Guest Post:Evolution is a HYPOTHESIS Developed and Promoted by Atheists -- Part II

Speak for yourself, Charlie! Your grandaddy may have been a monkey (or a monkey's uncle); the rest of us came from Adam, created directly by God, and did not "evolve" from the primordial soup or a pre-existing universe.

By Thomas McFadden

On Sunday, August 21st I sent to our mailing list an email about how Catholic kids lose belief in God because the Catholic education establishment has essentially incorporated theories of origins such as cosmic and biological evolution that are incompatible with Catholic doctrine. As an example I cited Bishop Robert Barron's incoherent belief that accepts the speculations of atheists as scientific facts but "baptizes" them by saying that "God did it." These "theistic evolutionists" are vague about what exactly God did and when He did it. I quoted the question posed by Fr. Michael Chaberek in his book Aquinas and Evolution. He asked how it happened that at the beginning of the 20th century evolution theories were rejected by Popes and Vatican Congregations and at the end of the 20th century, although neither the evolution theory or Catholic doctrine had changed, evolution theory had become at the education level, a mainstream Catholic teaching. One reaction I got to last Sunday's email came from a person on this mailing list who understands the problem:

I am so confused and angry that 9th grade history at Chelsea Academy (second year running) is beginning with talk of neanderthal man and the origins of man without reference to the Garden of Eden . . . .

What this person understands is that Chelsea is likely teaching the classic evolutionary story of history. Most of us heard the same thing in school, I know I did. We were told about the development from "hunters and gatherers" to farmers and keepers of domestic animals and that there was the "stone age" followed by the "bronze age,"and the "iron age" etc. Where the "Neanderthal man" fits into Chelsea's story I can only speculate about based on what the unhappy parent said. In normal evolutionary history some teachers like to discuss Neanderthal man as a different species along the path of evolution. For example, this is a typical treatment that one can find on Wikipedia:

Are Neanderthals the same species as us?
They weren’t our ancestors, but a sister species, evolving in parallel. Neanderthals fascinate us because of what they tell us about ourselves – who we were, and who we might have become.

It doesn't exactly say they were sub-human but in the ordinary treatment that is the impression students get. Something like the "missing link" supposed to have existed between animals and humans. It is compatible with the evolutionist belief in polygenism. Catholic doctrine is monogenism, all people descended from one couple. Evolutionists, who believe that humans evolved from a lower life form, think it is unlikely that only one couple made the "evolutionary breakthrough" to what we call human conscientiousness. They assume multiple people of some sort emerged and eventually died out. It is really no wonder that in 2014 a big, statistically-sound national survey by Pew Research found that 87% of self-identified American Catholics believed that humans evolved from animals, with or without divine assistance. (In my book, The Evolution of Catholic Unbelief, I included an appendix that reasoned that if theistic evolutionists are correct, then Our Lady's ancestor was a beast.)

One might get the impression that there were plenty of these Neanderthals inhabiting the earth and that it is simply a matter of scientific fact that they were "a sister species" (whatever that means). Neanderthals are the names given to people whose skeletons were first discovered in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856. About 500 have been discovered. A good read about Neanderthals written from a biblical perspective is here. https://creation.com/neanderthals-modern

In an email I can't explain all that is wrong with the evolution-based story of history but a few facts from the Bible are relevant. The evolution story is one of human improvement, especially in knowledge and technology. So-called "primitive" people of history and anthropology were considered to be stepping stones on the way up. The more likely explanation is that as people scattered into smaller, isolated groups they lost technological "know how." The Native Americans were fully human but when Europeans met them they were what anthropologists would call a "stone age" culture. Just because there is evidence of groups of people that lived in cultures that have been labeled "stone age," "bronze age," and "iron age" and some cultures had a written language and some did not doesn't mean that the human race, as a whole, passed through those technological ages. 

Authentic Catholicism teaches that Adam and Eve were endowed with preternatural gifts and infused knowledge. Regarding technology, the bible tells us that their son, Cain, built a city and within a couple of generations his descendant, Jubal, was "the father of all those who play the lyre and the pipe."And Jubal's half-brother, Tubal-cain was "the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron." For many generations after physically-perfect Adam and Eve, their descendants lived for hundreds of years and it is unlikely that they needed braces to straighten their teeth or spectacles to correct their vision.

Catholics say they believe the bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit but at the practical level many doubt it by accepting and teaching theories and stories that are incompatible with it and then being surprised when kids walk away from the Divine Revelation upon which Catholicism is based. Those who were around in 1994 may remember the big buzz that surrounded the publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church because it was the first universal catechism since the Roman Catechism that resulted from the Council of Trent. Paragraph 22 of the 1994 catechism stresses how important it is to teach the Catholic doctrines of creation but that paragraph was "dead on arrival" when it reached the parish level. The Catholic education establishment is unable or unwilling because typical educators had accepted the alternative paradigm based on cosmic and biological evolution. In 1995, Cardinal Ratzinger (who became Benedict XVI) lamented that:

…the creation account is noticeably and completely absent from catechesis, preaching, and even theology. The creation narratives go unmentioned; it is asking too much to expect anyone to speak of them.

 What has changed?