In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he describes one of the most disturbing phenomena of our time, the intellectual elite’s denial of the intelligent design of the universe and their illusory belief that man’s fallen intelligence can re-fashion humanity and the natural world to improve upon them—since they are the products of random, unconscious material processes. He writes:
The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those men that detain the truth of God in injustice: Because that which is known of God is manifest in them. For God hath manifested it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. His eternal power also and divinity: so that they are inexcusable. Because that, when they knew God, they have not glorified him as God or given thanks: but became vain in their thoughts. And their foolish heart was darkened. For, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. (Romans 1:18-22)
One of the leading proponents of this upside-down view of reality is the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. In his popular book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Harari writes:
As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose.
Echoing a view that seems to be popular with some Catholic theistic evolutionists, Harari asserts that a “Cognitive Revolution” took place between 30,000 and 70,000 years ago with “the “appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating.” Amazingly, Harari believes that these “new ways of thinking and communicating” resulted from “accidental genetic mutations.” He writes:
The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of Sapiens, enabling them to think in unprecedented ways and to communicate using an altogether new type of language. We might call it the Tree of Knowledge mutation. Why did it occur in Sapiens DNA rather than in that of Neanderthals? It was a matter of pure chance, as far as we can tell.
With this statement, Harari reveals the astonishing extent of his ignorance of paleoanthropology, since even most evolutionary paleoanthropologists acknowledge that Neanderthals and homo sapiens formed a single race. As evolutionist Michael Shermer wrote more than ten years ago, commenting on a study published in Science, “[W]e must reclassify Homo neanderthalensis as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of Homo sapiens.”
Harari’s blind faith in the evolution of mankind through random mutations and natural selection leads him to conclude that we are now on the brink of a new stage in human evolution in which humans will use technology to take evolution into their own hands. The video at this link shows that for Harari, Klaus Schwab and their transhumanist colleagues, the re-programming of the human genome will be accomplished by the global elite, with or without the consent of the unwashed masses of human beings. As Harari has noted: “If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids—you and they will not be exempt from the consequences.”
Max Tegmark and Artificial Intelligence
One of the leading theorists in the movement to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to advance human evolution is Max Tegmark at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). As a recent article by an author at Creation Ministries International has pointed out:
Dr. Max Tegmark
Tegmark shows his optimism of AI’s abilities with calculations demonstrating that future gains in technology are only limited by the laws of physics. Yet, he goes further, suggesting essentially that alchemy will make a comeback; that is, AI will be able to turn any material made up of quarks into any other material. It is not quite creatio ex nihilo, but not far from it. The underlying thought is that hydrogen was (presumably) converted into the other elements in the past so, going forward, this will be a process controlled by AI! The fiction continues with the artificial assembly of humans, starting with “two gigabytes of information needed to specify a person’s DNA and then incubating a baby to be raised by the AI, or the AI could nano-assemble quarks and electrons into full-grown people who would have all the memories scanned from their originals back on earth”
[In his book] Life 3.0: Being human in the age of Artificial Intelligence [Tegmark] blends science (verifiable prescriptions) and fiction (future scenario descriptions). . . Life 1.0 is biological life and can survive and replicate. Life 2.0 is more than that; it is cultural, and can design its own software—e.g. learn additional languages. Life 3.0, according to Tegmark, will be able to do the same, plus design its own hardware.
He has a positive outlook on where Life 3.0 might be heading. Holding to a worldview embracing big bang cosmogony and evolution, he believes Life 1.0 and Life 2.0 came about by random chance processes (rejecting divine design), albeit with goals of some sort. However, he is adamant that Life 3.0 will be designed, yet does not see the glaring irony of his belief. A member of the beneficial AI movement, Tegmark believes that working together it will be possible in the next century or so to have superhuman intelligence, consciousness not necessarily excluded. Will anything then be impossible (cf. Genesis 11:6)? If AI with superhuman intelligence should come about, people would no longer be the ‘wisest’ entities (as designated by our species name sapiens). Therefore, he suggests rebranding human beings, in the age of Artificial Intelligence, from Homo sapiens to Homo sentiens (laying the emphasis on our five senses rather than our then-inferior intelligence).
Unfortunately for Tegmark, Harari and any human beings attracted by their evolutionary fantasies, the exaltation of human intelligent design above divine intelligent design has already produced poisonous fruits for all to see in the form of genetically modified food.
The Unintended Negative Consequences of GMO Food
Most of the scientists involved with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences appear to share the conviction that food plants evolved through random mutation and natural selection and that God did not directly create any of them for mankind. As Dr. Nathan Daley has noted in an article entitled “GMOs and Health: The Scientific Basis for Serious Concern and Immediate Action,” the hubris of these special-creation-denying scientists leads them to propose improvements to created goods which almost always overlook the unintended negative consequences of their simplistic solutions. Commenting on the problems surrounding genetically-modified “Golden Rice,” he writes:
"Golden Rice" is genetically modified rice which possesses the genes to produce beta-carotene. Beta-carotene is the precursor to vitamin A in humans, and in regions of Africa and Asia, vitamin A deficiency is extremely common (causing a number of severe problems such as blindness). Therefore, this rice could effectively reverse the epidemic of vitamin A deficiency. Such medical and public health applications of GMO technology do appear to be much more reasonable than the pesticide resistant varieties (which are largely admired because they make agriculture more simple). However, the potential health implications of medical or public health oriented GMO technology are largely the same as all other GMO technology with regard to gene transfer and insertional mutagenesis.
Pope Francis blessing a sample of golden rice. Credit: Golden Rice Humanitarian Board
Even more relevant, however, is that the vitamin A deficiency in much of the world can be remedied in several other ways, many of which will have additional health benefits than just supplying beta-carotene. The vitamin A deficiency in much of the world is a result of a subsidized grain (largely rice) diet, which is a product of World Bank, World Trade Organization, and UN economic incentives and agreements aimed at increasing the economic output of developing nations. If the people of these nations were growing food for themselves and not for export, they would likely grow more diverse plant foods. Beta-carotene is widely abundant in the plant kingdom. Basically any plant food with a yellow, red, orange, and dark green color is likely to contain significant amounts of beta-carotene. Essentially, rice is not the solution to the vitamin A deficiency, it is the cause of it. This is a larger problem and a more difficult one to reverse, for sure, but we need to recognize the difference between real solutions which address the root problem and superficial solutions which simply compensate for one consequence of the problem. Failure to do so will accelerate our decline down the slippery slope of unintended consequences.
A similar hubris, born of a firm belief in human evolution through mutation and natural selection led to the promotion of bottle-feeding by most of the medical community in the United States more than 70 years ago, on the view that scientists could deliver the essential nutrients in mother’s milk more efficiently to infants through formula in baby bottles. As even most Catholic doctors glossed over the fact that both the first Eve and the New Eve nursed their babies according to God’s divine design, it fell to a group of faithful Catholic mothers to launch a counter-revolution.
La Leche League and the Kolbe Center
The La Leche League was founded by seven Catholic mothers in the Chicago suburbs in 1956. At that time, only one in five mothers in the United States nursed her children. The rest bottle-fed from day one. The founding mothers of La Leche League argued that Eve, the Mother of all the living, had nursed her children-and that nursing was the natural, divine design for mothers and babies. They chose the Blessed Mother, the New Eve, to be the patroness of their fledgling movement, under the title Nuestra Senora de la Leche y buen parto ("Our Lady of the Milk and Happy Delivery"), a title associated with an ancient Marian shrine in St. Augustine, Florida.
When the seven founding mothers launched the La Leche League, they faced intense opposition from the medical establishment, from corporations that profited handsomely from the sale of formula, baby bottles, and related products, and from social convention which looked askance at breast feeding, especially in public. Undeterred by the forces arrayed against them, the seven mothers enlisted a small number of doctors who recognized the health benefits of nursing and gathered testimonies from mothers who bore witness to the spiritual, emotional, and physical benefits for their children and their families. With the publication of the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, the founding mothers inspired millions of mothers with the courage to nurse their children and sparked a grass-roots revolution against the dominant bottle-feeding culture.
By 1980, 54 per cent of American mothers were breastfeeding, a huge increase in less than 25 years. By 2008, the American Pediatric Association was recommending that all mothers nurse their babies for a year-and the percentage of American mothers who nursed at least partially had climbed to 70 per cent. A 2007 study of the outcomes of breastfeeding versus formula feedings (updated in 2010) summarized numerous studies comparing breast-fed and bottle-fed children, and underscored the enormous physical, emotional, and financial benefits of breast-feeding.
It would be hard to exaggerate the positive contribution that the Catholic pioneers of La Leche League made to society with their grass-roots revolution. But another grass-roots revolution led by Catholic parents is even more desperately needed today, a revolution that will restore the traditional doctrine of creation as the foundation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Studies show that a majority of Catholics in the United States today believe in evolution as the best explanation for the origins of man and the universe, in spite of the fact that theistic evolution contradicts the understanding of creation believed and taught by all of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils in their authoritative teaching for nineteen hundred years. Arrayed against the minority of Catholic parents who defend the traditional doctrine of creation and teach it to their children are the mass media, secular academia, as well as the leaders of most Catholic universities, schools and seminaries, who either teach or tolerate theistic evolution.
Just as a culture of bottle feeding took a terrible physical, emotional and financial toll on parents and children, evolutionary indoctrination takes a terrible spiritual toll on Catholic families. But if, through the intercession of the Blessed Mother, seven ordinary Catholic mothers could spearhead a counter-revolution to restore the womanly art of breastfeeding, through that same all-powerful intercession a small number of Catholic parents can restore the traditional doctrine of creation. By God's design, nursing a baby is exclusively the role of a mother, who nevertheless needs the support of her husband, but the job of giving children the milk of essential Catholic doctrine is primarily the responsibility of the father in partnership with his wife. What is needed for a grass-roots spiritual counter-revolution is a group of Catholic parents who will:
Faithfully teach their children the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation
Defend the traditional doctrine of creation in their communities
Insist that Catholic schools, universities (and home-school coops!) teach the traditional doctrine, or, at the very least, allow it to be fairly presented to Catholic students
Testify to the blessings that faith in the sacred history of Genesis 1-11 brings to individuals and to families
This counter-revolution can now be carried out much more effectively simply by spreading the DVD series “Foundations Restored” –www.foundationsrestored.com -- far and wide.
Through the prayers of the Mother of God, of St. Joseph, and of all the Saints, may the Kolbe Center become a spiritual La Leche League for millions of Catholic parents!
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata, in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
P.S. We have decided to hold our 2022 annual leadership retreat at the headquarters of the Apostolate for Family Consecration in Bloomingdale, Ohio, again this year, from Sunday, August 28, until Saturday, September 3. For more information or to obtain a registration form, please email me at howen@shentel.net.
