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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.

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