[00:00:01] Speaker A: Biology is a science of life, different forms of life. So we cannot explain the origin of different forms of life because biology exists only when you have different forms of life. So basically these kind of origin questions, they require some other type of knowledge, the knowledge that surpasses or goes beyond what we can learn from nature, Idaho the Future A Podcast about Evolution and Intelligent Design
[00:00:32] Speaker B: well, here's a question for to reconcile faith and science. Is it enough to say God could have used evolution?
Many Christians adopt this theistic evolution point of view and it's now treated as the quasi official Catholic position.
But can this view really harmonize Scripture, theology, and modern science?
Or is there a better approach?
Today I began a two part conversation with Fr. Michael Haberek and Steve Green, authors of a new book called Creation or A Catholic Dilemma. Fr. Haberic is a Dominican friar of the Polish Province with a doctorate in Systematic Theology from Cardinal Stefan Wisinski University in Warsaw. He directs the Steno Institute for Faith and Science. He has published three books in English and many articles on the faith Science dialogue. He seeks to renew the Catholic theology of creation through a new intelligent design and progressive creation paradigm.
Steve Green is Director of Holy Family Institute of Catholic Faith and Life and host of the reasonably rational YouTube podcast. He has taught philosophy, theology, and ethics for a variety of institutions and presents regularly on issues of faith, science, and culture.
Gentlemen, welcome to Idea of the Future.
[00:01:53] Speaker C: Thank you, Andrew.
[00:01:56] Speaker B: Well, it's great to have you both and I'm excited to talk about the book that you've put together.
Now you've produced this book. It's called Creation or A Catholic Dilemma, and I'm wanting to unpack some of the insights from it over the course of a couple of episodes. Now, first, Fr. Michael, why did you decide to write this book, and why is there a dilemma at all among Catholics over the origin of man and the universe?
[00:02:23] Speaker A: This particular book was needed because it's on a popular level and I had authored three books, more academic books, which do not really maybe a difficult read for someone who is not trained in philosophy or theology. So this book is covering most of the topics that are connected with creation or revolution. Dilemma why there is a dilemma at all among Catholics well, because I think we live in times of confusion on many issues, and this particular issue is not less confused than the other ones. However, this confusion started much earlier, I would say in the Church. The confusion began in the 1920s, 1930s, and then it settled by 1960s.
So I think we are just beginning to clarify the issue and in my opinion Theology by large took a wrong direction and it's been kind of drifting, drifting in the wrong direction for the last 78, maybe even a hundred years.
So this is an attempt to show an alternative to this direction that is not correct, in my opinion. And the dilemma is whether we should continue this road, which I think will take us to nowhere, basically to the dissolution of Christianity ultimately, or we should kind of take a pause, consider scientific evidence anew, and then look at the traditional church teaching and perhaps, you know, turn back or, or, and then move forward in, on, on a different path. That would be my, my idea. And I, I try to say that this is the better way to go.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, Steve, how did you get familiar with this dilemma and how did you get involved with this project?
[00:04:18] Speaker C: Yeah, this interesting question, Andrew. There's a long backstory which I won't go into in great detail. It would take too long. But about 12 years ago, students of mine in a course I was teaching heard me give sort of a brief overview of theistic evolution. And it wasn't the topic of the course, it was just sort of a, a question a student asked. And I tried to give sort of a general idea of how it worked. And these students came up afterwards and actually said, you know, hey, with all due respect, Mr. Green, I don't think that that's exactly what theistic evolution is. And then they recommended to me one of the books that Father Michael wrote, Catholicism and Evolution, which is kind of a history of the Church's response to evolutionary theory from Darwin all the way up to Pope Francis.
That was an enlightening read. At the same time, I had also been tracking kind of the whole New Atheist movement. And in the process of tracking the New Atheists, I had come across a couple of the debates that they did with some of the Intelligent Design folks, Stephen Meyer being kind of the primary one. I'd watch. And I was impressed with two things, and then this connected to my connection with this project.
One, I was impressed with how intelligently Dr. Meyer argued the case for Intelligent Design.
And I was simultaneously impressed with how thin the arguments from the New Atheists were against it, to the point where it didn't seem like they had really read any of Dr. Meyer's books or actually engaged with his ideas and a lot of an hominum attacks. I started to see the same thing in Catholic intellectual and academic circles.
And so I had read from Father Herberic's book, I read some of Dr. Meyer's books. The two together for me were kind of, were kind of an aha moment.
And so my wife and I have co hosted a podcast for many years. We reached out to Father Habarik, had him on the, on the show, and actually were able to meet him one time when he came to Phoenix through mutual friends. So that began a long running conversation, which you kind of see reflected in the book and the questions that we address on all these topics. And we were looking for a project that we could do a deeper dive together. That was the book. And then there's actually an accompanying series of videos as well that are sort of supplemental to the book.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: Okay.
Now one of the, one of the things that books can do is they can bring clarity to a debate. And so in the, in the interest of that, I just want to clarify our terms a little bit before we go forward.
And you're careful to do this in the book as well, I might add. How do you, Steve, define the word evolution in this book? And also what claim made by evolutionists the book challenges? Can you just clarify that?
[00:07:09] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for that question. It is, as you say, very important to clarify precisely what we're speaking about.
So evolution, of course, has a number of different senses. In the book we're specifically addressing critiquing and challenging the idea of what would popular be known popularly be known as biological macroevolution, or the idea that over time evolution can actually produce new essences, new natures, new kinds of living things.
So what's non controversial, because it's actually readily observed and there's a mountain of data in support of it, is what would be referred to as micro evolution, evolution, which is basically adaptation and change in living things at the level of species and genus.
It's easy to observe. That's the kind of evolution that you actually see demonstrated in laboratories and, and laid out in textbooks.
But of course, the idea that Darwin had was that if you gave micro evolution enough time, it would eventually be able to move beyond adaptation at the level of species and genus and, and bring about entirely new families, entirely new kinds of creatures. So family for those who maybe aren't familiar with kind of the taxonomic levels of biology, family would be things like the, the Felidae family, the felines, the cats, the Canadae family, the canines, the dogs. And of course, you know, dogs, you've got jackals and wolves and foxes, et cetera, but they have a common nature. And then there's a number of different genus and species and adaptations to that nature.
So our contention in the book is that, is that evolution, natural selection, working on variation, genetic Mutation seems to be able to accomplish variation at the level of species and genus. Once you get to the level of family, which would be macro evolution, there the explanatory power of Darwinism kind of runs out of steam.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's. That's a great way to put it. Now then, we have the term theistic evolution, which some call it evolutionary creation.
How do you define that in the book? And I know that you do critique it, and we'll break that down, but just for now, how do you define it?
[00:09:24] Speaker C: Yeah, so theistic evolution, broadly speaking, is kind of an umbrella term. There are different theistic evolution positions, but broadly speaking, it's the idea that God used evolution to bring about life and biodiversity generally. Most theistic evolutionists would would say, listen, God created the universe at the beginning, but then he almost immediately turns the development of the universe and the origin of life and then biodiversity over to nature itself, and he kind of lets nature run the show from there. And then he shows up again 13 and a half billion years later or so, to be incarnate of a virgin, etc. And to save humanity from sin, there's almost kind of this absenteeism for most of the history of life and then the development of biodiversity.
And interestingly enough, I think one of the pieces of the theistic evolutionary worldview that's problematic is it almost seems like it's a tip of the cap to materialist evolution.
We need to get God in there somehow. So they kind of introduce him at the very beginning, but they. They try to hustle him off the stage of the great drama of life as quickly as possible, and then let nature do the rest from there. So theistic evolution is just the idea that God created the universe, got it started, but then backed off and let nature handle things going forward.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now, Father Michael, if traditional Catholic teaching has historically emphasized creation, how did theistic evolution become the default position in so many Catholic institutions?
[00:11:04] Speaker A: Well, that's a good question. I actually unpack it both in the creation of revolution and also in Aquinas and evolution, my books.
So I think that this is a very complex issue. It definitely coincides with the general decristianization of culture, which began very strongly in the 19th century when really materialism, Marxism and liberalism really started off.
I think there are actually two issues.
One is the age of the universe. And in the early 19th century, the evidence for a old, let's say old Earth started showing up from. It came from science, from geologists like Charles Lyell and others, and surprisingly, Christians, most Protestants and Catholics didn't have any problem to adopt it. In fact, by the late 19th century most Christians, as I said, both Catholic and Protestant, believed in the old earth.
But they kept believing in creation as well. Creation understood as direct divine acts in the universe throughout the history of creation.
But this idea was challenged by Darwin in the mid 19th century.
So initially there were very few theologians who would say okay, Darwin showed evolutionary origin of species.
They believed he proved it. So now we need to in a way combine Christianity with this new theory or as they said with science. We cannot be anti scientific. We have to adopt this new scientific theory which has been proven. Some would say that it was proven beyond any doubt.
So of course they confused micron, micro evolution and many other things. But in effect they started saying okay, God used evolution God.
And it sounds kind of nice, it doesn't really make anyone angry. You still have God on one side, on one hand, on the other hand you still have some form of creation, not direct anymore, but somehow mediated in the laws of nature. So, so on, on, you know, at this first glance it sounds good, but it, it's like an easy solution. And I think a big factor to the this tremendous victory of theistic evolution was also that it, that evolution was always presented as a science. And since the church had already got some kind of kind of Galileo complex, so they were the, the hierarchs and clergymen were very careful not to, not to contradict science. And Darwinian evolution was always presented as hard science without these distinctions between micro and macro evolution. The things that are observable and the things that are just inferred very those wild extrapolation like the tree of life, which you do not see, you do not see Tree of life. This is just a philosophical idea.
So Anyway, by the 1920s, 30s, I would say a big chunk of scholars, Catholic scholars, were already convinced to theistic evolution. And in 1950 the Pope published this encyclical Humani generis, which actually allowed to discuss the evolutionary origin of the human body, which by most scholars was interpreted as the fully fledged permission for, for tastic evolution. And since the pressure of the culture secular mind that it was becoming a secular and more secular culture and you know, 1950s, 1960s, that's a triumph of Marxism in the east and liberalism on in the West.
So both in both, let's say regions, evolution became a kind of established science, established fact, as they say.
So this pressure on clergymen who already had this Galileo complex, who didn't really know science and there wasn't really I would say professional critique of evolution from the scientific perspective. Those days, simple evolution was put everywhere into universities, schools, education.
So in a way, the paradigm changed. The paradigm shifted from, I would say broadly creationist or biblical to we could say evolutionist, evolutionary paradigm or, or, or materialistic. Right. And this is how, how. And this, this great cultural change affected the church or the churches because it affected Protestants as well.
And at the end of the day, by the 70s, 80s, we can hardly find any Catholic scholars who would actually defend creation as it was understood over 19 centuries as a direct act of God and also God creating things over time until creation was finished with man.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
So many in the Catholic Church feeling the need to retreat to an ever smaller island and try to hold on to God as well as pay, you know, lip service and tip the hat to what seemed to be the prevailing and dominant theory. But of course, the, the more we get to know this theory and the more we're able to study it closely in the modern, you know, sense, the more we're finding that it's an inadequate theory to create the information that is necessary for life.
And so I, I suppose it's a rather exciting time for the Catholic Church to be wrestling with this again as well as we get to know more and as we see the evidence for intelligent design in nature.
And I also wanted to say that, you know, we talk about academic freedom in the intelligent design movement a lot. You know, the, the ability for researchers, scientists, professors to have the freedom to explore the, the evidence and to follow it where it leads. It doesn't sound like, you know, Catholic clergymen and women had that freedom at least in recent decades or perhaps in the last hundred years. Would you say there's, there's been a loss of freedom and a great pressure to conform to what seems to be the dominant view?
[00:17:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that there was overlay of two issues.
On one hand, we had division between modernists and conservatives, let's put it this, this way. And this started in the 1920s again.
And modernism cannot survive without evolutionism. That's a pillar for, let's say theological modernism cannot survive without evolutionism. So those who adopted modernism, and that was a very broad circle of scholars, they also adopted, adopted evolutionism, tast evolutionist, obviously.
And once the modernists dominated the academia in the Catholic Church, at least evolutionism followed. And that was like, you know, one of, of the, one of the, one of the, we could say pillars of, of that new paradigm.
So I, I wouldn't say that there was a magisterial Ban on discussing this issue or any, you know, official persecution of those who held, who, who, who held the, the previous views. It was more like, you know, you are an old school guy, you are a Thomist, you are conservative. Now we have, you know, progress. We have these new ideas, new theology, as they used to say.
And within this kind of, let's say, environment or milieu, it was very hard to even think clearly about creation or evolution debate, because whenever you would challenge evolution, you were considered, you were immediately labeled as this bad guy from pre Vatican II era or whatever.
And so on the magisterial level, like church teachings, there was no limitation. Actually, the opposite happened. Pius XII in a way, opened up the debate, opened the possibility to debate. But there was hardly anyone representing the other view, the previous view, or the, we could say creationist view, because the academia, Catholic academia altogether, went down the road of, of, of, of evolutionism, which was, as I said, combined with modernism and some other changes in theology, like, for example, dropping the Thomistic approach. And I think Thomism very clearly speaks against, against evolution. So once you drop Aquinas, once you drop classical biblical interpretation, once you drop any, any relevant apologetics that was present in Catholic academia in the 19th century, you have no tools. Basically, there were no scholars who would still defend the Catholic understanding of creation.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, that's fascinating distinction. So did Humani Generis, this encyclical that came out in 1950, did it have the effect that Pope Pius VII intended?
You seem to be alluding to the fact that it was meant to open up the debate, but the debate actually became more closed, is that right?
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Yes, that's true, that's true. So I think Pius XII was well minded when he wrote the document.
I think he truly believed that debate is needed.
But he also put very strong or very hard constraints on the debate. He said, for example, that you cannot treat the evolutionary hypothesis as already being proven, which was a common place among theologians. They would say evolution was proven. So how can we even debate this issue? Another condition for the debate was that you should present arguments for both sides.
What was, what were the both sides? What were the sides in this debate? Well, one was saying that both body and soul of first men were created directly by God. And the other side was saying that the soul was created, but the body evolved from lower animals or as they say, previous living matter. So these were the both sides, but nobody discussed the creation of the body anymore. They all went along with this idea of body evolving from apes. And then somewhere at the end of the process God doing something to put the soul or to make this, this hominida real human.
So there was no presentation. And what's. What's more, the Pope actually explicitly forbade discussions on polygenism.
And again, after humani generis, everybody started discussing polygenism against, explicitly against the papal ban on this particular issue. Why did they do it? Because once you adopt the evolutionary origin of the human body, you start tinkering with the first couple because according to some biological assumptions, population genetics and so on, you need to have a population. So men actually did not emerge as a single man or a single couple, but in a population as a group.
So that was like a group beginning of a new species. So that's why they started challenging Catholic understanding of the origin of humanity from a single couple.
And basically this strain of thought absolutely dominated the academia. That's probably the biggest problem with the document. The Pope opened up the debate to have kind of balanced, nuanced discussion.
What happened is that almost nobody defended the original view.
Everybody adopted the polygenistic and evolutionary view and there were only slight differences. You know, how to understand polygenism in the context of the doctrine on original sin and these kind of things.
[00:23:48] Speaker B: Wow, that's fascinating background.
Well, in your book you say there are basically four fundamental positions one can adopt on the question of evolution and origins. Perhaps it's a good time to just clarify those. Steve, perhaps you can take this. What are those four basic positions?
[00:24:06] Speaker C: Yeah, there would, there would be further nuancing possible, but I think you can pretty much put the various stances on evolution into four categories. One would just be materialist evolution, and that would be the Darwinian version.
It's atheistic in that there's no space in the hypothesis for God or creating or ordering intelligence. That's certainly the kind that's popularized by the new atheists, you know, the Richard Dawkins and the Jerry Coins of the world.
Then still on the evolutionary side of the divide would be theistic evolution, which again is largely Darwinism with kind of a thin veneer of theism painted onto it or inserted into at various non essential points. And that's again just the idea that God created the universe and then used evolution indirectly and from a distance as the means by which he brought about life and biodiversity.
Then you would kind of cross over to the creationist side of the divide. And progressive creation, which is the position that Father Michael and I propose and defend, would be the idea that we let science do the science, so science is, is competent to answer science questions and we're happy to go with what science has to say on the scientific question. So when it comes to say, for instance, you know, the age of the Earth, there are many, many, or the universe, there are many many different converging lines of scientific evidence from all kinds of observation both here on Earth and then out in the cosmos, which seem to suggest the universe is, you know, somewhere 13, 14 billion years old, Earth three and a half, 4 billion years.
So for progressive creation, we're happy to just let the science answer the science questions and then go with whatever the latest science seems to indicate and additionally on the science. And then when it comes to the causes that are active in nature, we would hold with the intelligent design theorists that we should be considering if we're going to do science well and if we're going to employ the different causes necessary to explain what we observe and, and encounter in the universe, that we should be considering chance, necessity and intelligence, that there are three active causes which taken together can explain well what we experience and observe in the universe. So that's the science end of progressive creation. And then the theological and philosophical end would be the traditional understanding of Genesis as a literal and historical account of, of the creation of the universe, of life, and ultimately of the human person.
And so we would hold with the long standing tradition prior to Darwin and Darwinism that those are direct and intentional supernatural acts by God and that creation, the history of creation is actually divided into two parts. There's the initial or first creation, which is God bringing things into existence according to their kinds, and, and then there's the work of Providence which follows on that which is God holding everything in existence and allowing nature to function as a secondary cause in the bringing about of new individuals of species, et cetera. And then philosophically we would hold to kind of the Thomistic or the philosophical conceptions that come from St. Thomas Aquinas as kind of the gold standard of integrating the theology and the science. And then the final position would be young earth creationism, which is rooted in kind of a biblical fundamentalist view holding that the six days of creation in Genesis are six literal 24 hour periods, that the age of the earth is to be calculated by the adding up of the genealogies in the Bible, which gives you something around 6,000 years or so since the creation of the world.
And so that position I think is strong on maintaining an orthodox interpretation of Scripture, but I think sometimes to the detriment of allowing science to actually have a genuine voice in the conversation and provide real data. So it tends to what we would call fideism, which is an over reliance on faith to the exclusion of reason, progressive creation, the position that we espouse. We try to hold faith and reason in a dynamic balance and to approach truth with those two God given lights.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Okay, yeah. Now we regularly look at the scientific problems with Darwinian evolution on this podcast. And indeed in the second half of our conversation together, we're going to touch on some of the difficulties with a Darwinian explanation of life in the universe. Right now, though, just as we wrap up episode one, I want to focus on what's at stake as as this dilemma persists and why the theistic evolution view hasn't solved the problem. What are a few of the basic arguments theistic evolutionists make for their position and how would you respond to them? How do you respond to them in the book?
[00:29:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that they give in an so there are two types of questions. Let's say one is the type. The one is the answer to the question how things work, how the world works, how the elements of the world are built, how they work.
And these are, I would say, general, broadly speaking, scientific questions. So science can explain how the biological organism works, how dinosaurs or any other organism propagate, how they feed, how they function, and so on. And of course, science can explain how elements function and so on. But there is another type of questions where the essential elements of the universe come from.
So these are questions of origins, where the universe as such comes from. And this question cannot be answered by natural science, because natural science can exist only when you have already the universe, because when you have nature, natural science is possible. When you don't have nature, natural science is not possible. Therefore, natural science cannot explain where nature comes from, broadly speaking. But the same applies to physics. Physics cannot. Physics cannot explain the origin of physical laws and physical reality.
Biology is a science of life, different forms of life. So it cannot explain the origin of different forms of life, because biology exists only when you have different forms of life. So basically, these kind of origin questions, they require some other type of knowledge, the knowledge that surpasses or goes beyond what we can learn from nature as much as we can learn almost everything, possibly potentially, we can learn almost everything about living beings. We cannot answer naturally the question where the living beings come from, where life comes from.
Therefore, we need some other type of knowledge. This knowledge, as Christians used to believe for centuries, comes from the special revelation that was provided by God in the Bible.
Now, theistic evolutionists would simply mess up or mix up these two issues. They would give priority to science in answering all kinds of questions. Also the origin questions. Whereas they would dismiss the biblical message by saying that it's just kind of symbolic language or highly figurative interpretation of the Genesis account of creation.
So they would dismiss the biblical message and at the same time kind of ennoble the scientific message.
We say that those origin questions have to be answered by special revelation which primarily comes in the Bible. Therefore, we propose to go back to the original reading of Genesis, which was historical and literal, not literalistic, but literal or realistic. We could say that this biblical story is true story. It's not just a myth, it's something that really happened, actually happened.
It speaks about divine actions that actually happened in the past.
So tastic evolution is lost on these issues. And theistic evolution cannot explain the rest of God, the Sabbath, because the Bible clearly teaches that God ceased from his work on the seventh day.
And according to tastic evolution, God used evolution. Evolution works as long as the universe is in existence. Evolution works today. Therefore God never rested from his works. So how, how to combine these two things? It's, it's tastic evolution is completely ahistorical. It doesn't take into account real historical theology. It can only approach the universe systematically from trying to explain how God works in the universe.
But this is confusion between the question of origins and the question of how, how things work.
So tastic evolution also, in my opinion, is indefensible from the classical metaphysical standpoint.
Thomistic metaphysics. So the science of being is very abstract, I know, but we have to say that it's not possible to combine what Aristotelian Thomistic traditions say about being as such and its properties and substance and accidents. This is not possible to combine with tastic evolutionary idea. I give my arguments in Aquinas and evolution in the book. So I refer to those who would like to dive deeper into these details.
The tastic evolution has no support in science because we do not believe that evolution actually explains the origin of species. So the very, the very idea to combine theology of creation with evolutionism, which, which ends up in tastic evolution, the very beginning, the origin of this idea is in our opinion mistaken because the science of evolution is not that strong to tinker with traditional theology. But this is what had been done.
Why would you change theology if you don't even have the science settled?
So that's our question. And also theistic evolution as an idea of God using things is actually present in previous theology, like Gnostics of the second century, because, for example, St. Irenaeus Actually speaks about such ideas that were, that were that they appear as early as the second century. But these were heretical doctrines which Irenaeus fights and, and he says that this is not how God works in, according to Christian version. So in tastic, evolution is an old, we could say old heresy that was revamped and put into a garment of modern science.
So you actually take the old heresy, consciously or not, but I think that Charles Darwin threw his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin through Lucretius and Rerum natura and Epicureans. So you can see this line of thought from, from ancient atomists and materialists through Erasmus Darwin and Cartesius to Charles Darwin. But anyway, whether it was conscious or not, they actually restored the old pagan idea of mediated creation mediated in nature and they just wrapped it up in modern scientific terms.
And that's why it, it sounds very scientific but. And very modern and in a way convincing. But in fact it's not and it is something else, something different that the words would suggest.
Okay, so yeah, the strong points, I think I immediately criticized the strong points of it.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's very good. And of course all this is unpacked at length in your book.
You know, to, to really critique the theistic evolution position, you must turn to what it leans on, what it depends on, which is the Darwinian account of life. And so, you know, the more, the more we see that unravel the, the less room there is to hold a theistic evolution perspective.
So in part two we're going to touch on the science a bit more, continuing to understand why the theistic evolution perspective is not adequate. Now, last question for both of you to set us up for part two. What do you think is the biggest misconception Catholics have about the Church's teaching on evolution? Coming back to this whole dilemma again.
[00:37:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say that the biggest misconception that Catholics have is that the Church has given full throated support to evolution and is completely fine with it and compatible with it.
That, that I think is a very common misperception because of the fact that in Catholic academia, Catholic public intellectuals have so largely embraced theistic evolution. And they tend to treat the topic as though the first time the Church ever thought about it or had anything to say about it was 1950 Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis. And then because, and to just be perfectly frank here, the overwhelming majority of Catholics have never once read Humani Generis, have never even so much as glanced at it. So they're getting, in a sense, I, I kind of call it the Catholic telephone game. This person tells this person who tells this person who tells us. So by the time most Catholics hear about evolution and its relationship to the Catholic Church, the version they get is, well, Pope Pius XII said that the Church supports and accepts evolution back in 1950 and God can create any way he wants. So he just used evolution. And the Church is totally fine with it and it totally matches up with Genesis because that's basically just a symbolic account anyway. I think that is largely the going narrative. It's wildly off and it's based on a misunderstanding of what Pius the twelve said in a deeper misunderstanding about the Church's relationship with the ideas present in Darwinism, which actually, as Father just alluded to, go all the way back to the first centuries of Christianity. It's not a new idea, actually. Evolution is just a new name for an old idea, Transformism, which has been around and the Church has been fighting forever.
[00:39:35] Speaker B: Wow, Father Michael, did you want to add to that?
[00:39:37] Speaker A: Well, I totally agree with Steve. I would just maybe add that there is not a single Church document that would actually endorse theistic evolution explicitly or even implicitly.
Some would quote a document from 2004 called Communion and Stewardship, but it is not a Church document. We need to be clear. So when I speak, when I say church document, I mean magisterial, the one that would somehow bind Catholics. And of course there are different levels of authority in the Church. So if you look at the documents, which is the topic I studied, and precisely because of this phenomenon that I realized that most Catholics are really confused on this. That's why I try to explain it in my book Catholicism and Evolution. I showed that higher ranking documents from the 19th century implicitly or explicitly would reject theistic or atheistic evolution. Not just atheistic, but also theistic. Now in the 1950s we have this shift, but the documents that show up after 1950 are actually very low ranking and none of them explicitly adopts tastic evolution. So if you take just the sheer magisterial teaching as it stands, there is no really support for this overwhelming view in the Church.
So we have interesting phenomenon where we could say Catholic academia kind of drifted off from what the Church teaching actually presents. There is a huge discrepancy between these two areas, I would say. And I think most Catholics follow the academia because these are the people who teach them. The catechists are taught in the Catholic universities.
Then they pass on this, the same kind of interpretation to regular Catholics on the parish level, on the university level.
But almost nobody reads the real documents and nobody asks what the church actually teaches in her higher ranking documents.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
You know, I've had recent interviews with scientists and scholars and one idea that keeps coming back is that not enough people know about the scientific discoveries of the last hundred years that put God back on the table, that put the God hypothesis back on the table as a valid scientific hypothesis.
And that surprised me. And it might seem surprising, but this stuff only happened the last hundred years. Some of the major discoveries that we now hold as major evidence for intelligent design in nature, just the last century. And so we have a lot of work to do to teach people and reach people with this evidence. And I think your book is just a great tool to reach Catholics and other Christians with the evidence that this is not settled science on behalf of Charles Darwin and company, but that there's actually strong evidence that there's intelligence behind nature and that that information needs adequately explained. You know, you can't fall back on an antiquated 19th century theory even if it's been updated in the 20th century to explain it, because there's a lot of problems with that. So I'm grateful to you gentlemen for, for the work you've done bringing this book to life. And I'm excited to continue talking about it. So thank you for your time today.
[00:43:20] Speaker C: Thanks so much, Andrew.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Well, audience, be sure to tune into the second half of the discussion. And we're going to, as I said, we're going to have it in a separate episode. In the meantime, though, get a copy of the book Creation or A Catholic Dilemma at the usual outlets for books, including Amazon.com or you can visit it at the publisher's website, press.inkwell.net so Amazon other book publishers, but press.inkwell.net is also where you can pick up a copy. Well, until next time, this is Idea the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
