives a maximum age of the moon, not the actual age. This is far too young for evolutionists who claim the moon is 4.6 billion years old. It is also much younger than the radiometric “dates” assigned to moon rocks.[32]

·      Salt is entering the sea much faster than it is escaping. The sea is not nearly salty enough for this to have been happening for billions of years. Even granting generous assumptions to evolutionists, the sea could not be more than 62 Ma years old—far younger than the billions of years believed by the evolutionists. Again, this indicates a maximum age, not the actual age.[33]”

St. Augustine actually refuted evolution in the fifth century in his massive work De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos

In 1930 great Pope Pius XI wrote:

“We have retraced, venerable Brethren, the life and merits of a man, with whom one will not find another to compare, or certainly very few, from the beginning of the world to the present day, on account of the power of his penetrating genius, the sublimity of his holiness, and the victorious combat with which he undertook to defend Catholic truth…Surely no one is unaware of the admirable manner in which St. Augustine wrote of the divine government of all things and all events of history in his noble work on The City of God. For he made use of everything he drew from an assiduous study of the Bible on the one hand, and from the fullness of the human culture of his day on the other hand, in order to produce one integrated concept of the history of the world”[28]

Pope Pius XI

 Pope Leo XIII wrote:

“St Augustine was the great Doctor of the Church who before all others conceived and executed the plan of the philosophy of history. Those who deserve mention after his time in this branch of philosophy always took Augustine for their master and guide, and derived their inspiration from his writings. On the other hand, those who have departed from the path laid down by this great man, have suffered a variety of errors and have ended far from the truth. The reason for this is the fact that they who contemplate and narrate the pathway and development of human societies apart from St Augustine’s position, will lack a true knowledge of the causes which govern the temporal process of humanities.”[29]

Again, Pope Leo XIII:

“But Augustine would seem to have wrested the palm from all (the Fathers of the Church). Of a most powerful genius and thoroughly saturated with sacred and profane learning, with the loftiest faith and equal knowledge, he combated most vigorously all the errors of his age... (and) laid the safe foundations and sure structure of human science....”[30]

Pope Leo XIII

Pope Pius XII himself remarked that “The doctrine of St. Augustine, since it offers excellent instruments for refuting and defeating the fallacies of our own times as well, ought to be expounded in the fullness of its light.”[31]

Let us carefully note that scientists who propagate the doctrine of evolution are not doing so because they are sure of what they are doing but because they believe that it just can’t be the way the Bible says it is! For our “scientists”, the biblical idea of a few thousand years is just unthinkable. So, with evolution, they’re just looking for an alternative to the Bible. By this attitude of course they manifest a complete poverty of thought. What, for instance, would be the Evolutionists’ answer if we ask: And what existed before those billions of years? Did the world exist before then? If not, what existed? Where was man before those billions of years that it took before he “evolved”? And the world? Did it exist? If so, what was its nature? In fact, where was evolution itself before those billions of years?  Where were fossils, the DNA, etc.?

As St. Augustine remarks—about one thousand six hundred years ago, even before evolution raised its ugly head—the idea of so short a time since man’s creation upsets them because, in their poverty of thought, they fail to consider that nothing which has a limit is of enormous duration, and that all the finite spaces of the ages, when compared with endless eternity, are to be counted not as very little, but as nothing at all.

Science, broadly defined, means knowledge. Specifically we refer to science as knowledge ascertained by observation and experiment, critically tested, systemised and brought under general principles. Being even more specific one must distinguish between empirical or experimental science dealing with, and confined to describing and classifying, observable phenomena, and speculative science dealing with unknown phenomena, sometimes phenomena that cannot be duplicated in the laboratory. The “science” of Evolution belongs to the latter, that is, speculative. The term “scientific speculation” is actually a terminological incongruity since no speculation can be called knowledge in the strict sense of the word. At best, scientific speculation can only describe theories inferred from certain known facts and applied in the realm of the unknown.

Religion, on the other hand, means a belief in the existence of God or gods (and the activities that are connected with the worship of them). In terms of the Jewish religion, as it was before the coming of Christ, this is belief in the Divine nature of the Torah–Torah min Hashamayim; belief that the Torah received by Moses and given to the Jewish people is Divine in source and is the word of God. Being so, Torah is Divine wisdom, and since God is true, so is His Torah. Torah is often referred to as Torat Emet meaning the True Torah. Torah reveals the truth.

From these two definitions, it is evident that science formulates and deals with theories and hypotheses while Torah deals with absolute truths. These are two different disciplines and “reconciliation” is entirely out of place. Torah is the realm of truth of the absolute. What Torah says is true not because it has been scientifically proven to be true, rather it is true because the truth was revealed by God. Science does not deal with absolutes, rather it deals with the realm of observable phenomena and produces principles based on its observations.

In the 19th century it was the prevailing view of “scientists” and modernists that human reason was infallible in “scientific” deductions and that sciences such as physics, chemistry, mathematics etc., were absolute truth, that is to say, not merely accepted truths but absolute. Speaking in Jewish terms, this meant the establishment of a new idolatry, not of wood and stone, but the worship of the contemporary sciences and philosophies!

With regards to the origin of the world, the above view of our “scientists” and “philosophers”—that the world is billions of years old—is indeed similar to the so-called Pre-Adamite or Preadamism—a hypothesis within theology which holds that human beings existed before Adam. This theoretical assumption is contrary to beliefs describing Adam as the first human, as stated in the Bible. The theory of Preadamism is therefore distinct from the conventional religious belief that Adam was the first human. Preadamism has a long history, probably having its origins in early pagan responses to Abrahamic beliefs regarding the origins of the human race.

Advocates of this hypothesis are known as "Pre-Adamites", as are the humans believed by them to have existed before Adam.

The first known debate about human antiquity took place in 170 AD between Theophilus of Antioch and an Egyptian pagan ‘Apollonius the Egyptian’ (probably Apollonius Dyscolus), who argued that the world was 153,075 years old. Figures such as this occur regularly in Greek and Roman literature, as do the claims that the world and mankind have always existed.

The most serious early challenge to biblical Adamism came from the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate who, upon his rejection of Christianity and his conversion to Theurgy, a late form of Neoplatonism, accepted the idea that many pairs of original people had been created, a belief termed Co-Adamism or Multiple-Adamism. To some, Genesis 1:27-28 might allow for co-creation of multiple pairs, if the word ‘them’ were construed accordingly: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;…’” In addition, if a framework of strictly sequential chronology were adopted in interpreting the order of these texts from the ancient Middle East, it might be argued that Adam, and therefore Eve, are created a little later than the humans created in Genesis 1:27-28. But these are matters of interpretation. Thus, on the other hand, Eve is called “the mother of all the living” in Genesis 3:20.

St Augustine’s work De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, contains two chapters indicating a debate between Christians and pagans over human origins: Book XII, chapter 11, ‘Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years’ — ‘De falsitate eius historiae, quae multa millia annorum praeteritis temporibus ascribit’, as well as Book XVIII, chapter 40 — ‘The Egyptians’ abominable lying, to claim their wisdom the age of 100,000 years’ — ‘De Aegyptiorum mendacissima vanitate, quae antiquitati scientiae suae centum milia ascribit annorum’ indicate that Augustine saw pagan ideas concerning the history and chronology of the world and the human race as incompatible with the biblical version. Augustine’s position on this matter was supported by most rabbis and also by the Church Fathers, who generally dismissed views on the antiquity of the world—views that modern men like John Paul II and Ratzinger simply celebrated in the 20^th and 21^st centuries!—as myths and fables not requiring any considered refutation.

The Six Ages of the World, or sex aetates mundi (also, Seven Ages of the World) is a Christian historical periodization first written about by Saint Augustine, which is based upon Christian religious events, from the creation of Adam to the events of Revelation. These were widely believed and in use throughout the Medieval Period, and until the Enlightenment, the writing of history was mostly the filling out of all or some part of this outline. In our own time, even though the popes and other prominent leaders have embraced apostasy, many good Catholic historians, theologians and philosophers still hold the view.

Some writers talk about each age (Latin aetas), that is, each of the six ages, lasting approximately 1,000 years. It should be noted, however, that according to Augustine, the ages from Adam to the Flood and from the Flood to Abraham correspond not by equality in the passage of time but in respect of the number of generations. After those ages there are three more—from Abraham to David and David to the Exile in Babylon and Exile to the coming of Christ (making it five different ages), after which we have the sixth age (our own time). Again, this sixth age, according to Augustine, cannot be measured by the number of generations,

“because it is said, ‘It is not for you to know the dates: the Father has decided those by his own authority.’[32] After this present age God will rest, as it were, on the seventh day, and he will cause us, who are the seventh day, to find our rest in him”[33]  

For Augustine, then, the six ages of history—from Adam and Eve to the Flood, from the Flood to Abraham, from Abraham to King David, from David to the Babylonian Exile, from the Exile to Our Lord Jesus Christ, and from Christ to the Second Coming—would be followed by a seventh age, the reign of Christ on earth. World history is a “salvation history”—the course of events from Creation to the Last Judgment—and its purposes are religious and moral. Thus, all the references by Augustine and other early authors to a “middle time” must be understood within the framework of the sixth age of salvation history.

As already pointed out, until the Enlightenment, the writing of history was mostly the filling out of all or some part of this outline.

“Despite the vast amount written on St Augustine’s Philosophy of History, little notice has been given to a well-defined plan for instruction in history devised by him and widely adopted in the schools of later days”,[34] writes late William Green, professor emeritus of Latin at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The novelty of the scheme”, continues Prof. Green, “appears in two aspects: as against the casual instruction of history given in pagan schools, there was opposed a well-defined outline of world history based on the Bible; and as against the Jewish and Christian notion of six thousand years of history (with no natural division into ages), there was opposed the plan of six ages, clearly defined by important crises of Bible history. As priest and bishop, Augustine found his pattern useful for instructing beginners in Christian doctrine. It not only provided a convenient plan of Bible history, but left room for the continuation of history till the end of the world. The student was not to think of a sharp break at the close of the apostolic age, but was rather shown the continued revelation of God’s hand in the progress of the Church…History and revelation merge into one symmetrical pattern, in which the believer has his own stable place, fixed in the eternity of God’s beneficent purpose.”[35]  

Again,

“The Catholic faith brings with it a unique new view of world history,” writes late Msgr. Eugene Kevane, a student of St. Augustine and one time dean, Catholic University of America, Professor of Christian Philosophy and Professor of Catechetics. “St. Augustine was the first Christian thinker fully to realize this fact. The first element in this Christian view of earthly reality and of human life and destiny, is the fact that certain striking works of God stand in the world history of the human family as real events. These works of God, which Sacred Scripture calls the mirabilia Dei, the “wonderful works of God,” are real and genuine events, facts established by documentary evidence. These events took place in this world history of the human family on this planet. They are not part of a different “history,” called “sacred,” a history conceived somehow as running distinct and separate from another history called “profane.”[36]

Eugene Kevane

 “St. Augustine, in other words,” he continues, “in accepting the Bible as containing the religious teaching of God to mankind, accepts it also as a valid knowledge of history, containing fundamental information concerning the historic life of mankind. This vigorous assertion of the historical character and validity of the Divine Scriptures is essential to St. Augustine’s program of education, for it affects and governs the manner in which the discipline of history ought to be taught.”[37]

In his 1951 book, II concetto di storia in Sant ’Agostino, Giuseppe Amari, a bishop and long-rector of a major seminary in the Italian city of Mantua, writes:

“This is the vision of universal history which St. Augustine derived from St. Paul and the Fathers who went before him. It is the story of the economy of salvation. Sacred Scripture is a history, but also more than a history, understood as a mere narrative of events or chronicle. In this sacred history, the narrative of events is secondary, a means, a vehicle for conveying a conception of wisdom and a body of doctrine. Creation, the fall, the Old Testament, these are facts located in time, but they carry with them great religious truths, the dogmas of the Catholic religion, and many other secondary and spiritual truths. God has hidden his truths in these human and earthly facts, in order to make them accessible to all men.”[38] 

This is the type of history—championed by St Augustine—which was taught in the schools of Christendom. St Augustine, a great teacher, illustrates the manner in which he elaborates sacred history so that the prospective convert may come to that grasp of the providential order of things which is the mark of the true believer in God. “So five ages of the world are ended”, he writes in De Catechizandis Rudibus. “Of these the first is from the beginning of the human race, that is, from Adam, who was the first man to be made, to Noe, who built the ark in the time of the flood…”[39]

St. Augustine

He was writing in the “sixth age”—our own time, too, the sixth age in the historic life of mankind on this planet, which is a time of rebirth and reform by means of the gospel, a process which, according to Msgr. Kevane, elevates the Catholic Church as a spiritual sovereign over all nations.

In De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, St. Augustine, having refuted the theory of cycles, and the so-called Preadamism, defended with an unequalled lucidity and power the historicity of the Sacred Scriptures. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, as we noted earlier, says that “Myths are specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified” but pretends as if the time humans actually evolved is specific!  The Encyclopaedia is saying, in other words, that what is written in the Bible is not historical but mythical!

St. Augustine states that it is God Himself "who both inspired the Sacred Scriptures, and created this visible cosmos". He rejected vigorously the very thought of a distinction between the religious teaching of the Bible and the factual character of its historical narrative. The Sacred Scriptures, in other words, recount a history which is not the mere local and isolated memory of the Hebrews as one of the natural peoples; on the contrary, with divine light and power, the beginnings of the human family as such are announced to modern man through the Catholic Faith in the Bible.

In his work De Genesi ad Litteram—a treatise on the Book of Genesis—St. Augustine poses the question, “are all things to be understood figuratively, or ...asserted and defended according to the reality of historical events?” His own answer, exemplified by his entire mode of treatment, is perfectly clear: “The narration in this book of Genesis”, he writes, “is not in the literary kind of figurative speech, as in the Canticle of Canticles, but it is entirely a narrative of historical realities, as in the Books of Kings and others of this type.”[40]

In his earlier work on the Book of Genesis, St Augustine writes that “this entire passage is first to be discussed according to history, then according to prophecy. The facts are narrated according to history, but they also predict future things in a prophetic way.”[41]

Modern Evolution, of course, never existed during the time of St. Augustine, but a topic related to it is treated in his work De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, books XII and XVIII. In Book XII, chapter 10, “Of the opinion that the human race, like the world itself, has always existed”—De opinione eorum, qui humanum genus sicut ipsum mundum semper fuisse existimant; and chapter 11, “Of the falseness of the history that the world hath continued many thousand years”—De falsitate eius historiae, quae multa millia annorum praeteritis temporibus ascribit, Augustine discusses man’s origin from the biblical perspective. Evolution theory says man has existed for millions (or billions) of years. There were people in the time of St. Augustine who said something similar—but they, unlike modern evolutionists, made their assertions based on what they understood as “recorded history” and not an evolutionary one, hence their “years”, unlike those of modern evolutionists, were not even up to one million but “many thousand years”. St. Augustine faulted that assertion:

“Those who hold such opinions are also led astray by some utterly spurious documents which, they say, give a historical record of many thousand years, whereas we reckon, from the evidence of the Holy Scriptures, that fewer than 6, 000 years have passed since man’s first origin. To avoid any long argument in refutation of the nonsense of the writings which allege many more thousands of years, and to show how utterly inadequate is their authority on this subject, I need only refer to the well known Letter of Alexander the Great to his mother Olympias. This incorporates the narrative of an Egyptian Priest, which he produced from the writings considered sacred by the Egyptians. This document records, among other empires, the monarchies which are also known to Greek historical sources. In Alexander’s letter the Assyrian monarchy is represented as lasting more than 5, 000 years, while in the Greek records it covered only 1, 300 years, from the reign of Belus, who appears as the first king in the Egyptians’ story as well as in the Greek. The Egyptian allege a duration of more than 8, 000 years for the Persian and Macedonian Empires down to the time of Alexander, to whom he was speaking. But in the Greek account the Macedonian monarchy is found to have lasted only 485 years up to the death of Alexander, while the Persian Empire, according to this reckoning, was brought to an end by Alexander’s conquest after 233 years of power. The Greek figures are thus much smaller than the Egyptian. In fact they would not equal them, even if multiplied by three. Now it is said that the Egyptians at one time had short years, lasting only four months, so that the real year, a full year, like the modern Egyptian year (which is the same as ours) would contain three of those old Egyptian years. But even so, as I said, Greek record would not coincide with the Egyptian in chronology. And there is good reason for regarding the Greek account as more worthy of credence, in that it does not exceed the true statement of the number of years, as presented in our Scriptures, which are truly sacred. Moreover if this well-known letter of Alexander is so widely discrepant from the trustworthy record of the facts in respect of the chronology, how much less credence should be given to those writings, packed with fairy-tales about reputed antiquity, which our opponents may decide to produce in attempts to controvert the authority of our sacred books, whose inspiration is so generally acknowledged. This is the authority which foretold that the whole world would believe in it; and the belief of the whole world has answered to that prophecy. The fulfilment in reality of those prophecies of the future guarantees the truth of the biblical narratives of the past.”[42]

In Book XII of De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, we read:

“Quae saecula praeterierint antequam genus institueretur humanum, me fateor ignorare; non tamen dubito nihil omnino creaturae Creatori esse coaeternum. Dicit etiam Apostolus tempora aeterna, nec ea futura, sed, quod magis est mirandum, praeterita. Sic enim ait: In spem vitae aeternae, quam promisit non mendax Deus ante tempora aeterna; manifestavit autem temporibus suis verbum suum...”

“I confess my ignorance about the ages which passed before the creation of mankind, yet I am certain that no creature is co-eternal with the creator. The Apostle (i.e. Saint Paul) also talks about eternal times not as in the future but, what is more surprising, in the past. He says, ‘In the hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before eternal times; but at his own appointed times he manifested his word...”[43]

Late Irish classicist and historian of ancient and medieval philosophy (in particular Augustine and Eriugena), John O’Meara, a professor of Latin at the University College Dublin, rightly points out—with respect to Augustine’s reference to “eternal times”—that the original Greek words used by St. Paul in Titus 1:2, πρὸ χρόνων αἰωνίων (“pro cronon aionion”), Latin ante tempora saecularia, actually mean “before ages ago” rather than “before eternal times.”

Interestingly, I have encountered evolutionists who say that even St. Augustine, too (from the above statement) confessed his ignorance of the ages which passed—certainly the billions of years!—before the creation of man!

Augustine is human, and a humble one for that matter—quite unlike the arrogant, modern evolutionists. 

However, the book we are dealing with is simply a refutation of evolution — those millions or billions of years are just untenable. For instance, in chapter 13 of Book XII, “The reply to the argument against the recent creation of man”, Augustine writes:

“Some people raise the question why an infinity of ages passed without man’s being created, why his creation was so late that less than 6, 000 years, according to scriptural evidence, have passed since he first came into existence. Our answer to this is the same as that we offered to the similar objection about the origin of the world, raised by those who refused to believe, not that the world has always existed, but that it had a beginning (as Plato clearly admits, although some believe that he was not expressing his real opinion). If the idea of so short a time upsets them, and the years since man’s creation, as recorded in our authorities, seem so few, they should consider that nothing which has a limit is of enormous duration, and that all the finite spaces of the ages, when compared with endless eternity, are to be counted not as very little, but as nothing at all. Therefore even if we speak of not just 5, 000 or 6,000 years, but even 60, 000 or 600, 000 or 6, 000,000 or 60,000,000 or 600,000,000, and go on squaring the numbers until we reach a number to which we cannot give a name, and make that the time since man’s first creation, the question could still be asked: ‘Why not earlier?’

“For God’s pause before the creation of man was eternal and without beginning, so that compared with it an inexpressibly great number of centuries, which must still have an end and a defined extent, is not so much as the smallest drop of water compared with all the oceans of the world: for in this comparison, though one is tiny and the other incomparably huge, still both terms are finite. But any space of time which starts from a beginning and is brought to an end, however vast its extent, must be reckoned when compared with that which has no beginning, as minimal, or rather as nothing at all. For if you take from it the shortest moments one by one, beginning from the end, however great the number may be, even if it is too great to have a name, it will still decrease as you go back, until the process of subtraction brings you to the beginning. It is like subtracting the days of a man’s life working back from the present until you reach his birthday. But if you take what has no beginning, and work backwards, not subtracting moments one by one, or hours, or days, or months, or years, but intervals equal to that number of years which exceeds all possible computation and yet can be wiped out by the subtraction of moments one by one, and if you subtract those immense spaces of time not once or twice or any number of times, but without limit, it is all to no avail; you never reach the beginning, because there is no beginning at all. Therefore the question which we now ask after 5, 000 years or more, posterity could as well ask, with the same curiosity, after 600, 000 years, if the mortal state of humanity, with its succession of birth and death, should last so long, and our frailty, with all its ignorance, should endure. And our predecessors might have raised the same question soon after the creation of man. In fact the first man himself might have asked, on the day after he was made, or even on the very day of his creation, why he had not been made sooner. And whenever he had been made, no matter how much earlier, this objection about the beginning of temporal things would have had precisely the same force then as now—or at any other time.”[44]

Conclusion

According to “Saint” John Paul II’s scandalous “Catechism of the Catholic Church”, any believer may accept either literal or special creation within the period of an actual six-day, twenty-four-hour period, or they may accept the belief that the earth evolved over time under the guidance of God! This new “Catholicism” holds blasphemously that God Himself initiated and continued the process of “his evolutionary creation,” and that all humans, whether specially created or evolved, have and have always had specially created souls—not just bodies, because that, according to Pius XII, may have possibly evolved!—for each individual.

On the contrary, traditional Catholicism teaches that God created the first human beings on this earth, Adam and Eve, along with the other land animals, on Day 6 of the Creation Week (Genesis 1:20–25, 31)—and that was, according to recorded or Sacred History, about six thousand years ago, not the evolutionary utopian millions or billions of years ago. Death, bloodshed, disease, and suffering as we experience here on earth are a result of Adam’s sin (Genesis 1:29–30; Romans 5:12, 14;1 Corinthians 15:21–22). Representatives of all the kinds of air-breathing land animals went aboard Noah’s Ark during the Flood. All those left outside the Ark died in the cataclysmic circumstances of the Flood, and many of their remains became fossils. After the Flood, around 4,300 years ago, the remnant of the land animals came off the Ark and lived in the present world, along with people. All the people living in the present world are descendants of those that survived the Flood. 

The “logic” of evolution is that human nature changes with time. This, put simply, is quite contrary to reason and common sense—quite contrary to what we really observe in our world. From the history of humans—and I mean humans as presented to us by recorded history—we are yet to observe that, to observe, for instance, that an African or European man living in the present world is different in appearance (as human) from an African or European man that lived in the first century AD (or any other period of recorded history); or that he speaks like a normal human while the former did not; or that men living in the present world can reason while those that lived in the BCs did not (even though we are yet to see thinkers in the present world who can reason as soundly as Plato or Aristotle).

As I once wrote in an old article, “To deny the relevance of Classics—and may I add, philosophy—in the modern world is to reject human sentiment,” writes Sarah Graham, “to ignore the fact that, in spite of the passing of centuries, human character remains the same. Despite the many differences between the ancients and ourselves, and the many changes in the world we live in, the ancient writers convey emotions so eloquently and so strongly, that they are able to bridge the gap across the centuries and communicate with us directly through our most basic human emotions. We feel the same horror of war, the same pangs of love, the same dread of isolation, the same fear of death and the same desire to make our mark upon the world, to live on through our words and deeds, as the ancient writers we read.”

In a nutshell, the human beings presented to us by the Bible or recorded history are those who, just like us, are humans in all things, while those presented by evolutionary history are radically different from us and are, in fact, not really humans.

Gerhard Ludwig Müller, Francis-appointed—and now demoted—“cardinal”, recently commented on the situation facing today’s Europe—with a focus on Germany—calling it “dramatic”.

New figures show about 160,000 Catholics left the Church in Germany last year alone. The number may be an improvement on 2015, when 180,000 “faithful” left the Church—or opted out of paying a church tax compulsory for members—but it still represents a sharp decline.

Müller lamented the state of German, and wider European, society.

“Active participation is very much diminished, also the transmission of the Faith not as a theory but as an encounter with Jesus Christ has waned. Religious vocations the same.”

Europe, he said, is undergoing a “forced de-Christianisation” that goes “way beyond secularisation”.

“It is the de-Christianisation of the entire anthropological base, with man strictly defined without God and without transcendence. Religion is experienced as a sentiment, not as adoration of God, Creator and Saviour.” (See a similar news: Dutch bishops tell Pope the Church is collapsing as they face hundreds of closures).

When we see some Westerners teaching the doctrine of evolution as a “scientific fact”, the above description is the fundamental “secret” behind their action: that is, it’s because they no longer believe in God or in what His Church teaches. This disbelief isn’t really because they aren’t sure whether the Christian Faith is true or not but because there is simply a massive hatred of God and religion generally—hence they don’t care replacing Christianity with just any assumption, true or false. 

“As Christian faith has ceased to command universal acceptance, society has turned to other ideological bases,” writes Tony Lane. “For sometime much of the world adopted a new secular ‘religion’, Marxism-Leninism. In the West, society is based on secular, non-religious assumptions. Religion is increasingly seen as a private affair for the individual, a matter for personal preference, like choosing to join a tennis club. This process has been encouraged by the emergence of a more pluralist society where a variety of different religions are practised.”[45]

The reason why the Catholic Church suffers more from atheists/secularists/liberal Christians in our time than other religions is because She alone, among other innumerable false religions in the world, “claims” to be the only true religion in the world—and She is. This “claim” has now been vigorously rejected. For instance we observe that the majority of contemporary scholars worldwide—both Christians and non-Christians—no longer use the terms AD and BC. The terms BC, Before Christ, and AD, Anno Domini, remain in common usage but have been expunged from the secular language of officialdom and academia. The new terms BCE, Before Common Era, and CE, Common Era (first invented in the sixth century AD) are now the rule in order to express politically correct sensitivity to non-Christians—even though whether it’s BC or BCE, both systems take the (Catholic) Gregorian calendar as their starting point! Of course, the reason for this new attitude is because BC and AD do have a religious significance because they state that Jesus of Nazareth is both God and Messiah: AD means “Year of the Lord.” BC means “Before Christ” or “Before the Messiah.” This religious component makes CE and BCE “more attractive” to many people—particularly atheists, secularists, non-Christians and liberal Christians. CE and BCE are notations that are not based on religion. They can be embraced by all.

Similarly, Church leaders who currently champion the doctrine of evolution want something which can be embraced by all, because the concept of Sacred History is just "outdated".

Notes:

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[1] "creation myth." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite.  Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] "evolution." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite.  Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014.

[5] Ibid.

[6] In The Popes Against Modern Errors (Rockford, Illinois 61105: Tan Books and Publishers, 1999) p.346

[7] Ibid. p. 361.

[8] In the Beginning, pp. 12, 65, 66. In the Beginning is an annotated version of a 4-homily series delivered by Joseph Ratzinger in Munich (1981). Subtitled A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall, the book was published in Germany in 1985 and is now available in English translation.

[9] Ibid. p. 50.

[10] Op. cit.

[11] Their article, How accurate are Carbon-14 and other radioactive dating methods?

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] A.R. Williams, “Long-age Isotope Dating Short on Credibility,” CEN Technical Journal, 1992, 6(1):2-5.

[17] Woodmorappe, The Mythology of Modern Dating Methods.

[18] F. M. Cornford From Religion to Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1957) p. 8

[19] Ernst Mayr The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, MA Belknap Press, 1982) p. 304

[20] Timaeus (28a)

[21] Ibid. (29b)

[22] Ibid. (29c)

[23] Ibid. (29d)

[24] Ibid. (29a)

[25] Ibid.

[26] A.A. Snelling, “The Cause of Anomalous Potassium-argon 'Ages' for Recent Andesite Flows at Mt. Nguaruhoe, New Zealand, and the Implications for Potassium-argon 'Dating,'” Proc. 4th ICC, 1998, pp.503-525.

[27] "big-bang model." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite.  Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014.

[28] In his Ad salutem humani generis (1930).

[29] In his Saepenumero considerantes (1883).

[30] Aeterni Patris (1879)       

[31] Quamquam Ecclesia (1954).

[32] Acts 1:7.

[33] De Civitate Dei contra paganos, Liber XXIII, 30.

[34] William M. Green: “Augustine on the Teaching of History,” University of California Publications in Classical Philology, 12, (1944), 315.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Augustine The Educator (West Minster, Maryland, 1964) p. 228

[37] Ibid.

[38] G. Amari II concetto di storia in Sant ’Agostino. (Roma: Edizioni Paoline, 1950) p. 93. Quoted by Eugene Kevane on page 239-240 of Augustine The Educator. Original text: “Questa ‘regalis via liberandae animae’ tracciata dalla Provvidenza all’umanita, e la storia della religione cristiana. E la visione storica della salute che Agostino attinge dalla tradizione, S. Paolo e i padri. La Sacra Scrittura e una storia, ma qualcosa di piu di una storia, intesa come racconto di avvenimenti, come cronaca. In questa storia sacra il racconto e secondario, esso e mezzo, veicolo di una con concezione, di una dottrina. La creazione, la caduta, l’antica alleanza sono dei fatti situati nel tempo, ma portano in seno grandi verita religiose, dogmi e altre verita secondary e spirituali. Dio ha nascosta queste verita in fatti, perche siano accessibili a tutti. Questa accondiscendenza divina e rilevata con parole espressive da S. Agostino.”

[39] De catech. Rudibus 22 (39): J.P. Christopher (trans.), St. Augustine: The First Catechetical Instruction (“Ancient Christian Writers” No 2; Westminster, MD.: The Newman Bookshop, 1946) p.70, in Augustine The Educator, op. cit., p.216.

[40] De gen. ad litt., VIII, 1 (2); P.L. 34, 272: “Narratio in his libris (Genesis) non genere locutionis figuratarum rerum est, sicut in Cantico Canticorum, sed omnino gestarum, sicut in Regnorum libris et hujuscemodi.”

[41] Quoted by Eugene Kevane, op. cit. p. 

[42] De Civitate Dei contra paganos, op. cit. Liber XII, 11.

[43] Ibid. Liber XII, 17

[44] Ibid. Liber XII, 13.

[45] Tony Lane Exploring Christian Thought (Nashville Tennessee: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1996) p. 182