Unintelligent Evolutionary Forces

by Thomas A. Droleskey

One of the things we love to do is to take our dear Lucy Mary Norma to zoos. As we live in the confines of a motor home, it is good to get her out and about when we are in different places around the nation. She went to her first zoo, the Bronx Zoo, in  early May of 2003, when she was just a little over thirteen months old. She has been to many since that time, including some of the more prominent zoos (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Antonio, Omaha, Kansas City, Houston, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, which is Lucy's favorite). As there is usually a considerable amount of evolutionist propaganda to debunk, I make it a point to ask, out loud, the following question of Lucy, "Who made these animals, Lucy?" Lucy responds, dutifully, "God made all the animals." "Yes, that's right, Lucy, God made all of the fishes and the fowl on the fifth day of creation. He made all of the cattle and beasts, according to their kinds, on the sixth day of creation, right down to their last detail, just as we see them here today. There is no such thing as evolution." This usually evokes a bit of shock from those within earshot. Some observers occasionally smile and nod in agreement, as did a man at the dearth Kansas City, Missouri, Zoo, where there are few animals in sight, in 2004.

The reactions of zookeepers around the country to my quoting from the Book of Genesis are generally ones of stunned surprise. After all, each of them has been thoroughly indoctrinated in the lies of evolutionism. Nothing, though, surpasses what happened at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., on the morning of September 30, 2005.

We took Lucy to the National Zoo following Holy Mass at Father Ronald Ringrose's Saint Athanasius Church in Vienna, Virginia, the day after we dropped off our now infamous Trail Blazer at the collision shop in Vienna where it is still, as of this date, reposing without any word as to how extensively it has been damaged or when it will be repaired. Lucy looked forward to her visit to a new zoo, which coincided with something we knew nothing about: a national convention of zookeepers and zoo workers being held in the nation's capital. The grounds of the National Zoo were crawling with these people, all decked out in the uniforms they wear at their own zoos. Oh, what an opportunity to do some evangelizing amongst people so terribly deformed in their thinking and in their entire world view.

I was asking Lucy, quite rhetorically, you understand, my standard questions about who made the animals. Making sure to project my naturally loud, booming, sonorous voice, I added for one and all to hear, "That's right, Lucy. There's no such thing as evolution. Evolution is a lie. Darwin was a liar. Darwinists are liars. People who believe in evolution limit the creative power of God, Who but spoke the word and made everything we before us exactly as they appear to us." You should have seen the nasty looks I got as I bellowed this over and over again.

The coup de grace, though, was delivered in the orangutan house. A zookeeper at the National Zoo took quite an interest in Lucy, asking her name. When the zookeeper, a woman, heard that Lucy's name was Lucy, she said, "Lucy, meet Lucy." The other "Lucy" was an orangutan. This prompted me to say, "Well, our Lucy is named after Saint Lucy. Her middle name is Mary, being named after the Blessed Mother." Continuing on, I asked Lucy who created the orangutan. Lucy answered, "God made the orangutan." "That's right, Lucy," I said. "God made the orangutan down to his last detail on the sixth day of creation. There is no such thing as evolution. Evolution is a lie from the devil designed to convince human beings that they are little more than apes unable to control themselves."

The zookeeper was aghast. Shocked and dismayed, she took a step back (no, I am not exaggerating in the slightest), clutched her chest and visibly gasped. Her mouth as agape for a good thirty to forty seconds as she looked at me with a mixture of disbelief and total disdain. I took our daughter's hand and walked away, hearing the woman muttering something to an equally shocked onlooker as we moved on to the next exhibit in the orangutan house.

Sad to say, though, the reaction zookeeper in the orangutan house at the National Zoo on Friday, September 30, 2005, is shared by many of the world's Catholic bishops. It cannot be, you see, that the words of the Bible are literally true. Evolution is not only "plausible," it is a proved fact that demonstrates that the words of the Bible are not literally true, that it is indeed outside of God's creative power to have created the world as recorded in Chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis. The fact that even secular scientists have debunked all of the claims of Darwin and his successors means nothing to Catholic bishops and priests and theologians who demonstrated a manic desire to conform the truths of the Holy Faith to something that is not only an disproved scientific theory but a political ideology responsible for justifying the promotion of one grave evil after another under cover of law and in all aspects of popular culture here and around the world.

The Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales and the Catholic Bishops Conference of Scotland, for example, have released a pastoral letter, The Gift of Scripture, which states that the words of the Bible are not literally true and that it does not contain a reliable record of history. The London Times described the pastoral letter as follows in an article published on October 5, 2005:

As examples of passages not to be taken literally, the bishops cite the early chapters of Genesis, comparing them with early creation legends from other cultures, especially from the ancient East. The bishops say it is clear that the primary purpose of these chapters was to provide religious teaching and that they could not be described as historical writing.

Similarly, they refute the apocalyptic prophecies of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, in which the writer describes the work of the risen Jesus, the death of the Beast and the wedding feast of Christ the Lamb.

The bishops say: “Such symbolic language must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally. We should not expect to discover in this book details about the end of the world, about how many will be saved and about when the end will come.”

While The Gift of Scripture is the subject of a separate article being published today, October 10, I do want to point out in this commentary that a denial of Special Creation of man by God in the first week of Creation is at the crux of the problem in contemporary "theology" today, reflecting as it does the belief that it is not only the created species of the earth that evolve but God Himself and His Holy Truths. The acceptance of the premises of so-called "Scripture scholars" concerning the "un-historicity" of the Bible" leads ultimately to the triumph of the Hegelian dialectical spirit in all of the elements of the Church Militant's life, including the Sacred Liturgy. And the rejection of Special Creation as recounted in the Book of Genesis leads logically and inexorably to a contempt for the description of Our Lord's Second Coming in glory at the end time as record by Saint John the Evangelist in the Book of the Apocalypse. Although The Gift of Scripture is correct to reprove fundamentalist Protestants who are obsessed with "predicting" end times (the end of our times could occur at any moment, which is why we must always be prepared for our encounter with the Divine Judge in the Particular Judgment that follows upon our deaths), its rejection of  Saint John's description of end times in his Book of the Apocalypse is pridefully contemptuous of the inspired Word of God that is meant to instruct us as to the distinction between Our Lord's First Coming in relative obscurity on Christmas Day with His Second Coming in glory on the Last Day.

A rejection of Special Creation, however, leads to all other doctrinal errors and to the rejection of the Bible itself as an "unreliable witness to history.

Although there were progenitors of evolution prior to Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century, it would not be until Darwin posed his now disproved theory of the "natural selection of the species" that evolution began to take hold among the intelligentsia, and hence the general public. Darwin contended that higher species had evolved from lower species, something that even hardened evolutionists had to admit in a 1980 meeting in Chicago, Illinois, had been proven to be entirely false. Even evolutionists had to admit that there is no evidence to support the theory that DNA has evolved. Indeed, DNA is what it is. A dog is a dog, not a cat or a pig. While there are variations within a species (different breeds of dogs or cats or pigs), a dog is what it is. As Gerard J. Keane notes in his most definitive work on the subject (Creation Rediscovered, TAN Books and Publishers, Second and Expanded edition, 1999), "Once again, the odds are heavily stacked against random Naturalistic Evolution. Formation of the first living cell would have involved processes of molecular self-organization unknown to science, and the complex mechanism of cellular reproduction must have evolved in the brief period of viability of the first cell. Since is there is no known way for this to occur, acceptance of it as a natural process requires a great act of faith by the evolutionist: 'Regardless of how primitive and simple a primordial cell may have been, it must have been complicated enough to reproduce itself, carry on metabolism and to excrete waste products. In short, it must have been complex enough to live. All living chemical processes require stored but retrievable information to direct them. How did the stored information arise before the actual chemistry itself became functional? If this question is answered as many establishment biologists do, usually by mumbling the word "chance," one comes into conflict with all information science. . . . For these and other reasons, the evolution of a single primordial cell by chance to a high degree of complexity, as demanded by present biological thought, is untenable'" (Keane, pp. 122-113, quoting Arthur E. Wilder-Smith, A Basis for a New Biology).

True science, which can never be in conflict with the true faith as it is a tool given us by God to understand the world He created when He spoke the Word, is quite exacting. There is no scientific evidence that the human being is evolving into anything. Human beings are what they are, namely, human. As Keane points out in a remarkably cogent listing of salient points: "DNA cannot of itself give rise to truly new, 'higher' genetic information. . . . Belief in evolution requires belief in impossibly high odds, much greater than those regarded as impossible in the science of fingerprinting and law courts. . . .Many eyes are a complex system of systems which could not have arisen by incremental changes. . . . Some [migratory birds and butterflies] fly many thousands of miles and find the destination by instinct. This requires programming by a Designer-Creator" (Keane, page 158-2). The scientific evidence is absolutely overwhelming in favor of the Creation of the world--and of each individual species separately--as is described in the Book of Genesis.

Indeed, Gerard Keane provides a great deal of documented evidence tending to prove that the Flood, described in the Book of Genesis as a punishment sent by God upon his sinful creatures, actually occurred. Consider the following:

"The vast amount of evidence buried worldwide cannot be ignored when considering Flood credibility. That the Earth suffered a fairly sudden but immense catastrophe can be observed in the permafrost regions, where hundreds of thousands of various types of animals lie entombed in sediment, volcanic ash and ice--frozen hard as flint.

"In 1901, a mammoth was dislodged from the permafrost near Beresovka in Siberia and was examined by a team of scientists. Twenty-four pounds of undigested vegetable matter were found in the stomach, and a comprehensive list was complied of the wide range of shrubs, herbs, meadow grasses, mosses and plants found in the food. The color of the leaves of one plant was still intact, as if freshly packed. Another mammoth unearthed in 1908 was found lying on green grass frozen with the carcass.

"The data on the Beresovka mammoth shows the northern polar region underwent a rapid dramatic change of climate and has since stayed that way. The type of food found in the mammoth's stomach cannot grow in that area today; the climate must have been much milder before the change. Further, since the mammoth lacked oil-producing glands in the skin and hair-erector muscles, it could not survive in a very cold environment. The climate must once have been quite temperate.

"There seems little doubt that the creature was suddenly overwhelmed in the middle of the summer, within a half-hour of eating the food, and instant death occurred, following by rapid deep-freeze. The sudden death is proved by the unchewed bean pods, still containing the beans, that were found between its teeth; the deep freeze is suggested by the well-preserved state of the stomach contents and the presence of edible meat. Some of the carcass was thawed and fed to dogs in the expedition, who ate it with great relish and with no after-effects.

"The preservation of entombed creatures in the permafrost is quite intriguing. If the change of climate had been only gradual, the animals could easily have moved away southwards to a warmer climate. If the ground had already been frozen, the remains of the creatures could not have penetrated the rock-hard earth or would have suffered damage if crushed in a crevasse. If the ground were soft, as burial requires, then the temperatures must have been warm, and the remains should have rotted away. This shows that immediately after burial the ground was quickly frozen and has remained so ever since" (Keane, pp. 72-73).

The Keane work speaks for itself. What I want to concentrate on is the remarkable effort on the part of many Catholics to try to conform the faith to a disproved theory. Evolution has taken such hold in the minds of many serious Catholic intellectuals that some of them, including Father Stanley Jaki, have attempted to reconcile evolution theory with the faith, contending that God created the universe and then let evolutionary forces gradually create the visible world. As Keane notes, however, "A now-common trend is that of rejecting Darwinism but still praising Evolution, as though Evolution per se divorced from Darwin is viable. Father Stanley Jaki, O.S.B. strongly rejects both creationism and Darwinists in The Savior of Science, but then admits his belief in Evolution and gives a specific example of Evolution at work: 130 species of beetles arising on the island of St. Helena! Unfortunately, just like Darwin's flinches on the Galapagos Islands, this is not Evolution; there is no new. 'higher," information being added to the gene pool. Once any version of Evolution is given credence, this must influence one's view on Scripture and exegesis, ultimately to the detriment of sound doctrine" (Keane, p. 298). Indeed, it must.

The theory of evolution came along at a time in the Nineteenth Century when many of the German scripture scholars had begun their assault on the "historicity" of the Bible, providing them with a supposedly "scientific" foundation to debunk the "myths" and "fables" found in the pages of Holy Writ. The work of these "scholars" helped to destroy belief in the Bible as the Word of God in the minds and the hearts of many Christians. It ultimately influenced (and shaped) much of Catholic scripture scholars. It helped to foment the process of the de-Christianization of the mainstream Protestant sects, and it helped to give Modernists within the true Church the "ammunition" they had been seeking to claim that the Bible is an unreliable witness to history, and that there are no unchanging truths which bind all human consciences at all times for all eternity.

If there is no special creation of man by God from the dust of the earth, then we are little more than beasts who might be evolving into something else. If the species evolved from lower to higher, then it is eminently possible for God to evolve over the course of time, which is the essence of Hegelian thought (that the world is characterized by the constant process of the dialectic, the clash of competing ideas which will one day result in what Georg Hegel called the "ideal spirit," the time at which the human being will achieve perfection on earth). Hegel's process of constant change was "baptized," so to speak, by process theologians such as Loisey and Whitehead at the beginning of the twentieth century, who contended that God is in constant flux. Thus, if God is in constant flux, then so too must the Church be in constant flux. If there are no constants, if everything is evolving over the course of time, then theology itself must "evolve" The liturgy must "evolve." This was the essence of the thought of Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who has had such a profound influence on the state of the Church and the world in the past fifty years or so.

As the late Dietrich von Hildebrand pointed out in Transformation in Christ:

"Many people are impressed by a thinker who constructs a new world out of his own mind, in which everything is interconnected and 'explained.' They consider such conceptions the most eminent feat of the human mind. Accordingly, they praise Teilhard as a great synthetic thinker. In truth, however, the measure of a thinker's greatness is the extent to which he has grasped reality in its plenitude and depth and in its hierarchical structure. If this measure is applied to Teilhard, he obviously cannot be considered a great thinker.

"Teilhard's thought is hopelessly at odds with Christianity. Christian revelation presupposes certain basic natural facts, such as the existence of objective truth, the spiritual reality of an individual person, the radical difference between spirit and matter, the difference between body and soul, the unalterable objectivity of moral good and evil, freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and, of course, the existence of a personal God. Teilhard's approach to all of these questions reveals an unbridgeable chasm between his theology fiction and Christian revelation.

"Teilhard's Christ is no longer Jesus, the God-man, the epiphany of God, the Redeemer. . . . In his basic conception of the world, which does not provide for original sin in the sense the Church gives to the term, there is no place for the Jesus Christ of the Gospels; for if there is no original sin, the redemption of man through Christ loses its inner meaning."

How sad it is that Pope Benedict XVI has praised a disciple of Chardin's, Abbe Paul Couturier, the founder of "spiritual ecumenism," which itself is founded in a belief that God's Truths and the very nature of His Holy Church change over time and that we must come to recognize this change by an "interior process" of self-examination and prayerful reflection. This is a direct example of an attempt by Catholics to conform themselves to the disproved ideology of evolutionism, in this case with devastating results in the life of the Church Militant on earth in her human elements.

The Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Austria, Christoph Schoenborn, a close friend of and key adviser to Pope Benedict, has lent further support to the lie of evolutionism by stating in a lecture recently that, "I see no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, under one condition -- that the limits of a scientific theory are respected," meaning that the evolutionists must not rule out a "creator" who "set things in motion" as they later evolved on their own. Such statements, which fly in the face of the secular scientific evidence rejecting evolutionism, just confuse the faithful and cast doubt onto the historicity and truthfulness of Holy Writ.

Is it not the case, ladies and gentlemen, that the lion's share of Catholics (especially in the United States) believe that there are few absolutes in the world? We have to "dialogue" to find out what we believe. We have to have discussion classes to discover where it is we are "going" in our "journey." All of this empties the faith of anything creedal which has been revealed definitively by the Word Who was made Flesh and dwelt amongst us. All of this opens up the faith to all manner of infiltration by the forces of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Indeed, if God and the world are evolving, then why can't "rules" against contraception, the indissolubility of a sacramental marriage, abortion, euthanasia, or women's ordination to the priesthood change. Everything is evolving, right?

The theory of evolution has not only helped to undermine belief in the Bible as the Word of God--and hence faith in Sacred Tradition as the other source of Divine Revelation. The theory of evolution has also had a profound influence on popular culture. Darwinism helped to reinforce the beliefs of Karl Marx that the human being was nothing more than a miscellaneous mass of cells who is essentially no different than any other animal. It helped to reinforce Sigmund Freud's belief that the human being is really little more than a beast who is driven by carnal desire and aggression. It helped to give impetus to all atheists, including the nihilist predecessors of Adolf Hitler's racialist ideology. (Hitler believed in the superiority of the Aryan race, something he believed to be scientifically demonstrable). Darwinism was at the root of the social engineering desired by the likes of both Margaret Sanger and the bureaucrats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, to say nothing of their compatriots in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It helped to propagate the lie of "instruction" in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. After all, if we are nothing more than an intelligent form of beast, isn't it "necessary" for us to know what to do when our bestial instincts "drive" us to act in certain ways?

It is truly amazing to see how many people, including Catholics, have rushed to conform the Faith to a disproved theory. Evolutionists keep shifting ground to try to explain what is ultimately a belief system. There is no missing link between the highest form of primate and the human being. Carbon dating has been proven to be very unreliable, which means that the planet may actually be as young as 6-10,000 years old, not the billions of years we keep hearing about on news reports, which merely parrot the standard line of pseudo-scientists. The mathematical odds of two set of identical human fingerprints is 2,980,232,238,769,531,250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. Despite the advice given to the Holy Father by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (which has accepted advice from atheistic evolutionists), evolution is not more than a theory. It is a theory which is based upon a belief in a world which does not depend upon God.

The widespread belief in evolution, however, has led rather inexorably to devolution of human behavior. The belief that we are descended from apes has prompted people to act like apes. The law of the jungle rules in our schools, on our streets, in our homes, and in our government. Mothers can kill the natural fruit of their wombs under cover of law. The elderly and the chronically and/or terminally ill can be put to Asleep" much like my late father would euthanize a sick dog at the behest of its owners. Children feel free to massacre each other in schools. The most vile forms of insults are hurled by young toughs in their twenties and thirties as they attend sporting events, drinking so much alcohol that it may very well be the case that they will need nothing to preserve their bodies for their wakes after their deaths. If we do not believe that we are redeemed creatures who are made in the image and likeness of the Triune God, then we devolve to the level of barbarism over time, giving vent to every primordial urge after another solely because we are living on the material and sensual levels. Wild animals spend their waking hours on the prowl for food. The human beasts shaped by a world which teaches that we are descended from beasts work in order to eat, drink, and be merry, not to give honor and glory to the Triune God.

Could it not be the case, ladies and gentlemen, that God created the world exactly as is recorded in the Book of Genesis, that is to say in six days before resting on the seventh? Think about it. We believe in a God Who deigned to be conceived as a helpless embryo in the womb of a virgin by the power of the Holy Ghost. We believe in a God-Man Who resurrected from the dead and has ascended to the Father's right hand in glory. We believe that a mere man, a priest, has the power to make the God-Man incarnate under the appearances of bread and wine. If it is possible for God to do all of those things, why is it not possible for Him to have created the world exactly as the Book of Genesis tells us that He did?

Sure, Pope Pius XII wrote in Humani Generis in 1951 that the Church takes no position on evolution, that she is willing to look at the evidence presented. But all of the evidence points to special creation. No, pure science cannot prove the Creation account in the Book of Genesis. But pure science can disprove the propositions of the evolutionists, which it has done over and over again in recent years. Evolutionism has become its own belief system, with its adherents refusing to look dispassionately at the evidence which disproves its ever-shifting contentions.

The modern world needs to believe in the theory of evolution to sustain its own devolution in barbarism and its concomitant rejection of the true Faith. Father Peter Damien Fehlner, as quoted by Gerard J. Keane, notes:

"Good arguments can actually be adduced in fact to show that evolution is simply not a scientific hypothesis. It is a dogma providing the context for all scientific endeavors. And it is just this assumption of evolutionism as the universal paradigm that directly conflicts with the teaching of the Church . . . .

"The doctrine of creation, in general and in all its detail, is intimately bound up with the mystery of salvation. That is why the Catholic may not call into question any aspect of doctrine of creation which in fact the Church believes related to the mystery of salvation without also doubting that latter mystery."

I put my faith in the Word of God. Even secular science is proving Sacred Scripture to be a quite reliable source of both science and history. There is no evidence to support anything other than the truths we learned as children: that God carefully created each thing in the world, culminating His work of creation in man, whom He recreated on the wood of the Cross.

May Our Lady, the New Eve who gave birth to us in great pain as she stood valiantly by the foot of the Cross, pray for us to believe in the Word of God, not in fables propagated by people, who are proving that they are the produces of unintelligent evolutionary forces, who have a vested interest in convincing us that we are descendants of beasts, not adopted children of God by virtue of her Divine Son's redemptive act.

Our Lady, Ark of the Covenant, pray for us.

Saint Jerome, pray for us.

Saint Francis Borgia, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Anthony of Padua, Hammer of Heretics, pray for us, pray for the Church's hierarchy.