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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)

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