Catholic Apologetics International
Is The Earth Old or Young?
In the April 2003 issue of the New Oxford Review, Catholic astrophysicist Dermott Mullan proposes that evolutionists are correct in saying that the earth is billions of years old. In the next seven issues of the Catholic Family News I will be mounting a critique of Mullan’s old-earth theory. In this installment I will critique the foundation of evolution espoused by Charles Darwin and his followers. In the second, I will speak about Catholic evolutionists in particular, and begin my critique of Mullen’s NOR piece, and complete it in the seventh installment.
Ever since Charles Darwin published his 1859 book, Origin of Species, the debate of whether the earth is old or young has dominated much of the theological and scientific landscape. From the Scopes Monkey trial in the 1920's to John Paul II’s 1996 statement that “evolution is more than a hypothesis,” the debate rages on.
Contrary to any interpretations stemming from the Pope’s 1996 comment, however, for over 1900 years Catholic tradition has maintained the belief that the earth is young, that is, less than 10,000 years old. From the Fathers to the Medievals, a literal interpretation both of the Creation account in Genesis 1 and the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, left no room for any other view. After Darwin, however, a number of Catholics began sliding into the clutches of the evolutionary hypothesis.
By and large, following the influence of such figures as Fr. George Mivart in his 1871 book Genesis of Species(1), Fr. Ernest Messenger in his 1931 book Evolution and Theology(2), Fr. Pierre Tielhard de Chardin in his book The Phenomenon of Man(3), Fr. Richard Nogar’s 1963 book The Wisdom of Evolution(4) and Fr. Stanley Jaki’s Genesis 1 Through the Ages(5), many Catholics are convinced that some form of evolutionary process is a scientific fact and that Genesis is to be interpreted along such lines.
Recently, however, a prominent group of Catholics have once again taken up the banner bequeathed to them from tradition. Chief among them is the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation. Its members house theologians and scientists from all over the world, some tops in their field. In October 2002, the Kolbe Center presented the Special Creation model (i.e., the universe was created in six days) to both John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger at the Vatican, in two different meetings. I was privileged to be present at one of them. The presentation was comprised of scriptural, magisterial and scientific information gathered over the last 50 years that gives positive evidence of a young earth, much of it not known before. For example, one of the Kolbe scientists, Dr. Guy Berthault, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, has proven beyond little doubt that Charles Lyell’s theory of the geologic column (i.e., that the layers of sediment were formed over millions of years) is false.(6) Another scientist, Dr. Robert Gentry, has shown by evidence of Polonium halos that the earth had to be created instantaneously, otherwise Polonium 216, with a half-life of 3 minutes, could not exist. Hence, the traditional Catholic approach to the question of origins has come of age, and is now poised to present to the world a very convincing scientific model of how the world was created in six days.
But we do have our critics, and they are legion in modern Catholicism. Most of them come from the liberal ranks, but a few conservatives have joined the fray. Ever since the Galileo affair, the prevailing thought among a consensus of Catholics is that the Church should never again be caught between the claims of science and the interpretation of Scripture. Consequently, today’s modern Catholic makes a concerted effort to offer little resistence to all the current theories of cosmology and cosmogony into the interpretation of Scripture (including the Big Bang, Einstein’s Relativity, Darwin’s evolution, and Lyell’s geological timetable). In this way, as even the world’s leading evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard advocated until his dying day, science can have its “magisterium” and theology can have its. In his 1999 book, Rocks of Ages, Gould called this wishful relationship “Non-Overlapping Magisterium,” or NOMA for short.(7) In his view, science is the king of its domain, and Scripture would have to distance itself from anything science claimed, whether it was proven as scientific fact or not. In fact, Gould, and his colleague Niles Eldredge (of the American Museum of Natural History), had a convenient way of turning even their theories into fact. Gould claimed, for example:
“Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact...Einstein’s theory of gravitation replaced Newton’s in this century, but apples didn’t suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin’s proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered....Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory – natural selection – to explain the mechanism of evolution.(8)
Of course, Gould and Eldredge were secular evolutionists who didn’t give a whit about what Scripture said, although it should be noted that Gould took great pride in his Judaistic roots, but Eldredge laments:
I am a ‘lapsed Baptist.’....I will say that I am extremely skeptical that the kind of all-knowing, all-caring, all-doing God pictured in some circles exists.(9)
Despite their self-assurance, in 1980 they were finally forced to admit that a gargantuan hole existed in the evolutionary model they had been espousing. Gould and Eldredge went on record at a major science convention in Chicago admitting that, after 100 years of painstaking archeological research, they were not able to find any transitional fossils (e.g., fish to amphibian; reptile to bird, etc), and because of this lack of evidence, classical Darwinism had to be abandoned. Newsweek magazine covered the event and reported: “the majority of the 160 of the world’s top paleontologists, anatomists, evolutionary geneticists and developmental biologists supported some form of this new theory of ‘punctuated equilibria.’” Needless to say, Gould and Eldredge shook up the whole auditorium, as well as the entire scientific community. In one of Gould’s more somber moments he admitted that the lack of transitional fossils was “the trade secret of paleontology.” Eldredge had first hand experience of this, since he organized regular expeditions to search for the needed fossils but always came up empty.
In place of Darwin, as noted above, Gould and Eldredge proposed the theory of “punctuated equilibrium” – a fancy phrase which proposes nothing more than the idea that sea and land animals just suddenly began appearing, or “punctuating” the earth, without any sign that they had evolved from a previous species. Trying to avoid the obvious (i.e., that they didn’t evolve), Gould had a clever answer for the lacuna – intermediate fossils do not appear, he said, because the progression from one species to another happened so fast that there was no time for fossilization to occur. Of course, the adoring crowd of scientists were all too happy to accept his explanation, since the alternative was admitting that the real reason we didn’t see any transitional fossils was that God “punctuated” the world with plants and animals on six successive days.
After Gould’s explanation, Catholic scientists were also battening down the hatches of the evolutionary ship they had already accepted from Mivart, Messenger, de Chardin, et al. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which is composed of about 80 members who are appointed without reference to “race or religious creed,” and who are all avowed evolutionists – not once accepting a single Special Creationist in their ranks since the academy’s inception – stated in 1982, just two years after Gould’s admission, that “...we are convinced that masses of evidence render the application of the concept of evolution to man and other primates beyond serious doubt.” How the PAS could have no “serious doubt” after Gould’s stark admission just two years prior is anyone’s guess. If nothing else, it shows the intellectual hubris of the PAS. We can understand why papal envoy Archbishop Luigi Barbarito stated: “About this body I would say that it has no authority in matters of faith and doctrine and expresses only the views of its own members who belong to different religious beliefs.”(10)
Actually, Gould and Eldredge were not the first to opt for punctuated equilibrium. Charles Darwin himself, when pressed for his own lack of evidence of intermediate fossils, wrote in Origin of Species:
...We do not make due allowance for the enormous intervals of time, which have probably elapsed between our consecutive formations – longer perhaps in some cases than the time required for the accumulation of each formation. These intervals will have given time for the multiplication of species from some one or some few parent-forms; and in the succeeding formation such species will appear as if suddenly created (emphasis mine).(11)
Feeling the heat from his colleagues, and being incessantly quoted by Protestant creationists who were using his concession to further their cause, in 1983 Gould altered his view, saying:
Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists – whether through design or stupidity, I do not know – as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.(12)
What precisely Gould means by “generally lacking” and “larger groups” is anyone’s guess, but the ploy here is to keep the terminology sufficiently ambiguous so no one can pin him down. The phrase “generally lacking” would mean that there were at least some transitional fossils at the species level, but Gould was well aware that no such fossils had been found. It was the very reason he made his earth-shattering admission in Chicago in 1980. As to why “larger groups” show transition whereas species do not, Gould never explained, nor did he offer any specific examples. The fact remains, despite Gould’s claim, without specific transitional forms between species, evolution simply has no scientific evidence for its claims.
Ironically, ever since the discovery of genes and DNA, the main problem for evolutionary theory has been to explain how the upward progression of species, whether it occurs slowly or is punctuated, can create the proper genes for the next species, since it is well known that genes cannot create different genes. Whereas Crick and Watson boasted that their chief goal was to “discredit the existence of God,”(13) what they actually ended up discovering for the rest of the world is that DNA cannot evolve, rather, it is species-specific.
Other scientists in Gould’s ranks are a bit more revealing. Colin Paterson, senior palaeontologist at the British Museum of Natural History which houses the largest collection of fossils in the entire world, writing to a reader who wondered why there was no mention of intermediary fossils in his book on evolution, stated:
I fully agree with your commentary on the lack of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would have certainly included them. I will lay it on the line, there is not one such fossil.
During a paleontologist congress in 1998, Paterson asked his scientific colleagues whether someone had yet found a transitional fossil.(14) The whole audience remained ghastly silent.
Evolutionist A. G. Fisher, editor of American Scientist (1998) admitted: “The fossil record has always been a problem.” Similarly, Collard and Wood in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics (1994) state:
...existing phylogenetic hypotheses about human evolution are unlikely to be reliable. Accordingly, new approaches are required to address the problem of hominids....Despite a century of work on metazoan phylum-level phylogeny using anatomical and embryological data, it has not been possible to infer a well-supported [evolution].
In the same publication, S. R. Palumbi states: “The formation of species has long represented one of the most central, yet one of the most elusive subjects in evolutionary biology.”
In the book Parasitology by Noble and Noble, the authors state:
Natural selection can act only on those biologic properties that already exist; it cannot create properties in order to meet adaptational needs.
Orr and Coyne in American Naturalist (1992) admit:
We conclude – unexpectedly – that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak.
D. L. Stern in Evolution states:
One of the oldest problems in evolutionary biology remains largely unsolved. Which mutations generate evolutionary relevant phenotypic variations? What kinds of molecular changes do they entail?
Paleontologist Steven Stanley of Johns Hopkins University, writes in his 1981 book The New Evolutionary Time Table:
...the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.
David Raup of the University of Chicago states in his 1991 book: Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?:
We now have a quarter of a million fossil species, but the situation hasn’t changed
Theoretical biologist H. van Waesberghe states:
Finally, coincidence is not an explanation, but rather the lack of a scientific explanation....Based on these and other identical objections, colleagues are no longer interested in the proto-soup model, which is still taught in secondary and high schools....According to Yokey we don’t have the faintest idea how life has originated, and it would only be fair to admit this to the financiers of scientific research and to the public in general.(15)
Taking a different tact, Geoffrey Bourne, Oxford-educated American cell biologist and the world’s leading primatologist, has declared his belief that apes and monkeys came after man, not before, the exact opposite of Darwin’s theory.(16)
Seeing these twists and turns shows us that the theory of evolution is just as subject to evolution as the theory it presents. No one knows how it is supposed to work. They just somehow “know” that it does.
In the midst of these anomalies, one might ask why scientists are so tenacious in holding on to evolutionary theory, often casting aspersions on those who doubt its validity. The reasons are many.Darwin himself knew of the extreme difficulties in his theory: He writes:
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” In reference to the Cambrian explosion of fossils, Darwin writes: “The case at present must remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a valid argument against [my theory].(17)
Yet goes on to say that, if all the right conditions are present “...then the difficulty...can hardly be considered real.”(18)
Thus Darwin fantasized about “right conditions” to answer his problems. Other scientists are not so patient. They fend off their critics by wrapping themselves in impenetrable insulation. In addition to turning mere theory into fact, today’s evolutionists define “science” in a most peculiar way. To Eldredge, “science” is established by the failure to falsify it, not by proof of its tenets. He writes:
This simple prediction – that there is one grand pattern of similarity linking all life – doesn’t prove evolution, but only because science proceeds by falsifying – disproving – statements we make about how the universe is structured and how it behaves. But we gain tremendous confidence in our statements if, after hundreds of years, everything we have devised to test an idea fails to falsify it. And so the failure of scientists to disprove evolution over the past 200 years of biological research means that the fundamental idea that life has evolved really is one of the few grand ideas of biology that has stood the test of time.(19)
Conversely, in 1929, evolutionist D. M. S. Watson, gave an altogether different reason why science won’t be swayed from evolution. He writes:
The theory of evolution is universally accepted not because it can be proven true, but because the only alternative is special creation by God, which is clearly incredible.(20)
Neither Gould or Eldredge take kindly to such remarks, however. Eldredge, for example, in his book The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism, anathametizes anyone who puts the Creation/Evolution debate on a moral level. He writes: “To those who say there are moral lessons and ethical systems – evil or good – implicit in the very idea of evolution, I say, A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES” (emphasis his)(21). Eldredge adds a sardonic touch by printing the words The Failure of Creationism backwards on the front cover of his book.
Generally, evolutionists admit that the only alternative to their theory is that of a supernatural Creator who fashioned the world according to his pleasure, but this they automatically dismiss on the grounds that it is “unscientific.” Hence, the religion of Scientism is alive and well among our academia today. Eldredge writes:
...this tremendously diverse array of life...can rationally be explained only as the simple outcome of a natural shared descent with modification. The only alternative is the decidedly vague and inherently untestable (thus inherently unscientific) claim that it simply suited a supernatural Creator to fashion life in this way.(22)
Geneticist Richard Lewontin is quite candid about the impregnable wall that Evolutionists, like himself, have set up around themselves. He writes:
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a-priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.(23)
Unfortunately, the debate between special creation and evolution will forever be caught in this quagmire over God’s existence, and there is little hope, barring a dramatic conversion experience, that the evolutionist will ever see the light. Since they have camouflaged their failures as triumphs, their house of cards will continue to be built unabated.
In the meantime, many people, especially the impressionable young, are greatly influenced by evolutionary theories. A survey conducted in the late 1970's in Germany, searching for answers why many people no longer went to Church, revealed that a staggering sum of 47% attributed their spiritual apathy to the difference between the theological and scientific explanations for the origin of the world.(24) Abbe Michonneau, a 20th century worker-priest in Paris among the peasants, concluded that the conflict between science and the Genesis six-day creation story was much more effective in promoting atheism among the poor and the uneducated than were the social injustices that were inflicted on their flesh and blood.(25) It is no secret that some of the world’s most notorious men have attributed their atheistic and humanistic philosophies directly to Charles Darwin. Karl Marx, for example, dedicated his book Das Kapital to Darwin.
Lest we believe that the controversy between special creation and evolution is something new, a brief review of the patristics reveals that the Church Fathers were in heated battles with the Greeks over the origin of the world. The Greeks, not Darwin, were the first to propose the evolutionary model, and were also the first to propose a heliocentric solar system, not Copernicus. Writing against his Greek opponents, St. Basil of Caesarea writes:
Some had recourse to material principles and attributed the origin of the Universe to the elements of the world. Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules...by their union formed the nature of the visible world. Atoms reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths and the most durable bodies owing their consistency to the strength of their mutual adhesion...Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that all was given up to chance.(26)
Having similar experiences with the Greek scientists, Hippolytus of Rome, an early Father who lived in the second century (d. 235), writes:
But Leucippus, an associate of Zeno...affirms things to be infinite, and always in motion, and that generation and change exist continuously....And he asserts that worlds are produced when many bodies are congregated and flow together from the surrounding space to a common point, so that by mutual contact they made substances of the same figure and similar in form come into connection; and when thus intertwined, there are transmutations into other bodies, and that created things wax and wane through necessity...”(27)
After thoroughly examining their works, St. Basil concludes:
The philosophers of Greece have made much ado to explain nature, and not one of their systems has remained firm and unshaken, each being overturned by its successor. It is vain to refute them; they are sufficient in themselves to destroy one another.(28)
Needless to say, St. Basil was without doubt the greatest patristic authority espousing the six-day special creation model. At one point he calls Origen’s attempt to allegorize Genesis as “dreams and old wive’s tales.”(29) Incidentally, Origen was the only Father to allegorize Genesis 1, but that is probably due to Origen’s penchant to allegorize almost all of Scripture.
There is another breed of evolutionists who, although quite devoted to God’s existence as Creator, give themselves license to depart from a literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2 so that the prevailing views of science can take first place. Georgetown theology professor John F. Haught is one of these. Although the leading evolutionist, Stephen Gould, admitted in 1980 that there were no transitional forms between species, Haught claims that “there is no doubt among biologists today that transitional forms abound.” Moreover, despite the fact that 99% of genetic mutations are harmful, and that experiments which seek to create genetic mutations in the laboratory have produced no viable specimens, Haught denies this, claiming, “Genetics has had the effect of supporting and defining Darwin’s evolutionary theory...According to almost all biologists today, cumulative genetic change over time can bring about new species without requiring any special miracles.”(30) Haught’s book is nothing more than a complete dismissal of all the recent scientific evidence refuting evolution,(31) yet Haught is representative of most Catholic theologians today. Almost all of them have bought into the evolutionary hypothesis. Jude P. Dougherty, dean of philosophy at Catholic University of America states: “Evolution is perfectly compatible with the Catholic faith.” David Beyers, executive director of the committee on science for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington states: “Who questions evolution now in the Catholic Church? I really can’t think of anybody.”
An even more prominent example is Fr. Stanley Jaki, science professor at Seton Hall University. Accepting the methodology of the higher critical schools, Jaki asserts that Genesis 1 has little to do with the details of creation; rather, it is a story written by Jews returning from captivity in the sixth century BC. According to Jaki, the Jews wrote the creation drama merely to invigorate themselves with the sense of the divine, since they had lost their spiritual roots and fervor after spending 70 years in pagan Babylon. In Bible and Science, Jaki states: “And since Genesis 1 is, on stylistic grounds alone, a patently post-exilic document...,”(32) while in Genesis 1 Through the Ages he says that “accepting higher criticism about the three or more different sources of Genesis that almost force one to date Genesis 1 as post-exilic.”(33)
Jaki’s theory goes hand-in-hand with the historical critical school of the nineteenth century Protestant scholar Julius Wellhausen who posited that the Jews wrote Genesis 1 merely because they were seeking to compete with the Babylonian god Marduk, but for the sake of the Mosaic religion, managed to keep Genesis 1 free of any pagan notions. To Jaki, Genesis must be interpreted in this way since a literal interpretation is simply out of the question based on all the “scientific evidence” to the contrary.
In Genesis 1 Through the Ages, Jaki claims that the biggest stumbling block to a literal interpretation of the creation story is the fact that the sun and its natural light are created on the Fourth day but the earth and the original light are created on the First day. Jaki claims this is a scientific contradiction, and thus Genesis 1 can only be considered as the private musings of simplistic Hebrews. In his contempt for literalists, Jaki writes: “...that fourth day, perennially troublesome for those fond of waving their Bibles.”(34)
Although Jaki does a thorough search through the Fathers and Medievals, he finds that none of them had a problem with Genesis’ juxtaposition of light between the First and Fourth days. Jaki is quite dismayed with his findings and concludes that every bit of the patristic exegesis is for naught, since they simply had no way of knowing the real truth about science.
When we look at this honestly, both Scripture and science deny Jaki’s assurance. Scripture declares in Ecclesiastes 12:2 that there is a light in addition to the sun, moon and stars, as does Psalm 74:16 (73:16), while Job 38:19 states that we don’t know the source of this additional light. Now, either we take this information at face value, as Pope Leo XIII taught us that Scripture is to be “interpreted in its literal and obvious sense, except only where reason makes is untenable or necessity requires,”(35) or we make excuses for it. Unfortunately, despite the fact that David, Solomon and Job may be giving us an astounding scientific fact about light – something that we could not know on our own – Jaki and company are more than ready to relegate such information to the dustbin of primitive cultures.
Einstein himself, after all his years of studying light, couldn’t make up his mind whether it was a wave, a stream of particles, or something in-between. One of his more famous sayings is: “For the rest of my life I want to reflect on what light is.”(36) He is not the only one. Science has been struggling to understand the nature of light ever since the electro-magnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell in the mid 1800s, but without much success. In fact, it could be safely said that what science has actually discovered is how little they know about the nature of light.
Recently, three independent teams of scientists in the last five years, one of which was written up in the most prestigious science magazine on the planet, Nature, have shown by experiment that the speed of light is not constant. Not surprisingly, it has been known for quite some time that the speed of light traveling through glass is two-thirds of that when traveling through a vacuum. Yet careful analysis reveals that the propagation speed of light through glass is actually the same as in a vacuum, but that a superposition of effects in the glass makes it appear that the propagation speed is slower. If this is true for glass, it would also be true for light traveling through gravitational fields, which also means that light’s actual speed could be incalculable. And when we consider that Einstein’s claim for the constancy of light was a direct result of his desire to save the world from having to reject Copernicanism due to the results of the 1887 Michelson-Morley interferometer experiments, one might conclude that much of science today is nothing more than a concerted effort to save face from having to admit that Scripture was right all along.(37)
We might also mention that science boasts that the universe is 13.5 billion years old and the increasing red shift of light from the stars shows that they are very far away and are receding from the earth at great speeds. This reliance on red shift has been a cornerstone of modern cosmology and cosmogony, but its interpretation is highly in dispute, and certainly has not been proven. Current theory says that the red shift is due to the expansion of light’s wavelength. But the anomaly here is that if red shift is caused by longer wavelengths, then Hubble’s constant (a “constant,” incidentally, that has been changed several times) would require galaxies to be receding faster than the speed of light, which then means that Einstein’s theory of light’s constancy is nullified (even for general relativity). Moreover, red shift theory makes the nature of light dependent on the source, yet the source is said to be billions of miles away from the light it released. If light’s behavior is not source dependent, then there should be no red shift related to recession of the source.
Interestingly enough, it seems to have escaped the attention of the scientific community that the second law of thermodynamics would require that a light beam lose energy as it travels. If it loses energy, it will create a red shift, for that is the side of the light spectrum with less vitality. If so, this means the universe is much smaller and much younger than current science purports it to be. Suffice it to say, modern science is somewhat baffled and confused regarding the nature of light, as they are about many things. There is certainly enough doubt to make ample room for a literal interpretation of Genesis 1.
As Jaki holds tenaciously to the evolutionary theory, he disdains attempts to use Genesis as a model for the timetable. He writes: “...the evolution of the universe, from very specific earlier states to a very specific present state, nothing is, of course as much as intimated in Genesis 1. Much less should one try to find there the idea of a biological evolution...” Jaki also admits:
“In other words, nothing can any longer gloss over the fact that the fossil record defies the mechanism of evolution proposed by Darwin...the paleontological record was never known to have contained clear transitional forms, let alone a series of gentle gradations leading up to man....The only solid ground for holding evolution is belief in the createdness of the universe, and therefore in the strict interconnectedness of all its parts, a feature demanded by the infinite rationality of the Creator.”(38)
In this regard, Jaki states:
Already today one can be amused by seeing the ruins of bridges which certain Darwinists, more ideologues than scientists, had busily drawn as arching across vast gaps in the world of the living. They had claimed for well over a century that they had seen the transitional forms (the segments of those bridges) whose non-existence is now ruefully recognized. Some of them even admit that they have been lying all along.(39)
Popular Catholic philosophizer, George Sim Johnston agrees:
“The empirical evidence against Darwin is so compelling that a paradigm shift is inevitable.”
Like Jaki, Johnston advocates “a reasonable Catholic middle ground.” His plea is that “an enlightened Catholic view of science must recognize that God prefers to work through secondary causes,” and he quotes Francisco Suarez’s comment (although out of context) that, “God does not interfere directly with the natural order, where secondary causes suffice to produce the intended effect.” Johnston concludes that “There are good reasons to accept the earth’s age of 4.5 billion years...”(40) Lest we miss it, the key ingredient in Johnston’s “middle ground” is the idea of secondary causes, that is, causes that occur naturally after the raw material has been called into existence ex nihilo, which progressive creationists, such as himself, attribute only to the first day of Creation.
The special creationist (i.e., those, such as myself, who believe that God created separate things, ex nihilo, on all six days of creation) can agree partially, but not totally. Secondary causes certainly existed in the six days of creation. When water was created it assumed the shape of its container and it sought a lower point than land; or once birds were created, they flew by the Bernouli principle of aerodynamics. But secondary causes do not create new species of animals (that is, animals do not evolve from one species to another) simply because no naturally occurring secondary cause has ever been shown to create the new genes that the next species will need to exist.
Nevertheless, Jaki and Johnston are disdainful of special creationists. In Angles, Apes and Men, Jaki writes:
...only the blindness induced by the radical separation of faith from reason would insist on the creation of each and every species, and that the age of the universe must be measured in a few thousand years....The creationists aim at...impregnating young people’s minds with the biblical creation story which they expose to ridicule by taking literally all its statements.(41)
Similarly, Johnston says:
Scripture does not teach science, period. Unfortunately there are still biblical fundamentalists, Catholic and Protestant, who do not grasp this simple point.(42)
Here, as in many other statements from more liberal-minded Catholics, we see the epithet of “fundamentalist” being thrown around with abandon. Anyone who dares take Scripture at face value in its testimony on creation is immediately castigated as a naive, Bible-thumbing hillbilly.
But let’s analyze Johnston’s claim. In general, let’s agree that Scripture is not a scientific textbook. After all, Scripture does not have formulas like E=mc2 or F=ma. Nevertheless, let’s put this in perspective. Are the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence religious documents? All things considered, the answer would have to be no. They would be classed as political documents. But everyone will agree that when either of them address a matter of religion, all ears perk up, since it is recognized that they are giving factual statements about religion that, in fact, are some of the most crucial expression of the two documents.(43) The same is true with Scripture in regards to science. Yes, Scripture is not a “science” book, but when it touches upon a matter of science, all men’s ears should perk up, since Scripture is giving information about the world that men cannot obtain any other way, simply because man wasn’t there when God created the world.
Nevertheless, so convinced of his position is he, Johnston makes the outlandish claim that “Biblical fundamentalism – and its corollary, creation science – is a distinctively Protestant phenomenon.”(44) It is not surprising that Johnston would make such an assertion, since his book is virtually empty of patristic and medieval citations, except a few quotes from Augustine and one from Ambrose. But if Johnston had bothered to read the Fathers and medievals, he would have found out, as Stanley Jaki did quite painfully, that almost without exception, the Fathers were biblical literalists when it came to interpreting Genesis 1, and most of them had no trouble using science to help back up their claims when it agreed with Scripture. Jaki is dumbfounded that, in opposition to the Greeks, the Fathers had virtual unanimity on the fact that the days of Genesis 1 were 24-hours long, many even using the phrase “twenty-four hours” or its equivalent in their writings.(45) The main patristic witness Johnston cites is actually the very one that says it is necessary to use science to support the interpretation of Genesis 1, since in regard to science Augustine warns, “...the credibility of the Scripture is at stake.”(46) Not only that, but as we shall see below, Augustine warned that Scripture is the final authority in these matters.
In the face of this, advocates of Jaki’s and Johnston’s theistic evolution often commandeer a famous quote from Augustine to bolster their case. Cautioning Christians against putting unreasonable scientific burdens on Scripture, Augustine writes:
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world...Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn...Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.(47)
Jaki incessantly appeals to this quote from Augustine in an attempt to preempt literal interpretations of Genesis 1.(48) But the fact is that Jaki and his colleagues have totally misunderstood Augustine on this point. Augustine is merely warning Christians that they must know what they are talking about before they start expounding on the meaning of Scripture. But Augustine is not, by any means, saying that a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 is “reckless” or “embarrassing.” Although Augustine himself had some difficulties with the Genesis text, his first and foremost line of defense against the pagans and naysayers was to take Moses’ words very literally, something for which Jaki chastises Augustine, as he does the rest of the Fathers.
In fact, Jaki has two major litmus tests he consistently uses to determine if someone is interpreting Genesis 1 correctly. The first, as we saw, is his claim that the light of Day One and Day Four cannot be reconciled. Jaki dismisses the fact that most of the Fathers and medievals had sufficiently explained this anomaly. They taught that the light of the first day later became part of the light of the sun and stars on the fourth day. In fact, virtually all of the Fathers, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas and other medievals, understood the light of the First day as literal light that God created, independent of the sun and stars on the fourth day.(49) Yet Jaki dismisses this consensus as the “...concordist exegesis of many of the Church Fathers...”(50)
Of course, the biggest stumbling block to accepting independent sources of light on the First day and Fourth day, respectively, is that current science teaches us to believe that light cannot exist without being generated from a luminous body. But this has never been proven true. Let’s reason this out. Today’s scientists believe that the light we receive from distant stars has been traveling to earth for hundreds or thousands of years at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. Because of this vast distance, the scientist will have to agree that once light leaves the star it is, as it were, on its own. The light does not depend on the star in order to keep the light from existing or traveling. The light beam will do whatever it is designed to do with or without the star’s presence once it leaves the star. The star could be destroyed many years after it released the light, yet the light will keep traveling. Thus, light can exist, and will exist indefinitely, apart from luminous bodies. The only thing left to do is to identify the source of light which does not originate from a luminous body. But that has already been answered for us in Genesis 1:3, which teaches that God spoke it into existence. Once it exists, it exists. It does not need a luminous body for its survival.
Jaki’s second litmus test is his claim that the firmament of Genesis 1:4-6 has no scientific basis in fact. Anyone who dares interpret these words literally, Jaki more or less ridicules. Unfortunately for Jaki, the one he earlier cited to support the idea that Genesis 1 should not be interpreted literally (i.e., Augustine) is the very Father who doggedly adheres to a literal interpretation of the firmament, which shows that Jaki totally misunderstood Augustine’s former warning. Augustine writes:
With this reasoning some of our scholars attack the position of those who refuse to believe that there are waters above the heavens...Thus they would compel the disbeliever to admit that water is there not in a vaporous state but in the form of ice. But whatever the nature of that water and whatever the manner of its being there, we must not doubt that it does exist in that place. The authority of Scripture in this matter is greater than all human ingenuity.(51)
What does Jaki do with this? He merely dismisses it as flights of fancy in Augustine, never once admitting that his assessment of Augustine’s former warning could possibly be wrong. Jaki writes:
Augustine’s search for the firmament should seem baffling. It certainly seemed to slight the very sound principle he had already laid down in respect to reconciling truths known by reason about the physical world with corresponding propositions in the Bible.(52)
To his dismay, Jaki admits that he finds hardly anyone in the history of the Church who even mentions, let alone sides with, his view of Genesis 1.(53) In the face of this he claims, with quite a repetitive droning in his book, that the only thing the Genesis 1 writer was interested to demonstrate was that God had creative power, and he was only describing it by stating the “whole” (i.e., “In a certain beginning God created the heavens and the earth”) and then some of its “parts,” but whose “parts” have no relevance to actual sequential events.(54)
Contrary to Jaki, the scientific evidence seems to be leading right back to accepting the firmament of Genesis 1:6-8. In reading the Genesis account of Creation, one is immediately struck by the attention paid to the firmament. Its importance is noted by its occupying the whole of the second day of Creation. The passage centers around the firmament’s chief function – dividing the waters which enveloped the earth on the first day of Creation. Yet there is also a second function of the firmament, as we find out in the description of the fourth day of Creation. Here the firmament serves as the depository in which the sun, moon and stars are placed. Thus, on the one hand, the firmament seems to be a hard and sturdy substance; on the other hand, a malleable receptacle for massive bodies. The latter feature would certainly require that the firmament stretch out through the whole universe, since there seems to be no region in the universe where stars do not exist. As Gregory of Nyssa said of the firmament: “the beginning and the end of all material subsistences is called the firmament.”(55) Or as Jerome said: “There are countless other stars whose movements we trace in the firmament.”(56) In fact, all the Fathers who wrote on this subject believed the firmament was a substance spread out through the whole universe, and upon which rested water. In this light, it is not surprising that Ezek 1:22 and Apoc. 4:6 speak of ice (water) around the heavenly throne of God, and Psalm 148:4 (147:4) and Judith 9:17 speak of water above the heavens; nor is it surprising that modern science is well aware of giant water clouds in deep space.(57)
As for the substance of the firmament, it has long been known in modern science that there exists a world permeating all of space that consists of the smallest dimensions known to man – dimensions much smaller than even the smallest atomic particle. This strange world is known as “Planck” dimensions, named after the physicist Max Planck. It is in this world that lengths come as small as 10^-33 cm (10 to the minus 33 centimeters). Compare this to the atom which is 10^-13 cm in length and we see that the Planck length is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 times smaller than an atom. Accordingly, a Planck mass would be 10^-5 grams; a Planck time period would be 10^-44 seconds.
In fact current science theorizes that these Planck particles pop in and out of existence in 10^-44 seconds.(58) They also theorize that the density of theses Planck particles in the universe is 10^93 grams/cubic centimeter.(59) Thus, according to modern science, it appears that we are engulfed in a sea of extremely tiny particles within which everything else in the universe is deposited and which holds everything together. If we use Augustine’s methodology of coalescing science and Scripture, these tiny universal particles could very well be the “firmament” that Genesis 1 insists was the only thing created on the Second day.
That our instruments cannot penetrate into the Planck dimensions would be the very reason for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. The de Broglie wavelength of atomic particles is so long compared to Planck particles that the latter is transparent to the former, and makes it appear as if there is an “uncertainty.” In a recent issue of Discover magazine, Dr. Gerard ‘t Hooft, a theoretical physicist at Utrecht university, Netherlands, reveals that quantum mechanics “is not the ultimate theory of nature...quantum mechanics is simply how the ultimate theory of nature [Planck particles] is revealed to us.” Science correspondent Kathy Svitil goes on to comment that,
The heart of the problem is gravity. General relativity describes the way gravity operates on large scales but does not explain its origin. Quantum mechanics describes the subatomic world where the forces of nature arise, but it turns increasingly vague over extremely small distances. Quantum theory falls apart entirely at the Planck length – an unimaginably minuscule distance some 10-20 times the size of a proton – which is precisely where gravity holds sway. In ‘t Hooft’s view, the universe follows orderly rules at the Planck length but in such a way that information disappears on its way out to a larger world.(60)
In other words, ‘t Hooft is confirming our assertion that there exists a whole world of particles, much smaller than atomic particles, which are the underlying and ultimate explanation for every mass, motion and force we experience in the universe. In fact, Svitil hits on the very problem that Einstein simply could not solve, and which remains a glaring contradiction in his Relativity theory, that is, the speed of gravity. Since Einstein said nothing could go faster than light, he thus limited gravity to the speed of light, but if that were the case, the universe would fall apart quite easily, considering the astronomical distances between bodies in Einstein’s universe. If we, however, incorporate Planck particles and dimensions into the solution, gravity can be explained, since reactions times to cover the large distances between objects would be on the order of 10^107 centimeters/second or 10^102 miles/second. To boot, none of these figures are new, for all of them have been noted previously in the scientific literature.(61) But perhaps it requires a person who is not afraid to take Scripture at face value in order to interpret the scientific evidence correctly.
In the end, the ironic fact about Jaki’s and Johnston’s viewpoint on origins is that neither of them offer any model, or even a suggestion, as to how the universe in all its detail came into being by secondary causes. They constantly berate special creationists as “fundamentalists” and “concordists,” but they provide no explanation of how a theistic evolutionary model would work in the real world. Since they have discounted both Darwin’s natural selection and genetic mutations as mechanisms for evolution, they themselves are without a mechanism, except for some vague and ambiguous references to “God prefers to word through secondary causes,”(62) but of which they never explain its meaning.
Hence, here is the real problem. Although today’s theistic evolutions like Jaki and Johnston have rejected the tenets of Darwinian evolution, they nevertheless remain wedded to the cosmological tenets of Einstein and the Big Bang. The acceptance of Einstein as the gospel of science leaves them no option but to believe in a gigantic and very old universe, for that is what Einstein’s theory requires of them. As noted above, however, because they have rejected Darwin, they are stuck without a mechanism to bring about all the ingredients that are essential for building Einstein’s 13.5 billion year old universe.
After covering some of the major players in theistic evolution in our last essay for CFN, we must also address others of this persuasion who are a bit more sympathetic to the contents of Genesis 1 as having at least some scientific basis. Common among these are the “Day-age” theorists who, seeking to coalesce the current views of science and biblical hermeneutics, posit that each day in Genesis 1 represents a period of millions or billions of years. One of the more popular variations of the Day-age theory proposes a bridge between secular science’s Big Bang explosion (which is purported to have happened at the beginning of time about 13.5 billion years ago, and which was decreased from 20 billion just a couple of years ago), and Genesis 1:3's words: “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.”
One such person who holds this theory is Dermott Mullan, an astrophysicist at the University of Delaware, who recently wrote an article for the New Oxford Review titled: “Fundamentalists Inside the Catholic Church: A Growing Phenomenon.” Mullan espoused his “Day-age” theory with an earlier article for The Catholic Answer about four years ago titled: “The Signature of God: Science in the Bible.”
It is not hard to see by the title of the NOR article that Mullan has an axe to grind against opponents who don’t share his view. Mullan makes no apologies for his desire to save the Catholic world from a “Fundamentalism...now beginning to infect the thinking of certain Catholics,” and which “the clearest symptom of infection is the belief that the Earth is young, no more than a few thousand years old.”(63) The word “infection” is obviously meant to make those who believe what Tradition has taught for over 1900 years as nothing more than scientific, if not theological, misfits. In addition, Mullan’s use of the word “fundamentalist,” which has become a pejorative term among elite intellectuals, is meant to marginalize his opponents and intimidate his readers. As Stephen Clark writes:
Many who use the term [fundamentalist] in an inaccurate, derogatory way have come under the strong influence of secular humanism (liberal Protestantism, Modernism). They use the word as a term of abuse to discredit their more orthodox opponents. These people interpret scripture as a book which does not have God as its author in any significant sense, and as a book without real authority. Their approach to interpretation comes out of a line of thought which has compromised the fundamentals of the faith...and that seeks to interpret scripture in a way that allows that compromise.(64)
Although Mullan does believe that God authored Scripture, nevertheless, in resorting to the caricature of “fundamentalist,” he puts himself in the same category as other “fundamentalist-hating” theologians, such as the late Fr. Raymond Brown, who criticized what he called “the Catholic right,” those stubborn ideologues who
...insist on the literal interpretation of the Genesis account, namely, creation in six days or six periods of time; that human beings did not evolve from lower species; that woman was formed from man’s body; and that life at the beginning of time was in an idyllic state.(65)
Not only does Mullan find himself in company with liberal-minded theologians, but in assuming something akin to the Day-age theory, Mullan must, ironically, part company from them and become sort of a quasi-fundamentalist himself – a view for which Fr. Brown would have appropriately classed him, since Mullan sees Genesis 1 as depicting “six periods of time” – a heresy in Brown’s book.
In opposition to Fr. Stanley Jaki whom we covered earlier, Mullan at least sees some connection between the interpretation of Genesis 1 and the scientific facts at his disposal. Whereas Jaki outrightly rejects associating the Big Bang with the light of Genesis 1:3, Mullan sees no problem. Mullan is more like George Sim Johnston (whom we covered earlier) who advocates “a reasonable Catholic middle ground” just as long as we can still “accept the earth’s age of 4.5 billion years...”(66) Yet in their particular hermeneutic of assigning various scientific theories to Genesis 1, Johnston and Mullan will face many an exegetical anomaly that Jaki will never encounter.
In seeking to connect the Big Bang with the Light of Genesis 1:3, the most glaring problem for Mullan is that before the light is created, Genesis 1:1-2 says the earth already existed. In fact, the lack of light is the very reason the earth is sitting “in the void with darkness upon the face of the deep.” But the Big Bang theory Mullan advocates states that light came 8.5 billion years before the earth. Obviously, Mullan has a big exegetical problem on his hands. He is so enthused to match the light of the Big Bang with Genesis, but in reality his “scientific” evidence proves too much for his case.
When this is pointed out to him, Mullan has no choice but to hedge on his approach to Scripture. Mullan will propose that, although he seeks to interpret Genesis 1 more literally than say, Stanley Jaki, he is not required to interpret everything literally. In effect, Mullan’s hermeneutic becomes quite arbitrary.
In correspondence he wrote to me a few years ago that asked for a review of his article before it appeared in The Catholic Answer, he stated:
Genesis does not say unambiguously that the earth existed before the Light. Gen 1.2 refers to a time when ‘the earth was without form and void.’ The phrase ‘without form’ can mean a lack of definite physical properties, and the word ‘void’ means absence of content. This sounds to me like a description of the total absence of anything remotely like the earth as we know it.
Here we see how fast Mullan can become a “fundamentalist” as he desperately tries to parse the meaning of Genesis’ words right down to the lexical nub. So it’s not really literal interpretation, per se, against which Mullan wishes to inject his antibiotics, but only against those who go beyond Mullan’s self-imposed and arbitrary limits of literal interpretation.
As one can see from his above paragraph, it is Mullan’s desire to minimize the meanings of “without form and void” so that he can make them describe nothing but a blob of matter, or, in Mullan’s words, “the total absence of anything remotely like the earth as we know it.” Mullan thinks that if can dilute the meaning of the Hebrew words sufficiently enough, there won’t be anything left of substance that we could call “Earth,” and thus the Light can immediately assume first place in the order of creation. In essence, Mullan allows himself to alter the chronology of the text, inverting the respective appearances of the earth and the light to match his cherished Big Bang theory, never having the slightest compunction at the presumptuous juxtaposition of holy writ he has just forced upon the text. In the face of this, Mullen has the temerity to castigate those who believe Genesis 1 teaches six twenty-four hour periods as “fundamentalists” who “reject...rational thinking.” How “rational” is it, we wonder, when someone changes the meaning and order of Genesis’ words at will?
Seeing the hermeneutic of convenience he was creating, I answered Mullan with the following:
You are twisting the Scripture to fit your own theory, Dermott. Genesis 1:1 is clear that “God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:2 is clear that the “Earth” of Genesis 1:1 was not merely an introductory statement but an actual object with mass and a name. Whether or not it was formless and void has no bearing on whether it existed as an object prior to and distinguishable from the creation of Light. The point remains that there was an object called “Earth” surrounded by “water” and “darkness” and upon which the Spirit of God moved prior to the existence of Light. Just the fact that Genesis 1:2 says there was “darkness” shows that there was no light prior to its appearance in Genesis 1:3. If the first thing God said in Genesis 1:1 or 1:2 was “Let there be light,” and then said in Genesis 1:3 “and God created the earth and it was formless and void,” you would have room for your contention. As it stands, your argument is thoroughly self-serving and anachronistic.
Going back to Stanley Jaki for a minute, he can also become quite a “fundamentalist” when it suits his interest to prove his “anti-fundamentalist” views of Genesis 1. Let’s see how he does so. Genesis 1:1 says “God created the heavens and the earth.” The Hebrew word for “created” is bara. By uncovering what he feels is the precise literal meaning of bara, Jaki will then use this information in an attempt to eliminate the idea of ex nihilo creation (i.e., creation out of nothing) from the days of Genesis 1. If he can eliminate ex nihilo from the days of creation, then we are left with the idea that God, at some point in the distant past, bought into existence a lump of matter out of which all that we see today evolved from secondary or “evolutionary” causes. Jaki writes:
...of the forty or so cases when bara occurs in the Old Testament, it is used to denote in five cases a purely human action....Of the three other cases the ones in the book of Joshua (17:15, 18) refer in the Piel tense to the cutting down of trees....In Ez 23:47 we see the prophet use bara to denote a gruesomely human action, prompted as it could be by Yahweh’s utter displeasure with idolatry....in all these cases the taking of bara for an exclusively divine action, let alone taking it for creation out of nothing, can only be done if one deliberately ignores those three uses of it that span more than half a millennium...The verb bara means basically “to split” and “to slash” or an action which conveys that something is divided and that the action is done swiftly.(67)
Jaki is asserting that, since bara in Joshua 17:15-18 and Ezekiel 23:47 means “to split,” this eliminates the idea of ex nihilo creation and connotes something akin to an evolutionary process, apparently because matter is “splitting” from matter and undergoing some kind of subsequent development, as opposed to being created whole with no subsequent modification. Ironically, in the same vicinity, Jaki recognizes that the majority opinion among scholars is that bara means creation “out of nothing,” even citing P. Heinisch’s cataloguing of bara in the Qal and Nifil stems as evidence against his view.(68)
So what, in the face of all the scholarly evidence against him, leads Jaki to conclude that bara “means basically ‘to split’ and ‘to slash’” if it occurs with that specific meaning only in three instances out of forty? A hint to Jaki’s reasoning is found in the beginning of the paragraph:
It should seem significant that both in the book of Ezechiel, certainly a post-exilic product, and in the book of Joshua, a product quite possibly some seven hundred years older, one is confronted with a very human connotation of bara...uses of it that span more than half a millennium.
So Jaki’s main argument is that we should accept the meaning of bara as “to split” or “to slash” simply because the Piel stem was used early in Hebrew literature and retained its meaning 700 years later.
As an aside, let me alert the reader to my previous critique of Jaki’s dating of biblical texts that appeared in my second essay for CFN. I pointed out that Jaki holds Genesis 1 as being written after the Babylonian captivity, circa 500 BC, and thus 700+ years after the writing of Joshua. In a similar vein, the reason Jaki can refer above to Ezekiel as being a “post-exilic product” is that the same historical-critical approach to Scripture which concluded that Genesis is “post-exilic” also claims that Ezekiel’s prophecies of the Babylonian captivity are merely reminisces of the past, not visions of the future. In other words, Jaki thinks Ezekiel was fabricated to makes its words look like Ezekiel was predicting the future.
Thus, if someone were to counter Jaki’s thesis by claiming that a sufficient amount of years separates the use of bara in Genesis from, say, the use of bara by contemporaries of Ezekiel, namely Isaiah 40:26 and Jeremiah 31:22 where bara means created “out of nothing,” Jaki would tell us that the comparison has no merit because Genesis is not separated by a sufficient amount of years since it is “post-exilic” and thus very close in chronological proximity to Isaiah and Jeremiah. In other words, to Jaki, the meaning for bara as “created out of nothing” is only a late development in the vocabulary of the Jews, especially when compared to the indigenous meaning of bara as “to split” appearing during the conquest of Canaan 700 years prior. Again, this is so because Jaki believes Joshua was written long before Genesis. This, of course, is at best speculation and at worst another indication of the overly-enthusiastic conclusions of historical-criticism to which Jaki and many of his colleagues have fallen victim. In essence, they won’t allow you to trust anything Scripture says about history and chronology.
The important thing to notice in Jaki’s long-winded attempt to eliminate the concept of ex nihilo creation from the days of Genesis is the picayune literal interpretation he utilizes to prove his point. In fact, I don’t know anyone who has gone to such lengths to parse the meaning of bara to prove such a point. But rest assured, if a “fundamentalist” had extracted the same kind of lexical minutia to prove a point for a six day creation, Jaki would have a cow over it, hurling the most derogatory epithets, as he does quite often in his writings.
Be that as it may, the ironic fact about Jaki’s literal interpretation of bara is that it is totally without merit. Laying aside his reliance on the historical-critical hermeneutic, no Hebrew scholar worth his salt would determine the “basic” meaning of a Hebrew word from its Piel stem, unless, in a preponderance of cases in the Hebrew bible, the word in question appeared in the Piel stem. The Piel is an intensive form, and one of the more rare in Hebrew due to that intensity. When a Hebrew verb is put in the Piel it dramatically changes the meaning of the verb. In the three instances Jaki cites (Joshua 17:15; 17:18; Ezekiel 23:47) the Piel denotes “splitting” only because that is what the writer wanted to depict when trees are hewn down – one splits wood with an axe. The “basic” meaning of a Hebrew word, however, comes from the Qal stem. It just so happens that 71% of the uses of bara in the Hebrew Bible are in the Qal stem.(69) Another 19% are in the Nifil stem (but which doesn’t change the meaning of the Qal, only its subject). That leaves the Piel stem with less than 10% of the appearances in the Hebrew bible, which is hardly determinative of the “basic” meaning of bara. Moreover, if a “splitting” or a “division” of matter were in view in Genesis 1:1, the Hebrew could have easily used the verb badal, as it does in Genesis 1:4 when God “divides” the light from the darkness.(70) As it stands, bara means “creation out of nothing,” and Jaki has no way of disproving it.
Again, the point of the above exercise was to show how theistic evolutionists, such as Jaki and Mullan, who castigate and even name-call those who side with a literal reading of Genesis, can suddenly develop an acute affinity for literal interpretation if they find that it suits their cause.
Since we are critiquing Mullan’s essay in the New Oxford Review in chronological order, we will come back to Mullan’s attempts at biblical exegesis a little later. For now, the next topic he speaks about is his work as an astrophysicist. He writes:
Why do I find the young-Earth development troubling? Because it flies in the face of reason. In my profession as an astronomer, I am familiar with abundant evidence from the physical world indicating that the Earth and the Sun and the Universe have ages that are measured in billions of years. The evidence for these ages comes from at least five distinct and independent areas of research in astrophysics: expansion of the universe, stellar structure, isotope dating, white dwarf cooling, and properties of the cosmic microwave radiation.
It is beyond the bounds of reason to suppose that, if the Universe were actually no older than a few thousand years...many hundreds of researchers from diverse countries and all religious backgrounds would discover five completely different methods which all yield multi-billion-year ages.(71)
Interestingly enough, Mullan does not explain how his “five distinct...areas of research in astrophysics” prove that the earth is old, nor does he direct the reader to any sources where his so-called proofs can be studied and scrutinized. Apparently, the reader is supposed to accept this assertion simply because Mullan says so. So let’s analyze his claims.
First, the nature, cause and meaning of each of the five “areas of research” are by no means settled issues in astronomy. I was a physics major in college with an emphasis on astronomy, and I have kept up with much of the literature since then. I can tell you in all honesty that, although scientists have accumulated more information about the universe over the last few decades, they are more confused now than they ever were as to its nature and function. Ironically, the more they discover, the more they find out how much they don’t know. Information is not the issue. Anyone can look through a telescope and record what he sees. It is the interpretation of that information which is key.
Let’s take one of Mullan’s more popular assertions, the so-called “expansion of the universe.” This novel concept was the result of Albert Einstein’s work. When he formulated Relativity theory, he was surprised to find that the mathematics required either a contracting or expanding universe. In order to compensate for this, Einstein added his infamous fudge factor – the “cosmological constant” – a mathematical equation which kept the universe stable.(72) But in 1929, Edwin Hubble (from which the Hubble Space Telescope is named), who interpreted the “red shift” of star light as the stretching of it’s wavelength (which I spoke about in my last essay for CFN), formulated an equation to calculate the speed at which galaxies receded from the earth. The more “red shift” in the star light, the further away the galaxy was said to be from us, and the faster it was receding compared to a galaxy closer to us. The calculation of its recession speed became known as Hubble’s Law.(73)
Needless to say, Hubble’s Law supported the idea that the universe was expanding. Moreover, if it was expanding, then it must have been much smaller billions of years ago. If we could imagine the expansion being reversed until the universe went back to its original form, Hubble calculated that the present expansion had been transpiring 3-4 billion years, at least according to how far telescopes could peer into the universe in 1929.
You can imagine what sort of welcome Hubble received from the science community, and particularly from evolutionists. This was the key ingredient to their theory of a multi-billion year universe, which they desperately needed in order to give enough time for things to “evolve.” Hence, the connection between Einstein’s Relativity and Darwin’s Evolution was cemented. Hubble’s work was immediately pressed into service for evolution in his famous 1953 “Darwin lecture” in which he states:
“...the law will represent approximately a linear relation between red-shifts and distance. When recession factors are included, the distance relation is...accelerated expansion...[If no recession factor is included]..the age of the universe is likely to be between 3000 and 4000 million years, and thus comparable with the age of rock in the crust of the Earth.”(74)
Those astrophysicists who challenged Hubble’s work, and there were a good many of them, were eventually ostracized by the scientific community. In fact, a well known astronomer by the name of Halton Arp, who was the protege of Edwin Hubble, was systematically marginalized because his extensive work on quasar and galaxy red shifts indicated that the universe was not expanding. As astrophysicist Jayant Marlikar writes:
The ludicrous climax came about ten years ago when Arp was denied the use of telescopes in major observatories. The reason given was that his findings “did not make sense” and were therefore a “waste of time.” In other words, telescopes are meant only to confirm the established ideas and not turn up anomalous data.(75)
Astrophysicist Paul Marmet concurs:
Science is said to be about searching for truth, but the harsh reality is that those whose views clash with established theories often find themselves ridiculed and denied funds and publications.(76)
With the addition of Hubble’s Law, all the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. In the mid 1800s Charles Lyell convinced the world that the layers of sediment we saw on elevated plains were the result of strata being deposited in sequences of millions of years. His contemporary, Charles Darwin, told us that the fossils found in those layers were deposited chronologically, from the simplest organisms at the bottom to the very complex at the top. As noted, Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble gave science the billions of years they needed to mesmerize the adoring public into thinking that given enough time anything could happen, including evolution. Sigmund Freud dispensed with Genesis 3's explanation for evil (Original Sin) and replaced it with a “scientific” reason (i.e., repressed memories in the “id” from a tormented childhood that could not be overcome by the “ego”). Julius Wellhausen and Rudolph Bultmann convinced us that Genesis 1's Creation story was merely a rehash of old Babylonian myths and legends. Shake all this up and bake it in the pan and you have the main ingredients for our modern society that has practically lost sight of God having anything to do with the universe. Added to this are the multitudes of Catholic religious who, not wanting to be embarrassed by another Galileo-type episode, try their best to incorporate each of the above theories into their beliefs, and one of the best examples of this is theistic evolution.
But as you might suspect, there is more to this than meets the eye. To put it bluntly, the above theories have created the illusion of intelligence and certainty. They are passed off as fact but with little, if any, evidence to support their claims. To perpetuate the illusion, modern science needs only point to a few of its accomplishments (e.g., the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wireless phones, antibiotics) and suddenly the populace is filled with awe and wonder and dare not ask any questions. Or to put it more bluntly, the Goliath of scientism only need brandish his ten-foot sword and all the Christians go scurrying away in fright. But when all is said and done, it will only take a well-placed blow to bring down the whole edifice.
Let’s start with the real story behind the “expanding universe” idea. Edwin Hubble worked with M. L. Humason, but only Hubble’s name survives. The reason is that Humason did not succumb to the pressure being put on the two men from the scientific community to provide evidence for a multi-billion year expanding universe. The scientific community, based on the work of Einstein, had already decided that the universe was expanding and they were more than ready to interpret the “red shift” as a Doppler shift wherein galaxies were said to be moving away at great speeds from the observer.(77) Mind you, there is no proof for a connection between receding galaxies and red shift, or that galaxies are indeed receding at all, or that red shift is to be interpreted as a Doppler shift. In fact, in a paper published in 1931 Humason wrote:
It is not at all certain that the large redshifts observed in the spectra are to be interpreted as a Doppler effect but, for convenience, they are interpreted in terms of velocity and referred to as apparent velocities.(78)
Humason paid a dear price for his non-conformance. Whereas in the early going, the discovery of the redshift/distance ratio was attributed to “Hubble-Humason,” later, when it was clear that Humason would not capitulate, his name was eventually dropped from the credits, which is why the public only knows it as “Hubble’s Law.”
To fit the data he observed in 1929, Hubble figured that his “H” constant, which was the proportion between the speed of the galaxy compared to its distance away from us, would have to be 100 kilometers per second per megaparsec.(79) Thus, if a galaxy was said to be 10 megaparsecs away from us, Hubble’s Law said it must recede with a velocity of 1000 kilometers per second. If the galaxy were a gigaparsec from us (which is 1000 megaparsecs), it must recede with a velocity of 100,000 kilometers per second.
Lo and behold, as more powerful telescopes were built, one of them, ironically, being the Hubble Space telescope, the universe Hubble saw in 1929 was dwarfed by what men were discovering in the 1970s through 1990s (at least with the formulas they currently use to measure astral distances). The universe was no longer measured in megaparsecs but gigaparsecs. The first estimates came in at 50 gigaparsecs.(80) But if one enforced the Dopplerian interpretation of redshifts on a universe of 50+ gigaparsecs in size, Hubble’s Law would be forced to say that the outer galaxies were receding from earth faster than the speed of light! What a kettle of fish this was! The very Einsteinian theory that gave them the expanding universe was now faced with a universe that was, as it were, too big for its britches, and which ends up contradicting Einstein’s most cherished fact of life – that nothing can go faster than the speed of light.
So what did science do? Rather than face embarrassment by having to modify the foundation of its theory, it changed the “expanding” universe into an “exploding” universe, and thus the Big Bang concept was born – that primeval “point of singularity” infinitesimally smaller than the dot of the i on this page that, holding all the material of the universe, decided to explode about 13.5 billion years ago in a fraction of a second, and is still exploding, producing all that we see in the starry universe today and the recessional speeds to go along with them. (And they call Special Creationists “dreamers”!) This is one of the best examples of science pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the hat. The emperor really is wearing no clothes but Scientism keeps dressing him up in more and more make-believe garments, and no one is the wiser.
You can imagine how delighted the science community was in 1964 when, in search of evidence for the new “exploding” universe, two astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered from their radio telescopes a very faint microwave radiation coming from all directions in the universe. Penzias and Wilson concluded that the radiation, a mere 3 degrees Kelvin, just had to be remnants of the Big Bang explosion! The scientific community entertained no other possibilities for the origin of this radiation. The radiation could have merely been from vibrations in cosmic particles, but obviously that postulation wouldn’t have given any evidence for evolution.(81) Accordingly, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for their “discovery,” and evolutionary theory advanced one more step.
But there were pesky little facts that were always throwing a monkey wrench into the works. For instance, once one claims that the universe is “exploding,” not only is one forced to say that galaxies are receding faster than the speed of light, but basic laws of science stipulate that there must be a certain amount of matter in the universe in order for it to “explode” at the rate it is said to be exploding. As it stands, when science adds up all the matter in the universe, the best estimates show that they have less then 5% of what is needed to account for the Big Bang universe!
Now, with such an anomaly facing them we would expect these scientists, who pride themselves on being so objective with scientific facts, to go back to the drawing board and reason that the foundation of their theory has serious problems. But just as they covered over the contradiction between Einstein’s expanding universe and the constancy of the speed of light, so science is in the process of covering over the fact that there is not enough matter in the universe to support the Big Bang.
Scientism’s latest attempt to pull the wool over our eyes is “Dark Matter,” which, they claim, constitutes 95% of the matter in the universe. You can read about this in all the major textbooks on astronomy and physics. Newsweek, Time, USA Today, Discover, Nature and many other periodicals have also carried articles on it.
There is one problem, however. They all admit we can’t see it and have no way of detecting it (hence, it is called “Dark” matter). The mathematics of Relativity and Big Bangism demands that the “Dark Matter” be there and thus, to the gods of scientism, it indeed must be there. Perhaps someday, they say, we will invent instruments to detect it, but for now they are content to let mere theory be assumed as fact, all in an effort to save appearances and save Scientism from having to admit that its foundational theories are totally baseless.
For example, astrophysicist David Spergel of Princeton University, member of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe launched by NASA June 30, 2001, states in an interview with Discover correspondent Tim Folger:
The thing I’m most excited about is the precision. We now know the age of the universe – 13.7 billion years – to an accuracy of 1 percent. We know that ordinary matter accounts for only 4% of the mass of the universe. The rest consists of dark matter. It confirms many of the predictions we’ve been making.
Later in the interview when Folger asks: “Have we answered all the big questions,” Spergel replies:
There are still a bunch of them. What is dark matter? What is dark energy, the unseen thing that seems to be driving the universe to speed up? Those are fundamental questions. Another big one is understanding what caused inflation, the extremely rapid expansion that occurred in the universe’s first moment of existence. WMAP and other experiments are just beginning to probe the physics of the early universe. And right now we have a model in which 4 percent of the universe is atoms and 96 percent is something else unidentified. I think it’s hard to claim that we know it all!(82)
Notice how Spergel admits that he doesn’t even know what “dark” matter is, but he’s positive it is out there, and he even knows that “dark energy” (which he also can’t detect) is propelling it! He also admits that science is “just beginning to probe the physics of the early universe,” and doesn’t know what caused the so-called “rapid expansion,” but he is positive that there was a Big Bang and that the universe is expanding. Like a magician waving a wand, the gods of scientism can create their own universe at will and preserve another day for the theory of evolution.
End of Part Three of Seven Parts
Footnotes
1) Mivart was a creationist early on, and later, while teaching at the University of Louvain, he became a theistic evolutionist. Mivart’s thesis was that the statement in Genesis 1“according to their kinds” referred to “species” in biological science. Theistic evolutionists were not accepted by the secular world, however. T. H. Huxley, for example, refuted Mivart’s attempt at coinciding Genesis and evolution, as well as contesting Mivart’s view that various Church Fathers and Scholastics, notably Francisco Suarez, could be interpreted as teaching the concept of evolution wherein one species gives rise to another. Huxley’s motivation was to sever religion completely from science. At one point he stated that religion “could never lay its hands, could never touch, even with the tip of its finger, that dream with which our little life is rounded” (Einstein: The Life and Times, p. 503).
2) Messenger also translated Canon Henri de Dorlodot’s book into English in 1922 under the title Darwinism and Catholic Thought. Also in this genre is Enrico Zoffoli’s book Cristianesimo: corso di teologia cattolica (Udine: Edizioni Segno, 1994).
3) The Church refused to allow de Chardin to publish his book during his lifetime. In short, de Chardin ascribes all present turmoil in the world to the crisis or “phenomenon” which comes before every new mutation. He sees God as the Primal Impulse manifested in matter. From the Big Bang explosion he believed occurred 15 billion years ago, de Chardin asserted that the primal Creator went pressing into all matter generating an ever greater spiritual consciousness, the final destiny being the Omega Point in which the divine impulse is perfectly manifested in all humanity.
4) The Wisdom of Evolution (Doubleday, 1963), p. 66. “Creationism becomes increasingly more untenable, the more deeply one looks into the fossil record.”
5) For Catholic proponents of theistic evolution, see Science of Today and the Problem of Genesis (Hawthorne, CA: Christian Book Club, 1969) by Patrick O’Connell, pages 61-81 for an overview.
6) Geological Society of France, 1993, and Julien Lan and Guy Berthault, “Experiments on stratification of heterogeneous sand mixtures,” CEN Technical Journal 8 (1):3750, 1994; Guy Berthault, “Experiments on lamination of sediments,” CEN Technical Journal 3:2529, 1988.
7) Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballentine Publishing Group, 1999), p. 5.
8) “Evolution as Fact and Theory” Discover magazine, May 1981.
9) Ibid., p. 17.
10) Archbishop Barbarito’s comment contained in correspondence to G. J. Keane, 8-1-83 author of Creation Rediscovered (p. 202).
11) Origin of Species, Penguin Books, London, 1968, pp 309-310.
12) Hen’s Teeth and Horse Toes, Norton, NY, 1983, p. x.
13) Francis Crick, now 86, recently stated that “The God hypothesis is rather discredited....Archbishop Ussher claimed the world was created in 4004 B.C. Now we know it is 4.5 billion old. It’s astonishing to me that people continue to accept religious claims. People like myself get along perfectly well with no religious views.” James Watson, 74, another atheist, stated that religious explanations are “myths from the past....Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours” (London Daily Telegraph, cited in The Washington Times, 3-24-2003).
14) Correspondence to Luther Sunderland quoted in Darwin's Enigma, 1988, p. 89.
15) Intermediair 44, 1988.
16) Quoted from ICR’s Acts and Facts, August 5, 1976.
17) Quoted from George Sim Johnston’s, Did Darwin Get it Right?, p. 31.
18) Op. cit., p. 217.
19) The Triumph of Evolution and The Failure of Creationism (NY: W.H. Freeman and Co, 2000), p. 31.
20) Nature Vol. 123.
21) The Triumph of Evolution and The Failure of Creationism, p. 154.
22) The Triumph of Evolution and The Failure of Creationism, p. 63.
23) “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, pp. 28, 31.
24) Carl Winterstein. Bible-Science Newsletter, June 1976, p. 8. Cited in Paula Haigh’s Thirty Theses Against Theistic Evolution, Theses 13 (home.earthlink.net/~origins1/creation/30theses.htm).
25) Cited in Genesis 1 Through the Ages, p. x.
26) The Hexameron, Homily 1, NPNF II, vol. 8, p. 53.
27) The Refutation of All Heresies, Ch. X: Leucippus and His Atomic Theory. Hippolytus also critiques Thales, Founder of Greek Astronomy; Pythagoras on his Cosmogony and the Transmigration of Souls; Empedocles on Causality; Heraclitus on his Theory of Flux; Anaximenes on the idea of “Infinite Air”; Anaxagoras on his Theory of Mind and Efficient Cause; Parmenides on his Theory of Unity, and other Greek philosophic and scientific ideas.
28) Ibid.
29) The Hexameron, Homily 3, 2.
30) Responses to 101 Questions on God and Evolution, pp. 16-18. (Paulist Press, 2001).
31) Chief among these recent books is Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (Simon and Schuster, 1998).
32) Bible and Science, p. 45.
33) Genesis 1 Through the Ages, pp 25-26.
34) Genesis 1 Through the Ages, p. 168.
35) Providentissimus Deus, II, C, d.
36) Einstein: The Life and Times, p. 252.
37) Einstein’s biographer writes: “The problem which now faced science [after the Michelson-Morley experiment] was considerable. For there seemed to be only three alternatives. The first was that the earth was standing still, which meant scuttling the whole Copernican theory and was unthinkable” (Einstein: The Life and Times, p. 110). Einstein, as we all know, did not accept that alternative, rather, he chose to make light constant rather than to make the earth constant. He admits, however, that “If Michelson-Morley is wrong, then relativity is wrong” (Ibid, p. 107). It is well known, however, that Michelson-Morely was wrong, or at the least, misinterpreted, since further experiments, all of which Einstein ignored quite deliberately, all showed that the supposed “null” result of Michelson-Morely was actually a positive result. Experiments performed by Trouton-Nobel (1903), Sagnac (1913), Michelson-Gale-Pearson (1925), Kennedy-Thorndike (1930), Michelson-Miller (1933), Joos (1930), O’Rahilly (1965), Marinov (1974) all show that Einstein’s interpretation of the data is wrong. We will cover this topic more in depth in the coming articles of the Catholic Family News.
38) Genesis 1 Through the Ages, pp. 145-146.
39) Bible and Science, p. 148. Jaki’s footnote on this incident reads: “For instance, N. Eldridge, curator of the Natural History Museum of the City of New York.”
40) Did Darwin Get it Right: Catholics and the Theory of Evolution, pp. 12, 14, 17, 113, 90 (in sequence with my ellipses).
41) Angels, Apes and Men, p. 71.
42) Did Darwin Get it Right? p. 119.
43) Constitution: Amendment 1: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof...”; Declaration of Independence: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...”
44) Did Darwin Get it Right?, p. 122.
45) Basil (Hexameron, 2, 8); Gregory of Nyssa (Hexameron, PG 44:68); Ambrose (Hexameron 1:37; 1:20; 6:75); Victorinus (Creation of the World, NPNF1, v. 1, p. 343); Ephraem the Syrian (Comm. on Genesis 1:1); Theophilus (Autolucus 2, 12); Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 5:28:3); Lactantius (Institutes, 7, 14); Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, Bk 6, Ch 16); Epiphanius (Panarion 1:1); Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechetical Lectures, 3:5; 12:5); Hippolytus (Refutation of All Heresies, Bk 6, Ch 9); Chrysostom (Homily 3); Athanasius (Discourse Against the Arians, 2, 48), The only one that departed from this was Augustine, opting to see the six days as one day, but this was due to his misinterpretation of Ecclus 18:1 since Augustine did not know Greek, and his indecision as to where to place the angels in the creation story.
46) Confessions, Bk 2, Ch 9.
47) The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Bk 1, Ch. 19, No. 39.
48) Genesis 1 through the ages, pp. 90-91; 141; 174. Johnston says much the same: “Catholic also have to avoid the trap of biblical concordism, which is the attempt to fit the finding of modern science into the creation narrative of Genesis 1" (Did Darwin Get it Right?, p. 152).
49) Those who elaborate on this point are Basil in The Hexameron, Homily II, 7;Victorinus in On the Creation of the World. Leo the Great, Sermon XXVII. Gregory of Nyssa (Hexameron, PG 44, 66-118); Ephrem the Syrian (Genesim et in Exodum commentarii, in CSCO, v. 152, p. 9); Chrysostom (Homilies on Genesis (PG 53, 57-58); Aquinas Summa Theologica, 1, Qs. 67, Art. 4, Re. 2; Bk 1, Ques. 67, Art. 1). Honorius of Autun (Hexameron PL 172, 257); Peter Lombard (Lombardi opera omnia, PL 192, 651); Colonna, aka Aegidius Romanus (Opus Hexaemeron); Nicholas of Lyra (Postillae perpetuae); Cajetan (Commentarii de Genesis 1); as well as Mendelssohn (Commentary on Genesis) Petavius (Dogmata theologica) et al.
50) Genesis 1 Through the Ages, p. 169.
51) The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Bk 2, Ch. 5, No 9.
52) Bible and Science, p. 95.
53) Genesis 1 Through the Ages, p. 64.
54) Genesis 1 Through the Ages, pp. 21, 61, 72, 95, 132, 156.
55) Answer to Eunomius’ Second Book.
56) Against the Pelagians, Bk 1, 16.
57) S. H. Knowles, et al, in “Spectra, Variability, Size, and Polarization of H2O Microwave Emission Sources in the Galaxy,” Science, March 7, 1969, pp. 1055, 1057 reveal evidence of water clouds in deep space the size of our solar system. NASA’s Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) mission, between Nov. 1995 to June 1998, states “In the Orion nebula, for instance, ISO found enough water to fill the earth’s oceans thousands of time over.”
58) Princeton professor John A. Wheeler was the first (1957) to describe what is popularly called “spacetime foam,” which is the concept that space is filled with extremely dense particles which pop into existence and pop back out. Stephen Hawking, who is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, confirmed Wheeler’s thesis stating that on extremely small scales space is packed with turbid random activity and gargantuan masses. Physicists Redmount and Suen in Physical Review D, 3rd series, vol. 47, No. 6, March 1993 speak of “Quantum Spacetime Foam.” J. P. Vigier, in the article “De Broglie Waves on Dirac Aether” speaks of a “nonempty vacuum” in space (Lettere Al Nuovo Cimento, vol. 29, No. 14, Dec. 1980).
59) Physicist M. A. Markov in The Very Early Universe (Cambridge University Press, 1983) writes of infintesimal particles he calls maximons possessing a density of 3.6 x 10^-93g/cm3 (pp. 359-361). Robert Moon, professor emeritus in physics at University of Chicago, in the journal 21st Century, states in Space Must Be Quantizied,: “According to accepted theory, free space is a vacuum. If this is so, how can it exhibit impedance. But it does. The answer, of course, is that there is no such thing as a vacuum, and what we call free space has structure...The impedance equals 376+ ohms” (May-June, 1988, p. 26ff).
60) Discover, May 2003, p. 13.
61) J. P. Vigier, in the article, “Causal Superluminal Interpretation of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox,” describes the existence of faster-than-light interactions in an “underlying deterministic substructure,” which is the same as Markov’s maximons or Hawking’s “spacetime foam.” Vigier points to the experiments by Aspect which confirms the results (Physical Review Letters, vol. 49, No. 2, July 12, 1982.
62) Did Darwin Get it Right? p. 17.
63) New Oxford Review, April 2003, p. 31.
64) Man and Woman in Christ, p. 350.
65) Origins, May 7, 1981, p. 739. Fr. Brown also calls his Catholic critics “fundamentalists,” and has some very harsh words for those who criticize his methodology of biblical hermeneutics. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary (c. 1990) is edited by Fr. Raymond Brown, along with Fr. Joseph Fitzmyer and Fr. Roland Murphy. Brown deceased in 1998, but probably remains the most notorious and influential liberal Catholic scholar of the past fifty years. In another of his works Fr. Brown writes: “In the last hundred years we have moved from an understanding wherein inspiration guaranteed that the Bible was totally inerrant to an understanding wherein inerrancy is limited to the Bible’s teaching of ‘that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writing for the sake of our salvation’” (The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, pp. 8-9). Not surprisingly, Fr. Brown not only calls into question the traditional reading of Genesis, but he also raises doubts about the resurrection of Christ: (“Are we thereby perpetually committed to the notion held in times past of the biological how of that exaltation, namely a bodily resurrection?,” Ibid. p. 12); and infallibility: (“If biblical criticism has qualified the notion of the inerrancy of the Bible, does modern historical study imply that the Roman Catholic notion of the infallibility of Church teaching also has to be qualified?,” Ibid., p. 35); In fact, in his books and articles, Fr. Brown questions a majority of beliefs held as dogma in the Catholic Church, e.g., Mary’s Perpetual Virginity; the monarchial episcopate (i.e., papacy); the function and identity of apostles, bishops and priests; apostolic succession; the barring of women from ordination; the Eucharist as a sacrifice; the value and authority of Tradition, etc.
66) Did Darwin Get it Right: Catholics and the Theory of Evolution, pp. 12, 14, 17, 113, 90 (in sequence with my ellipses).
67) Genesis 1 Through the Ages, pp. 4-5. The two passages state: “Go up to the forest and cut down” (Joshua 17:15-18) and “The company will stone them...and cut them down” (Ezekiel 23:47). It is interesting to note that Jaki seems to have acquiesced this notion from atheistic evolutionist T. H. Huxley. Jaki writes: “...Huxley threw a red herring. He did so by arguing that the bible did not contain the doctrine of creation out of nothing, because the word bara could only mean the shaping of something from something already existing” (Bible and Science, p. 5; taken from Huxley’s “Mr. Gladstone and Genesis” in Science and Hebrew Tradition, p. 187).
68) Genesis 1 Through the Ages, p. 3.
69) The Piel is merely the intensive form of the Qal; the Nifil is the reflexive form of Qal; the Hifil the causative form of the Qal, etc.
70) Badal is in the Hebrew perfect tense in the Qal form in Gen 1:4. Used 38x in the OT, always refers to God’s creative acts (Dt 32:4; Ps 51:10; Is 40:26; 65:18; Jr 31:22), not matter evolving by divine force. If “splitting” were in view baqah could also be used (cf., Gen. 22:3; Num 16:31).
71) New Oxford Review, April 2003, p. 32.
72) 1917 paper titled: “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity.”
73) H = 100 kilometers per second per mega-parsec in distance.
74) Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 113. Hubble’s paragraph means that if the redshift interpretation is minimized it would equal a 3-4 billion year old earth. If the redshift interpretation is maximized, it would translate into a universe much older than 3-4 billion years.
75) Times of India, July 30, 1994.
76) www.newtonphysics.on.ca
77) A Doppler shift, as it is known in sound mechanics, is the expansion of sound’s wavelength as the source of the sound recedes from you (or contraction as the source approaches you). We hear a rapid change in pitch, for example, when a speeding train blowing its whistle either approaches us or recedes from us. Many scientists today claim that the same thing happens to light when it travels, that is, those who believe light is a wave say that the waves expand as the source of light recedes from the observer. As we have noted previously, however, this ignores the fact that light should reduce in energy as it travels; it ignores that light is supposed to be constant in speed whereas sound is not; and it ignores that the source of light has little to do with the speed of light if light is constant and the source is obliterated.
78) “Velocity-Distance Relation Among Extra-Gallactic Nebulae,” 1931, Astrophysical Journal, vol. 74. See also “The Apparent Radial Velocities of 100 Extra-Galactic Nebulae,” 1936, Astrophysical Journal, vol. 83. Even Hubble, while he tried to be the darling of the scientific community, had his doubts. As astrophysicist A. Sandage reports: “We now come to one of the most remarkable episodes in all of science. Hubble’s detailed analysis...is a most fascinating study of how an interpretation, without caution concerning possible systematic errors, led to a conclusion that the systematic redshift effect is probably not due to a true Friedmann-Lemaitre expansion, but rather to an unknown, then as now, unidentified principle of nature. Indeed, even in the abstract to this 1936 paper on the Effects of Redshift on the Distribution of Nebulae Hubble concluded: ‘The high density suggests that the expanding models are a forced interpretation of the data.’ His belief that the expansion probably is not real persisted even into his final 1953 paper which was the Darwin lecture of the RAS, given in May of the year he died in September.” Yet in a later paragraph Sandage states: “...Hubble maintained these views concerning the reality of the expansion until the end...” http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sandage2/Sandage2_3.html.
79) A “mega-parsec” equals 3.3 x 10^6 light years. A “light year” is the distance light travels in a year, at 300,000 kilometers per second, which equals 3 x 10^19 kilometers.
80) A gigaparsec is 1000 megaparsecs. 50 gigaparsecs equals 1.5 x 10^11 light years, as opposed to one megaparsec which equals 3.3 x 10^6 light years.
81) As we saw in an earlier references, for example, science is well aware of the Planck particles, and other cosmic particles, that pervade the universe. Robert Moon, professor emeritus in physics at University of Chicago, in the journal 21st Century, stated that space had an impedence of 376+ ohms (May-June, 1988, p. 26ff).
82) Discover, May 2003.
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