Autor: Xavier Silva Data de Publicação: 02Set2020 21:25:07 Comentários: 0 Ler na origem:http://wake-up.acordem.com/
Creation v. Evolution: Science and the Catholicism agree on the winner
Welcome to this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show. I'm your host, John-Henry Westen. We're going to be talking about something very controversial, about creation versus evolution, and it's going to be really fascinating. Stay tuned.
Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I am pleased to be with, on the program today, someone who has studied this issue of evolution versus creation for a long, long time. His name is Hugh Owen. Hugh, welcome to the program.
HO: Thank you. It's a joy to be with you.
JHW: So let's get into this issue. First of all, from the sort of 30,000-foot view, what's going on with creation, evolution? I mean, this was universally believed. You know, God's order of creation was believed and taught in schools all over the place until, actually, very recently in terms of history. And yet now, there's been court cases about it to stop it, fights and legislatures to allow people to still teach it in the classroom, and a big debate. Where are we today?
HO: Okay. Well, the situation today has to be understood in the right context. The origins of man and the universe is a fundamental issue because what we understand and believe about the origins of man and the universe determines our whole world view. It determines how we understand ourselves, how we understand the Creator - if we believe in creation - and how we understand our relationship with Him. So it's fundamental. And in the last 2,000 years, the Catholic church has always based her teaching, her whole program of education on God's revelation of how He created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all they contain as it was revealed to Moses in the sacred history of Genesis.
What happened was, beginning in the 19th century, there was a movement to abandon the traditional teaching of the church on creation and to replace it with a man-made hypothesis that everything in the universe came into existence through the same kinds of natural processes that are going on now. And at first, there was a lot of resistance to that. But eventually, by really early in the 20th century, the secular humanists whose whole world view is based on the assumption that everything has come into existence through a natural process of evolution through the same kinds of material processes that are going on now, these people like John Dewey, basically took control of education here and throughout the Western world and they began to impose the teaching of this molecules-to-man evolutionary hypothesis as natural science. And they began to work to exclude any teaching of supernatural creation as a religious doctrine which had no place in secular education.
Now, the irony of this, of course, is that neither the evolutionary account of the origins of man and the universe, nor the true Christian account of the origins of man and the universe is something that can be determined through the normal methods of natural science for one very simple reason: the work of Creation was supernatural. That was understood and taught in the church from the beginning and by all of the fathers and doctors of the church, including St. Thomas Aquinas.
So the very presumption that the origins of man and the universe is a proper subject for natural science is, in itself, not a straightforward inference from empirical science, it's a philosophical assumption. And the irony is that the secular humanists are actually imposing their religion because secular humanism is a religion. And the Supreme Court has even recognized secular humanism as a religion for freedom-of-religion purposes. But when it comes to the teaching of evolution in the public schools, even though it's the foundation of secular humanism, it's treated as natural science. Whereas, the Christian explanation for the origins of man and the universe – which is much more reasonable – is banned because it's supposedly the tenet of a religion. This is the situation right now.
JHW: Okay. So that's exactly it. But what I love about what you're doing is that you're actually taking on the science itself as well. And we're going to talk all about that. But first of all, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about the Kolbe Center that you founded?
Personal presentation
HO: Certainly. I got into this work because my father was the son of a Baptist minister in Wales, brought up in a conservative Christian home, who went to university in the '20s and '30s in England, and was taught that science could explain the origins of man and the universe through evolution. And my father, like millions of other people then and now, completely lost his faith in Christianity, became a secular humanist, went to work for the United Nations, became an assistant secretary-general co-administrator of United Nations' development program. After 25 years, retired from the UN, was knighted by the queen, and then looked at the world and saw that all the problems of the world were much worse than when the United Nations was founded. And determined, with the help of the intelligentsia that he knew, that the reason the United Nations was not making headway in solving the world's problems was because it wasn't going to the root of the world's problems which was over-population. And the argument was, if we cut down on population growth, we'll have enough to go around and all our problems will be solved. And so my dad accepted to become the first-ever secretary-general of International Planned Parenthood Federation at the very time when IPFF changed its position on abortion and became the world's number one provider of abortion as well as contraception and sex education.
And he held that position for about a year when he died unexpectedly of a heart attack in London when I was just 16 years old. Now, I had been brought up with no Bible, no prayer, no Christian formation whatsoever. But I believe, and I can't get into all the reasons why I'm confident, that at the last moment our Lord Jesus Christ gave my father the opportunity to see the truth and to repent. And I firmly believe that as he went down into the depths of purgatory, he began to pray for me, his very confused 16-year-old son. But whether or not the audience is willing to accept that, the fact of the matter is, less than two years after my father's death, I received the gift of faith, I was baptized, confirmed, and made my first Holy Communion as a Catholic in the Princeton University chapel where I was enrolled as a freshman.
Dutch cataclysm
Now, at that time, the Catholic chaplaincy at Princeton University was run by Jesuits. And the Jesuit priest who received me into the church, gave me a catechism so that I could learn my Catholic faith. But the catechism he gave me was the infamous Dutch catechism. We call it the Dutch cataclysm because this is the book that totally destroyed the faith of a once vibrant Catholic community. But this catechism has a theme that runs through it from beginning to end. And it is this: that we live in a scientific age and natural science has enlightened us so that we can understand everything in our Catholic faith in a new and deeper way. And with this very high-sounding introduction, the authors proceed to sow doubt in the mind of the reader about everything from the existence of angels, of Satan, of Adam and Eve, of original sin, of the perpetual virginity of our Lady, the virgin birth, the intrinsic evil of contraception, and everything you can imagine. And so it's an absolute miracle that I survived the Dutch cataclysm and came into the church at all. But even though I did survive the Dutch cataclysm, it caused a tremendous amount of confusion. And I consider it a very special grace obtained for me by the blessed Virgin Mary that I never could really accept this idea completely, that anything that we would learn, new things that were true in natural science, that it would cause us to change the teaching of the church in faith and morals.
Kolbe Center
And ultimately, I was delighted to discover that at the very time that my dad was being robbed of his faith, because there was nobody in his environment to show him the fatal flaws in this molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis, St. Maximilian Kolbe was writing articles and sending them all over the world, showing that the emperor of evolution was not wearing any clothes, that there actually wasn't sound scientific evidence for this idea that molecules turned into humans bodies over millions of years of the same kinds of material processes that are going on now.
And so in the jubilee year of 2000, we founded the Kolbe Center for the study of creation to provide a forum for Catholic theologians, philosophers, and natural scientists who reject this molecules-to-man evolution – we would say, mythology; we wouldn't even call it a hypothesis – and to defend the traditional teaching of the church on creation that was believed and taught by all the fathers, doctors, popes, and council fathers in their authoritative teaching.
JHW: Right. I think this is fascinating because you have amassed for yourself a bunch of-- and not only scientists. Scientists is great too, because they're able to latch on to the science and show the falsehoods, and we'll get into that. But you also have the theologians and the experts in philosophy who are able to explain how this has undermined the faith. So I understand also that you and your colleagues have just produced a DVD series, in fact, a 17-part series, called Foundations Restored. So if you can tell us about that, what's the series about and why did you decide to make it?
Foundations Restored DVD
Certainly. Foundations Restored is the most comprehensive defense of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation and the most comprehensive refutation of the principle claims of the molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis ever produced by Catholics in the video medium. It took us three and a half years. It was a team effort on the part of a large number of Catholic theologians, philosophers, and natural scientists. And what we've done in this series is to, first of all, show that the understanding of or the study of the origins of man and the universe is not a proper subject for natural science because we cannot observe the work of creation, it's something that took place in the past. And all the fathers, doctors, popes, and council fathers, in the tradition of the church, made a very clear distinction between the work of creation in the beginning, which was supernatural, and what many doctors call the order of providence, the natural order, what we are living in where God had finished the work of creation. And now He's just holding the work of creation in existence and everything's operating according to the natural laws that God established in the beginning.
Therefore, we can't study what's going on now and from that extrapolate all the way back to the beginning to understand how everything came to be. But we show right up front that competing with what we call the creation providence framework – which is the one revealed to us by God as the true framework and the only one as we can explain that really makes sense of what we see – is what we call the Cartesian Darwinian framework or narrative. And this was the framework that was put forward by the so-called enlightenment philosophers beginning, especially, in the 17th century with Rene Descartes and then Immanuel Kant and others. And what they did was to claim that it was more reasonable to explain the origins of man and the universe in terms of the same material processes that are going on now instead of this strange idea that things just popped into existence in the beginning. Now, Descartes' works were put on the index because every theologian worth his salt knew that this was complete nonsense.
JHW: The index, meaning a list of books that should not be read by Catholics. Right?
Correct. Yes.
Yeah.
HO: And the reason was that every theologian worth his salt in the entire world knew you could no more expect to explain the origins of man and the universe in terms of the natural processes that are going on now than you could explain the origins of the wine at Cana in terms of the natural processes that are normally at work when wine is produced. In both cases, it was the supernatural action of God that produced the result. And in fact, the fathers noted that the miracle at the wedding of Cana was the first sign that our Lord Jesus Christ did and that there were six containers of water precisely to show that the divine power by which our Lord instantly changed ordinary water into the most wonderful wine that anybody had ever tasted, which had all the appearance of having gone through a long, natural process, that it actually didn't go through at all, was the same divine power by which he created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all they contain supernaturally in the beginning. And so--
In six days.
In six days, yes.
Yeah.
Now, there's an Augustinian minority view which holds that God created all the different kinds of creatures instantaneously. But that is not at all compatible with the molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis even though many Catholic intellectuals today like to claim St. Augustine for theistic evolution, they're not really being honest, or at least not being correct in doing that because all the fathers and doctors agree that the entire work of creation was supernatural, God spoke and it was made, He commanded and it was created.
Origins is not a proper matter for empirical science
So the point is that right at the beginning of the DVD series, we establish this fundamental truth that what we believe about the origins of man and the universe is not a proper matter for empirical science because there is no creation going on now. The only way that we can know how God created the world in the beginning is from divine revelation.
Now, for the Cartesian Darwinian framework, the assumption is made that we have to be able to explain everything in terms of natural causes, in terms of the same material processes that are going on now. And whereas, the church, for a very long time, resisted this naturalism and even condemned it in the Syllabus of Errors and at the first Vatican council. Little by little, more and more Catholic intellectuals – in most cases, without intending to do anything wrong – accepted this enlightenment view, that it is actually proper for natural scientists to try to explain the origins of everything in the universe in terms of the same material processes that are going on now.
And this is why most Catholic intellectuals today believe that it is perfectly legitimate and correct to give naturalistic explanations for the origins of everything in the universe, from stars and galaxies to every kind of plant and animal and even for the human body prior to the point at which God infused the human soul into the body of an evolved subhuman primate. But what most of these Catholic intellectuals, no matter how brilliant they are, what most of them do not understand is that they have accepted this enlightenment philosophy which has no basis whatsoever in the entire tradition of the Catholic church. And in doing so, they are actually doing immense harm to natural science because, as we prove in the DVD series, every attempt to give a natural explanation for the origins of man and the universe fails miserably. And what happens is the scientific community ends up investing a tremendous amount of its resources in an exercise in futility. It would be like getting the most brilliant scientists and engineers in the world and saying, "Your top priority is to figure out how the water at Cana turned into wine. And we're going to give you an unlimited budget and the best facilities in the world so that you can accomplish this task." It would be a colossal waste of resources.
But that is exactly what is happening in the scientific community today because the false enlightenment philosophy has been accepted by the overwhelming majority of intellectuals both within the Catholic community and certainly beyond. And as a result, it's now come to be the conventional wisdom, certainly not the teaching of the church, that the origins of man and the universe is a legitimate subject for natural science. And this is the very first point that has to be clarified. So from that starting point, we go on to show what the authoritative teaching of the church has been from the time of the apostles with regard to the origins of man and the universe. And that tells us that the sacred history of Genesis is just that, it's an accurate account of what God actually did when He created the world. And it's an accurate account of what happened in the first period of human history leading up to the global flood and the tower of Babel incident. And then we show that this alternative explanation for the origins of man and the universe did not have a very good origin because Descartes actually developed this idea that we could explain everything in the universe, how it originated through natural processes, after leading a very immoral life, dabbling in the occult, and leaving Catholic France for the Netherlands where he would be free to think and do and write as he pleased. And he himself admitted that he had three mystical dreams in which a spirit of truth possessed him and put him on the path to develop a wonderful new way of thinking that would change the way people thought.
And if you watch the DVD series, I don't think you'll have any doubt who that spirit of truth, alias Lucifer, was that gave Descartes revolutionary ideas that turned the whole current of thought in the Western world away from the tradition of the church, the tradition of St. Thomas and the scholastics, in a totally different direction which actually has led us away from God and away from the truth.
But we don't stop there because we go on to respectfully present all the claims, all the principle claims of the molecules-to-man evolution theorists beginning with big bang cosmology with the Lyellian geology that was developed by Charles Lyell and James Hutton and their disciples which set the stage for Darwin. And then we thoroughly address all the claims of the evolutionary biologists. And we also deal with the claim that there is overwhelming evidence from radiometric dating and from geology that the earth and the universe are billions of years old. And we show [that in?] reality, all of this so-called overwhelming evidence is based on certain assumptions which are not only unprovable, they are actually unreasonable. And that when we look at the empirical evidence objectively, in any area of natural science, it is much more consistent with the traditional teaching of the church on creation than it is with the molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis.
JHW: Right. And that, I think, is very, very fascinating. So the science, in as much as it can look at things, is actually more supportive of creation than it is of evolution itself. One of the things that I found fascinating in talking to you earlier is about how this sort of established knowledge about evolution took place even among Catholic intellectuals. You were talking about a process whereby they were actually known fakes to prove evolution, but those lasted long enough to convince enough people that-- you know, some were convinced then it was found to be fake. There was another one in place to sort of prove-- these are, of course, the missing link fakes I'm talking about. But if you can explain some of that progression which allowed for so much of the Catholic intellectual world to actually embrace and accept as fact evolution.
HO: Yes. In the DVD series, we go into the most important examples of this kind in detail, drawing from the scientific literature. But right now, I want to just zero in-- zero in on the most important deception that was successful in convincing a huge portion of the Catholic intellectual elite that molecules-to-man evolution was sound science. And this took place very early on.
The Church’s 1st reaction
You see, if you go back to the time when Charles Darwin published his book, Origin of Species, one of the remarkable things that you will learn or discover is that when Darwin first came out with his book, blessed Pope Pius IX considered his ideas so preposterous, so absurd, that he did not think they merited a serious refutation. We have the forward that-- or recommendation that blessed Pope Pius IX wrote for a book by a French doctor refuting Darwin's wild conjectures. And in that recommendation, blessed Pope Pius IX calls Darwin's hypothesis a tissue of fables.
And this is one of the reasons why, at the first Vatican council which was convened 10 years after the publication of Origin of Species, there was not an explicit anathema against evolution because, at that point, it simply wasn't taken seriously. There was, however, an anathema that was handed down by the first Vatican council which did exclude evolution from serious consideration by Catholics. And that was the anathema which said that if anyone says that to the dogmas of the faith a new meaning must be given, different than what has been understood and what is currently taught, let him be anathema. Now, you have to understand that at the moment that anathema was handed down, what was the gold standard for teaching and preaching the dogmas of the Catholic faith in the whole world? It was the Catechism of the Council of Trent. And anybody can go online and look up the first article of the creed in the Catechism of Trent and see that the catechism teaches that God created everything by fiat, by willing it into existence. There was no evolution. He created all the different kinds of plants, all the heavenly bodies, all the different kinds of animals; Adam, body and soul, and Eve, from Adam's side, supernaturally.
And then the catechism is very clear, that then He stopped creating new kinds of creatures because He created everything for us in our first parents, Adam and Eve, we would say, in view of the incarnation and the Immaculate Conception, and only then did the natural order that we are living in now begin. So it is impossible for us to learn anything in natural science that is true, be it in astronomy, in geology, biology, or any other area of natural science, that will ever contradict the dogma of creation as it's set forth in the Catechism of the Council of Trent.
Ernst Haeckel
But here's what happened, the most successful propagandist for microbe-to-man evolution was not Charles Darwin and it wasn't even T. H. Huxley, although he was very effective. The most effective propagandist for this evolution mythology was the German anatomist Ernst Haeckel. Now, everybody of my generation, I would say, of your generation, who took a high school biology or freshman biology course was taught the same fraudulent pseudo-science that Ernst Haeckel successfully presented to the scientific world as fact.
