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by Robert Sungenis

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.

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)

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