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<\/p>\nAs a Catholic convert and medical professional with a keen interest in the creation-evolution debate, I am moved to present compelling reasons for the truth of Creation as taught by the Catholic Church, and the impossibility of Theistic Evolution per se, let alone its atheistic, strictly naturalistic antecedent.<\/p>\n
God is omnipotent: He continuously sustains everything in existence, and can accomplish whatever He wills. God is omniscient: He knows absolutely everything to the minutest detail. God is eternal: He is outside of time, which is also one of His creatures, and He has access to the entire history of what He created, including that which, from our time-bound perspective, has not yet happened. God is all-loving: all that He creates is meant by Him to thrive according to its nature and thereby give glory to His goodness. God created man as imaging (resembling) Him in his free will and his intellect, yet being the pinnacle of the material universe, which was created for man\u2019s benefit. God created the universe to be intelligible to man regarding its nature and processes, and subject to his dominion; whatever man could not interpret from his observations, including the nature of God and the supernatural world, God lovingly revealed directly -- among His revelations being the fact that Creation occurred in six days, with the natures and processes intelligible to man only being so after the sixth day.<\/p>\n
Rather than accepting and understanding the Biblical text and ancient doctrine of the Church in straight-forward manner, many Catholic intellectuals now tell us that the evolutionary conclusions of modern scientists are facts, and as such God would be a deceiver if the world and all that is in it was created miraculously only some 6,000 years ago, because this would be irreconcilable with the known evolutionary history of the world. Since God is not a deceiver, Catholic evolutionists claim the reality of the history of the world and its origin must be in accordance with evolutionary conclusions.\u00a0 Indeed, it must be stated that we agree that God is not a deceiver, and creation itself reflects His handiwork\u2014ie. reality.\u00a0 It is truly ironic that the evolutionists\u2019 are inclined to use this\u00a0 \u201cGod would be a deceiver\u201d argument because a \u201cGod would be a deceiver\u201d argument is at the heart of why we creationists are so adamant that evolutionism cannot be true.\u00a0 If they hypothesis of evolution were true then God and His Church would truly be deceivers because reality would be irreconcilable with what God has plainly told us and handed down to us from the Apostles in inerrant, infallible, canonical Holy Scripture, God\u2019s Word, and thus the Church taught as fact, for two millennia, an account of creation that is nothing more than a fable.\u00a0 What could be more deceptive than that?\u00a0 Who would trust that God?<\/p>\n
Let us ask ourselves which deception is more untenable.\u00a0 If the evolutionists are wrong, then this means any scientific conclusions about the history of the earth, the universe, and their contents must be thrown away as inherently untrustworthy if they disagree with the known origins and history of the world that we have received by public divine revelation, because public divine revelation cannot be questioned or reinterpreted.\u00a0 If, on the other hand, we creationists are wrong, then we must completely reinterpret Holy Scripture and Church doctrine on creation and all the related doctrines (original sin and related soteriology, Christology such as Christ is the new Adam, mariology such as Mary is the new Eve, eschatology, such as the end of the world and Christ\u2019s second coming happening in a miraculous way only comparable to the beginning in its magnitude), we must acknowledge and repent for errors of dogmatic Church teaching for two millenia, we must acknowledge that God\u2019s word and the Church is not the arbiter of truth (or that truth is relevant), and we must acknowledge that natural scientists, whether they be Catholic or Atheist, Deist or Unitarian, are the new high priests whose duty it is to correct the Church and bring her in line when she goes astray.\u00a0 God help us if our prelates continue down this road where the scientists are allowed to straighten us out with respect to the Christology, incarnation, resurrection, and other doctrines, not to mention creation itself, all found in the Nicene Creed and which are essential elements our faith but all of which utterly contradict the natural science of our new high priests.<\/p>\n
If God carried out the creation of all things in exactly the way He said that He did in His inerrant Word, as handed\u00a0 down to us from the Apostles, then saying because this would mean the evolutionists, in what they claim are observations-based conclusions, are wrong, and of course to them, this is unthinkable. The conclusions of the evolutionary scientists are venerated to such a high degree that Holy Scripture must be reinterpreted to pass the new litmus test of truth: conformity to the consensus of evolutionary scientists. Theistic Evolution is an offshoot of this thinking, an attempt to allow for evolution without fully denying Scripture and Sacred Tradition.<\/p>\n
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Of course, God\u2019s character is inconsistent with deceptive behavior. This is exactly why traditional-creation-affirming Catholics are so adamant, when it comes to the creation of all things, that God did it exactly the way He said He did.\u00a0 God\u2019s Word can and must be trusted more than man\u2019s, and the traditional view of creation is what our \u201cloving parent,\u201d Holy Mother Church, taught her children from the beginning. Anyone can verify the truth of this claim by looking up the First Article of the Creed in the Roman Catechism<\/em> which was the gold standard for teaching and preaching the dogmas of the Faith for 350 years\u2014and still is authoritative. The Roman Catechism<\/em><\/a> summed up the dogma of creation as it had been handed down from the Apostles and Church Fathers by teaching that \u201cThe Divinity created all things<\/em> in the beginning.\u00a0 He spoke and they were made.\u201d Like the Roman Catechism<\/em>, all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church taught that God supernaturally<\/em><\/strong> created:<\/p>\n Like the Roman Catechism<\/em>, all of the Fathers and Doctors also taught that God stopped or \u201crested\u201d from creating new kinds of creatures after He had created Adam and Eve\u2014because He made everything for mankind\u2014and that the natural order in which we are living only began when the entire supernatural work of creation was finished with the creation of Adam and Eve.\u00a0 Thus, the Fathers and Doctors knew that it would be impossible to extrapolate, as all evolutionists do<\/a>, from present-day observations of nature all the way back to the beginning of\u00a0 creation to explain how everything came to be. This would be like trying to determine the true\u00a0 age and origin of the miraculous wine of Cana by subjecting it to chemical analysis a few\u00a0 minutes after it had been supernaturally produced. The only way we can know the true age and\u00a0 origin of the six jars of wine at Cana and of the different kinds of creatures created during the\u00a0 Hexameron (The Six Days of Creation) is through the testimony of the witnesses appointed by God\u2014St. Moses and St. John\u00a0 the Evangelist\u2014as those witnesses were understood in God\u2019s Church from the beginning. It should go without saying that it is an unacceptable exegesis to extrapolate a different interpretation from which the authors of the text, God, the primary author, and Sts. Moses and John, the secondary authors, intended. Indeed, for the Church Fathers and Doctors, including St. Thomas Aquinas, the supernatural\u00a0 work of creation in the beginning was a proper subject for \u201cthe queen of the sciences,\u201d Theology,\u00a0 and not for natural science.\u00a0 It should go without saying that we must not allow Holy Scripture to be constrained to fit with\u00a0 worldly ideas that are antithetical to what the Church historically held and taught. We must hold\u00a0 to the highest view of Scripture that Pope Leo XIII advocates for:<\/p>\n For all the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical, are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can co-exist with inspiration, that inspiration not only is essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God Himself, the supreme Truth, can utter that which is not true. This is the ancient and unchanging faith of the Church, solemnly defined in the Councils of Florence and of Trent, and finally confirmed and more expressly formulated by the Council of the Vatican.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Perhaps an evolutionist could argue argue that God often works slowly and predictably, following the laws He Himself established. Of course, God has great patience. However, there is a big difference between God patiently waiting to pull the trigger on His intervention, a.k.a., a miracle, and what happens once He does. In every Scripturally\u00a0 recorded instance of God performing a miracle, the miracle happens, start to finish, quickly. I do not know of a single instance in Scripture where God performs a miracle \u201cslowly,\u201d once the action of the miracle has begun. Needless to say, a \u201cslow and gradual\u201d miracle would never be\u00a0 accepted by the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints in a process of beatification!<\/p>\n Some think that a loving God wouldn\u2019t test our Faith by making things merely \u201clook\u201d old. Quite true. Putting aside unreliable radiometric dating which depends on a plethora of assumptions including the starting elements present and if there was any leaching into or out of the sample over the years, which are unknowable yet critical cogs to the calculations, can you tell how old a rock is by looking at it?\u00a0 Regardless of looks and assumptions, are they truly old? Most evolutionists believe that the huge sedimentary rock formations all over the earth\u00a0 testify to long ages of slow and gradual deposition. However,\u00a0experimental research in sedimentology<\/a><\/p>\n has demonstrated that the best explanation for the massive sedimentary deposits we find is that they were laid down rapidly by moving currents of water, burying huge numbers of organisms quickly enough to fossilize their remains. Thus, the enormous deposits of sedimentary rock all over the world actually testify to rapid, catastrophic deposition in a cataclysmic Flood\u2014not to long ages of gradual deposition, as Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin believed.<\/p>\n It can be claimed that experimental or observational natural science could determine the age and origins of newly-created Adam, but that is a highly speculative assumption. Did<\/p>\n Adam have hair? If so, is God a deceiver because science tells us that hair of a certain length\u00a0 must have a certain history of growth? No one can say that God would be a deceiver if He\u00a0 created Adam, physically, in every respect like every other 30-year-old man to come because\u00a0 God told us, straight up, that He created Adam, man, supernaturally, and this necessarily comes\u00a0 with an appearance of age \u2013 degree of development and chronological age are not necessarily correlative. Likewise, most miracles, from healings to Our Lord turning water into wine, come with the appearance of age, because God accomplishes rapidly and miraculously what would have otherwise taken much more time, if even possible naturally.<\/p>\n Indeed, if God used long ages of evolution to produce the variety of living organisms, why has\u00a0 He hidden the transitional forms that ought to be present in the fossil record? Why has He given\u00a0 us the impression that there is no continuous gradual change in the fossilized organs and bodily\u00a0 structures of complex organisms when we examine the strata<\/a> from bottom to top? Why has He not kept the slowly developing galaxies and stars in deep space which neither the Hubble telescope nor the James-Webb telescope<\/a> has been able to find?\u00a0 Why has He not left some clearly rudimentary, functionless organs<\/a> in our bodies that would testify to our evolutionary history?\u00a0And if mankind has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, why has God ordained that we only find buildings and artifacts<\/a> younger than 10,000 years?\u00a0 It would have been so easy for God to give us this evidence. Why did He make the world appear as if there was no evolution?<\/p>\n In reality, as demonstrated in numerous articles on the Kolbe Center website and in the DVD series \u201cFoundations Restored<\/a>,\u201d the overwhelming weight of evidence from every area of natural science harmonizes much better with the traditional Biblical chronology than with the evolutionary time-scale.\u00a0 From the strong magnetic fields<\/a> of ancient planets and the absence of third-stage supernova remnants<\/a> to the presence of intact strands of DNA, soft tissue and Carbon-14 in the remains of dinosaurs<\/a> alleged to be more than 65 million years old, the empirical evidence overwhelmingly supports the traditional Biblical chronology that Holy Mother Church has affirmed from the beginning\u2014in contradiction to the long age evolutionary cosmologies of influential pagan philosophers like Lucretius.<\/p>\n To give two examples given by evolutionists for microbe-to-man evolution, we have Wallace\u2019s Line and the endosymbiotic origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts.<\/p>\n Regarding Wallace\u2019s Line, even if we work within the timeframes and according to the assumptions that evolutionists use, the Wallace\u2019s Line argument that marsupials evolved on one side of a deep marine channel and placental mammals on the other is internally inconsistent. According to evolution theory, \u201cFrom DNA and protein analyses, the time of divergence of the two lineages\u00a0 [Placental mammals and marsupials]\u00a0has been estimated<\/a> to be around 100 to 120 mya.\u201d Yet the land on either side of Wallace\u2019s Line<\/a> was only separated for 50 million years. So even according to evolution theory, there was plenty of time for marsupials to spread to both sides of Wallace\u2019s Line, before the split.<\/p>\n It is worth addressing, briefly, a bigger topic, the distribution of plants and animals, worldwide, and whether the evolutionist or creationist model makes more sense. Dominic Stratham has a compelling article on this topic, summarized here:<\/p>\n Evolutionists have great difficulties explaining the global distributions of plants and animals. Accepted models of continental drift are inadequate to explain both trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific disjunctions. At the same time, evolutionary biogeographers are unable to provide an adequate mechanism by which these distribution patterns could have arisen by dispersal. In contrast, the data fit well within a creationist model where plants and animals were rafted to the places they now inhabit on log mats left over from the Genesis Flood. The more raftable animals tend to have the most numerous transoceanic disjunctions and areas of high endemism\/biodiversity tend to be concentrated in coastal regions where ocean currents intersect with land masses. Areas of high plant endemism\/biodiversity often coincide with areas of high animal endemism\/biodiversity, suggesting that the plants and animals were transported to these places by the same means<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n As for endosymbiosis and mitochondria and chloroplasts as\u00a0 evidence for evolution. The advocated endosymbiosis theory is a perfect example of\u00a0 evolutionists jumping to unfounded conclusions. Dr. Jerry Bergman, who has taught at the\u00a0 Medical College of Ohio and has seven graduate degrees, amply deals with this topic in his 2021\u00a0 article, \u201cResearch has overturned endosymbiosis: the unbridgeable gap between prokaryotes and\u00a0 eukaryotes remains.\u201d He explains:<\/p>\n Cells are divided into two major groups: prokaryotes (i.e. without organelles) and eukaryotes (i.e. with organelles). Evolution postulates that prokaryotes evolved into eukaryotes. An enormous gap exists between these two cell types that could not have been bridged by transitional forms. The most popular effort to explain this gap is the endosymbiosis theory of Lynn Margulis. The proponents\u2019 theory proposes some proto-eukaryotic cells engulfed prokaryotes, and eventually the engulfed proteobacteria evolved into organelles in the primitive eukaryotes. The many major problems with this theory are reviewed, leading to the conclusion that it is widely accepted only because it is the most plausible evolutionary hypothesis and not because of empirical evidence. In fact, as documented in this paper, considerable evidence exists against the endosymbiosis theory<\/a>.<\/p>\n Because no physical evidence exists for most steps of the transition from prokaryote cell to eukaryote cell, armchair reasoning (i.e. mitochondria and chloroplasts have small plasmid DNA that superficially resembles prokaryotic DNA) is exploited as support. In fact, organellar DNA is more similar to eukaryotic nuclear genes. A well-known example of some organelle genes resembling eukaryotic nuclear genes is the presence of introns, which are rarely present<\/a> in prokaryote genes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In short, the molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis is directly opposed to Divine Revelation. It is a fiction that overtly seeks to replace the sacred history of Genesis and the traditional doctrine of creation that has been handed to us from the Apostles. In our post-Covid era, many of us are awakening from our collective slumber and rejecting the mantra, \u201cTrust the Science,\u201d which the powers-that-be have peddled to us for generations.\u00a0 Why would we continue to hold to this bastion of atheism when there are much more reasonable explanations of origins that accord with our Apostolic faith? If we can believe every other miracle that we are bound to believe as Catholics, why can we not believe the greatest work of all, the supernatural creation of all things that Holy Scripture reveals to us in the beginning?<\/p>\n\n
Compelling Evidence for Evolution?<\/h3>\n
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Dr. Kevin Mark practices dentistry and lives with his wife and seven children, with another on the way, in Bowman, North Dakota.\u00a0 His discovery of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation, as believed and taught by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, played a key role in his conversion to the Catholic Faith.\u00a0 He is a member of the Advisory Council of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation which provides an international forum for Catholic theologians, philosophers and natural scientists who defend the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation and who expose the fatal flaws in the molecules-to-man evolutionary hypothesis, in its theistic and atheistic forms.<\/em><\/p>\n
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