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 ("This sentence [of these sentences] have been removed by request of R. Sungenis") 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. ("This sentence [of these sentences] have been removed by request of R. Sungenis") 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. ("This sentence [of these sentences] have been removed by request of R. Sungenis") 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.

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