Catholic Apologetics International
What Do Andy Warhol and Karl Keating Have in Common?
In the July/August 2003 issue of This Rock, founder and president of Catholic Answers, Karl Keating, says that advocates of a young earth (i.e., an earth 10,000 years old, or less) are akin to those who “garner for themselves Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame.” (1) Can someone tell me why the president of an established Catholic institution, on display to the whole world, has to resort to such inflammatory characterizations of other Catholics and their motives? Unfortunately, Keating’s condescending approach to those of a differing opinion has become quite common in his rhetoric of late. People close to him have told me that he has already lost a substantial number of his fan-base due to his vicious judgments, some of which I addressed in The Remnant a few months ago.
Right beside Keating, in the January 2003 issue of This Rock magazine, director of apologetics for Catholic Answers, Jimmy Akin, although he doesn’t engage in the same condescending remarks as Keating, nevertheless, makes the outlandish assertion that the symbolic view of the creation story in Genesis 1 is now the “official” interpretation of the Catholic Church. According to Akin, the Catholic Church, through the 1992 Catechism, has finally relinquished the long-held view that the days of Genesis are 24-hour periods. He further says that although the literal view is still tolerated, the Church is systematically trying to ease that interpretation out of the Catholic’s mind.
Suffice it to say, these two neo-Catholic apologists have decided to throw down the gauntlet against those of us who have dared to hold onto the view of our patristic forefathers regarding the origins question.
Let’s deal with Mr. Keating’s claims first:
As Keating opens his piece, besides his pejorative use of Andy Warhol’s quote, he sprinkles his introductory paragraphs with caustic words such as “fundamentalist,” “eccentricity,” “new baggage,” and other such verbiage. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that Mr. Keating is hardly qualified to make the grandiose conclusions he puts in his article. He has little or no science background or training, and he doesn’t advertise a theological degree (though I’m told he attended a very liberal Catholic institution in southern California a while back). Why he insists on casting aspersions on Catholics who hold to what the Fathers taught us about the age of the earth is anyone’s guess. Alas, it has been my experience that those who know the least about the subject are the ones who resort to such condescending language in order to make themselves appear knowledgeable. In any case, Mr. Keating really needs to tone down his rhetoric.
With his slight to “fundamentalism,” perhaps now we know the real reason why Keating chose the title “Catholicism and Fundamentalism” (as opposed to “Catholicism and Protestantism”) for his 1988 book. Keating’s real enemy is not Protestants, per se, but anyone who does not ascribe to the various neo-orthodox and modernistic views of theology he has adopted for himself, including his distaste for traditional Catholics. This shouldn’t surprise us. Post-conciliar Catholics have drifted sufficiently far enough to the left of the spectrum that they find themselves having more in common with liberals and modernists than they do with traditional Catholics.
Keating knows he’s causing waves. He admits in his August 12 “e-letter” that because of his expose on the age of the earth “some of This Rock’s readers of the article threw up their hands and declared that Keating has sided with atheists and secularists and has gone over into the evolutionist camp.” Although Keating never denies that he is in the evolutionist’s camp, he tries to diffuse the complaints by contending that, even if evolution was not correct, “we still don’t need to believe in a young earth.” By shifting the burden away from evolution to the age of the earth, Keating thinks he can save face in front of his nervous audience, but at the same time, he creates enough doubt about a literal interpretation of Genesis that his reader finds himself the victim of a clever shell game.
Interestingly enough, This Rock magazine has made a trademark for itself in the last 20 years with a feature titled “The Fathers Know Best.” Here Keating shows that, when the Father’s were presented with passages of Scripture that non-Catholics insisted on turning into symbols, they doggedly adhered to the literal interpretation, no matter how absurd it appeared to their critiques. For example, Catholics have been ridiculed for centuries for giving literal interpretations to such passages as Matthew 26:26 (“This is my body”), or others such as John 3:5 (“unless you are born of water and the Spirit”) or John 20:23 (“whosoever’s sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven”). Despite the criticism, for 2,000 years the Catholic Church has never changed her belief about those passages. Why? Because that’s what was handed down to her by the unanimous consent of the Fathers of the Church. When it comes to the earth’s origins, however, suddenly Mr. Keating grows cold feet. Even though, as we will see in my critique of Akin’s article, that ALL of the Father’s believed in a young earth, and none of them espoused a theory of evolution, Keating feels not the slightest compunction in dismissing all that evidence.
Moreover, rather than admit to his audience that he is rejecting the Fathers’ testimony on the origins question, Keating forces another shell game on his readers. He puts the blame for belief in a young earth on Anglican bishop James Ussher who, according to Keating, “tallied the ages of the people names in Genesis...and worked backward from known dates in ancient history.” Thus, Keating makes it appear as if this is all a Protestant invention. From the carefully selected information in his article, his readers would never know it was the Fathers of the Catholic Church who, after the ancient Jews, were the very ones who adopted the literal reading of the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, fifteen hundred years before Ussher was born (1581-1656). I’m sure Andy Warhol wouldn’t be impressed. I don’t even think he would give 15 minutes of fame to Keating in the face of that kind of misdirection. Perhaps if Mr. Keating feels so compelled to ignore the Fathers he should start a new column in his magazine titled “The Fathers Don’t Know Best.”
The Fathers Against the Greek Evolutionists:
Not only did the Fathers not opt for an old earth or espouse evolution, they were in direct opposition to the Greek philosophers and academicians who, as Washington Times book reviewer Charles Russeaux states (commenting on Jack Repcheck’s new book on dating the earth):
Seeing seashells on Malta’s mountains led Xenophanes to formulate his
ideas of geological change in the earth fifth century BC and earned him the
title ‘Father of geology and paleontology.’ About 600 years before
Christ, Anaximander theorized that humans evolved from fish.(2)
Hence, long before Darwin, the Greeks had been espousing the theory of evolution
for quite a while. Seeing these kinds of teachings among the Greeks, the Fathers
wasted no time in denouncing them.(3) The best expositor among them was St.
Basil of Caesarea. He writes concerning the Greeks:
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.(4)
Having similar experiences with the Greek scientists, Hippolytus of Rome (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...”(5)
Thus 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.(6)
Hence, the company Keating and Akin keep is not with the Fathers, but with
the Greeks whose ideas were condemned by the Fathers. In any case, since Mr.
Keating is offering a new twist in the Creation/Evolution debate, that is,
that “one does not need to posit a young earth to argue against evolution.”
He insists that
If evolution could not have occurred over the last 6,000 years, is there some
dynamic that insists it likely would have occurred if the time in question
were 60,000 years or six million years or six billion years? Even if one works
from the position that evolution is a false theory, there is no evident reason
to plump for the young earth hypothesis.
What Keating casually dismisses, of course, is that for the last 1900 years
Catholics have used the testimony of Scripture as the basis for why they believe
the earth is a few thousand years old, and most of them did so without any
recourse to the theory of evolution. They simply believed Scripture’s
testimony as it was handed down by the Fathers and medievals. But dependence
on Scripture and patristics doesn’t seem to be in Keating’s repertoire.
Jaded as he is by the modernist hermeneutic and theoretical science, Keating’s
“Bible” has become the Grand Canyon – or at least, HIS interpretation
of the Grand Canyon.
Keating’s Trip to the Grand Canyon:
We find that Mr. Keating’s whole tirade against “fundamentalists” and “Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame” seekers is centered on one trip he recently took to the Grand Canyon. He writes:
In the part of the Grand Canyon where I was, the drop from the rim to the
river was 4,600 feet, or 55,200 inches. If one inch were lost per century,
it would have taken 5,520,000 years to form the Grand Canyon. (This is within
an order of magnitude of the figure geologists give. For my purposes here,
this rough approximation is sufficient). Now consider advocates of a young
earth. They claim the earth is only 6,000 years old. If so, for the Grand
Canyon to be as deep as it is, it would have to have been worn away not at
one inch per century but at 920 inches per century.
Later in another paragraph he elaborates:
Lying in my sleeping bag, staring up at the Redwall, contemplating the massiveness
and solidity of it all, I knew viscerally that what I saw was not formed recently.
It could not have been. I did not have to engage in the thought experiment
to realize that, of course. The hike from rim to river and back again contained
its own internal testimony. Anyone with open eyes and aching feet had a proof
that was strong even if not syllogistic. I had no need to know with exactitude
how old the earth is, but the rocky halls about me testified that it is far
older than 6,000 years – or even a hundred times that.
Although Keating tries to distance himself from evolutionists, nevertheless,
he must adopt their arguments on the formation of the Grand Canyon, for that
is all he has. Consequently, Keating will find himself in line with the theory
of James Hutton (d. 1797) and Charles Lyell (d. 1875) who postulated that
the rate of erosion and sedimentation in past time was the same as it is today.
Otherwise known as “uniformitarianism,” it is the belief that
since the beginning of earth’s existence, everything has remained relatively
constant and unchanged. The opposing view is catastrophism, which is held
by many biblical scientists. (Even a few secular scientists have adopted at
least portions of it).(7) It is their view that huge edifices such as the
Grand Canyon were formed by sudden and cataclysmic disruptions in the earth’s
normal processes. The most likely of these cataclysms is the world-wide deluge
recorded in Genesis 7-9, which according to the Genesis genealogy, happened
between 5000-7000 years ago, and which formed its characteristic rock structures
in a matter of days or weeks.
Assuming, as they did, that uniformitarianism was correct, Hutton and Lyell calculated the age of various stratums around the world from known rates of sedimentation deposition. There was one problem, however. Their calculations were hypothetical, since all the differing stages of stratum deposits that they assumed as evidence for their theory were never found together in one geological formation. Deciding to ignore this anomaly, evolutionists proceeded to date rock stratum based on the principle of superposition, that is, that lower stratum were older than higher stratum, even though they had no proof this was correct.
The upshot? If uniformitarianism is wrong, then Keating’s dependence on long periods of erosion as the cause for the Grand Canyon is wrong. Since there is no proof for uniformitarianism, then Keating, as much as he wants to distance himself from having to depend on evolution, still sinks with their ship. We will see how this develops as we move on in Keating’s article.
How Was the Tonto Group Formed?
Later in his article Keating cites his visit to the Tonto Platform of the Grand Canyon. He writes:
Other layers are made of debris or sharply eroded, softer rock and are caned
at about 45 degrees. The Tonto Platform, about a thousand feet above the river,
is the closest one comes to the horizontal, but it undulates constantly and
is never truly level...At an elevation of about 3,000 feet, the scrub-covered
Tonto Platform – which is nowhere really level – allows one to
traverse the Grand Canyon more or less horizontally. The Tonto Trail...runs
for about 92 miles.
For the record, evolutionists believe that the Tonto edifice of the Grand
Canyon occurred during the 70-million year Cambrian period, since it contains
many fossils associated with the “Cambrian explosion.” But again,
this is all based on the unproven and anomalous theory of uniformitarianism,
besides the fact that evolutionists have found no fossils before or after
the Cambrian period, in addition to the fact that the fossils in the Cambrian
period reveal no transitional forms.
The Work of Johannes Walther:
Other secular scientists have proposed a different scenario. A few years after the work of Hutton and Lyell came the geological studies performed by Johannes Walther in the latter nineteenth century. Walther began his studies by examining sedimentary deposits that stretched from land to ocean. To test a hypothesis of his, Walther drilled out a vertical cylinder of sediment midway in the advancement. He found that the various layers in the cylinder were in the same order as the leading edge of the advancement into the ocean. From this evidence he reasoned that the layers were being laid horizontally (not vertically, as Hutton and Lyell had proposed).
Walther performed the same testing in the bay of Naples. He found that after drilling out a vertical column of sediment, it revealed the same sequence of layers as the sediments laying horizontally. He concluded that Hutton and Lyell’s theory (i.e., that layers on the top were forming later than the layers on the bottom) was wrong. After Walther, however, not much experimentation was put into his discovery.
But in 1965, the American geologist Edwin McKee found evidence of Walther’s horizontal sedimentation in one of the branches of the Colorado river after it overflowed its banks from a torrential rain. The stratified layers reached a thickness of twelve feet in only forty-eight hours, and showed the same particle sorting and bedding planes as in all other sites previously investigated by Hutton and Lyell. Hutton and Lyell would have had to interpret McKee’s evidence as interruptions in sedimentation wherein one strata would have hardened before the next layer was placed on top, but, of course, this type of hardening would be impossible within the space of forty-eight hours.
Horizontal sedimentation was also confirmed by experimental evidence from coastal marine floods. In the 1970's and 1980's several teams of scientists bored vertical columns in the bottom of the Pacific ocean. To their amazement, they found that their samples confirmed Walther’s theory. Thus, not only were layers of sediment being laid horizontally in bays and beaches, but also in the deep sea. Germane to our topic is the fact that the same tests were performed on the Grand Canyon, and with the same results – the deposits showed evidence of being laid horizontally, not vertically.
With this evidence in hand, various other scientists set out to confirm or deny this intriguing phenomenon. In the 1994 publication, Grand Canyon: A Monument to Catastrophe, geologist Stephen Austin offers an explanation by citing the work of sedimentologist D. M. Rubin on the relation between hydraulic conditions and stratified structures in San Francisco Bay, which Rubin had originally published in Sedimentary Geology. Rubin found that with a certain speed of current, depth of water, and size of sedimentary particles, a specific sequence of layers were formed. Austin also refers to Jay Sufford’s work in Sedimentary Patrology, which summarized a series of thirty-nine flume experiments on the relations between hydraulics and stratification, and which found the same results as Rubin.(8)
To his amazement, Austin discovered the same sequential depositing of layers in the sedimentary rocks of the Grand Canyon as those in Rubin’s experiments. One of these was the 800 kilometer sample of the Grand Canyon, which Keating recognized as the Tonto Platform. It comprises three layers which extend east to west. The upper layer is made of limestone; the middle layer of clay; and the lower layer of sandstone. As predicted by Walther, the same sequence of layers are found side-by-side as those found from top to bottom.
From this evidence, Austin determined the hydraulic conditions which would have been necessary to form the horizontal layers observed in the Tonto Group. Austin found that a velocity of water moving at two meters per second, and causing the water to rise nearly 2,000 meters above the ocean level, would have been sufficient. He further found that all this could happen within a matter of two days (not millions of years). Not surprisingly, the velocity of the water needed to build the Tonto Group corresponded precisely with the velocities discovered in the thirty-nine flume experiments performed by Jay Sufford.
How Was the Grand Canyon Formed?
Thus, sedimentation occurs as follows. The advancing water travels at differing velocities. Heavier or coarser particles deposit before lighter particles in a fast-moving current. As the water level increases, the speed of the current decreases, and at that point the sediments deposited would be proportionately finer, yet all of the particles would be deposited at or near the same time, resulting in the sandstone-clay-limestone sequence as we see in the Grand Canyon. During the point at which the river or ocean arrived at its maximum level there would be little or no current. The finest particles would deposit at a rate of about 2 centimeters per day. (This, of course, shows that superposition does, indeed, occur, but not over millions of years). This process would be interrupted when, as the waters began to subside, the current reappeared.
The curious feature about the layers in the Grand Canyon, and all other sedimetary depositions, is that the layers are almost perfectly bordered against one another. That is, you see a few vertical feet of limestone layer with hardly any variation in the width of the layer extending for hundreds of feet. The next layer of clay, or sandstone, is just as perfect. That doesn’t happen very easily with vertical sedimentation dependent on the bottom layer hardening before the top layer is added. Conversely, it occurs quite easily in horizontal sedimentation.
Moreover, it is quite unlikely that erosion over millions of years could have produced what we see in the Grand Canyon, for erosion is not locale specific. It erodes all that it touches uniformly without distinction. Cataclysms, on the other hand, are locale specific, as well as possessing the tremendous forces necessary to make dramatic changes in the landscape (as we see in the Grand Canyon), and they do their damage in a matter of days or weeks, not millions of years.
As for the huge gorges in the Grand Canyon, they would have been formed as the water from the cataclysm began to recede. As it recedes, it creates velocities of current that are sufficient enough to cut deep gorges into the lightly-packed sediments deposited during initial stratification. This does not happen today on a similar scale because the sediments, over thousands of years, have become hardened, and thus relatively resistant to effacing.
I say “relatively resistant” to effacing, because not too long ago we had even more proof that gorges the size of those in the Grand Canyon can be formed in a very short time. In 1980, Mt. St. Helens erupted. The most remarkable things have happened in the years following the eruption. In the May 2000 issue of National Geographic, geological scientist Peter Frenzen writes concerning a canyon cut by the water flow created by the eruption: “You’d expect a hardrock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old, but this was cut in less than a decade.” Not only were the geologists shocked, but ecologists were just as surprised. Ecologist David Wood writes: “All of us were surprised at the rate at which this landscape was colonized again. We were thinking, Gosh, how long is it going to be before anything come back here?” The rest of the article answers the question: “Within just a few years scientists found flora and fauna pioneering in the niches created by the eruption’s various geological disturbances.”(9)
In conclusion, apparently unknown to Keating, there is abundant experimental evidence for the Grand Canyon being made in a matter of days or weeks, not over millions of years. Conversely, since the stratification theory used by evolutionists has never been proven experimentally, only assumed, then there remains little objection they can raise to these findings. As a result, their whole theory of the geologic column, including the multi-millions of years separating the Cambrian from such periods as the Jurassic or Pleistocene, will have to be discarded until they can provide experimental results to the contrary.(10) In the meantime, I thank Mr. Keating for allowing me to make this evidence available to the public.
Robert Sungenis
Catholic Apologetics Intl.
8-25-03
Footnotes:
1) This Rock, “The Testimony of Rocky Halls: A Grand Canyon Trek Gives Lie to the Young Earth Hypothesis,” July/August 2003, pp. 20-24.
2) Washington Times, August 17, 2003, in article titled, “Did he know the age of the Earth?,” p. B7.
3) In his Hexameron, Basil gives a long list of Greek writers advocating the evolutionary hypothesis (Homily 1, NPNF II, vol. 8, p. 53). Likewise, Basil dismissed the allegorical interpretation of Origen as “old wive’s tales” (The Hexameron, Homily 3, 2). Hippolytus also tells of his struggles against the Greek ideas of evolution in 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 many other Greek philosophic and scientific ideas.
4) The Hexameron, Homily 1, NPNF II, vol. 8, p. 53.
5) 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.
6) Ibid. 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” (The Hexameron, Homily 3, 2).
7) Dr. Kevin Henke has developed the theory of “Actualism,” which states that “the geologic record is the product of both NATURAL catastrophes (like local floods, landslides, earthquakes, meteorite impacts, and hurricanes) and slow and gradual processes (such as lakes drying up over long periods of time and precipitating salt deposits).” But those who advocate Actualism invariably deny that one of those catastrophes was the Noahic flood recorded in Genesis (e.g., Dalrymple, Hubbert, et al).
8) Geologist G. R. Morton offers a critique of Austin’s book on the web home.entouch.net/dmd/grandcanyon.htm, but it is all based on uniformitarian geology, with gives no room to catastrophe to explain unusual formation in the earth rock structures. As a result, secular geologists can never prove their arguments. Since they refuse to accept Scripture’s information that, whatever uniform processes existed, they were interrupted by the Great Flood, they can never come to the truth. The bottom line is that Scripture gives information about the earth’s past that men, of themselves, simply do not know.
9) National Geographic, May 2000, pp. 117, 121.
10) The information for this analysis was taken from the material published
by the 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.
Catholic Apologetics International