My friend Ann H.M.S. Beagle (nee Ann Dertal) has recently joined a non- denominational church, the Fire Baptized Church of God in Christ with Signs and Wonders Following Inc. She says that the Catholic Church teaches evolution and Darwinism. I was always taught that Darwinian evolution is a proven fact.  What do you think of evolution?

Yours truly,

Eva Lushan

I am not convinced about evolution. Personally I know a number of people who have never even bothered with it. If by evolution you wish to indicate a meaningless morphing of one species to another, humanity being just another one of those meaningless developments, then no, the Catholic Church most certainly does not believe in evolution. We believe that God, the Uncreated Creator, willed all things into being and that He created humanity in His own image and likeness. We don’t really know by what process He did this. He has not felt it necessary to tell us all the details. The Scriptures may well use the seven days of creation in a  poetic sense. We do that all the time. Take for example that irritating phrase now used by all the truly groovy, “back in the day.” It does not mean a particular day, but “a long time ago when things were groovier.” Perhaps the Holy Spirit uses the word “day” in the poetic sense. Similarly, the Almighty may have used a process of natural selection to form the human body from the dust of the earth, but we Catholics believe that the human soul is a direct and unique creation of God. Thus, we do not evolve. We are no more or less human than the first human beings, the parents of all the different shades and shapes of the six billion plus people who now inhabit the earth. We are not monkeys, no matter how badly some of us behave. 

You may think I am a medieval troglodyte (look it up) to deny that Darwinism is fact, but I would refer you to an excellent movie, Ben Steins “Expelled.”  I got it at the library. Buy it, rent it, borrow it, but see it. It is one of the finest documentaries I’ve seen in years.  If I understand Mr. Stein, (and remember I always tell you to take what I say with a grain of salt) he points out that Darwinism rests  on a fundamental error. Darwin theorized that all life descends from a simple single-celled organism. Therein lies the error. There is no such thing as a simple single-celled organism. We can now behold the cell in its amazing complexity. By the time cells came around, life was more complex than we can now possibly understand. Mr. Stein’s point is not that one theory or another is correct. He is trying to make the point that there really seems to be a willed and intelligent design in the fabric of life and being, and that current evolutionary theory just doesn’t answer the questions very well.

The idea of intelligent design is not unreasonable. Why shouldn’t science consider the possibility? The movie is a series of interviews with award winning scientists, sane and brilliant men and women, none of whom are wearing tin foil caps on their heads to keep space aliens from invading their brains, all of whom have been black listed by today’s academic, pseudo-scientific establishment. He also interviews members of this same establishment. The interviews are a hoot. He asks one scientist how these molecular structures crossed over into self-replicating, self-conscience life. The scientist answered that perhaps they “piggy backed on growing crystals.” The interview with Richard Dawkins, reigning pope of the militant atheist establishment, is special fun. Mr. Stein asks the same question of Dr. Dawkins. Dawkins, when asked how this cellular life began, said that we just don’t know, but that perhaps it was seeded here by design of some intelligent life (his words) elsewhere in the universe that itself evolved by some natural process. So, there you have it. These brilliant scientists who admit they haven’t a clue, are willing to entertain the possibility of crystals and space aliens creating  life on earth. If you mention an intelligent designer, you will probably lose your job teaching at a high school or university, but crystals and space aliens are no problem!?! 

Mr. Stein is a Jew, a pro-life Jew. He is pro-life because he cannot forget what the Nazis did in the last century. Just an aside, for all those people who think the holocaust didn’t happen or that it was exaggerated, it happened. I know. I’ve seen the tattoos and heard the stories. One of my relatives was a tank driver at the battle of Stalingrad, and another cousin, a priest, died in the camps. The family  had to spend Crystal Nacht in the barn, because they had always been too friendly with the Jews. All the windows in the house were broken by party members. The Jews had always been part of the town. They were our friends, 300 people in a town of two thousand. I remember an old man, a family friend, weeping as he told stories of the atrocities. A party member was beating an old Jewish woman in the street and my aged friend, then a young man, went and pulled him away from her, shouting, “What has she ever done to you?” Not long after, the trucks pulled up, the Jews who had lived with us since the fourteen hundreds were packed onto them and my relatives were told that the Jews would be relocated soon to farms in the Ukraine. Only three of the three hundred survived the war. There was indeed a holocaust.

There were lots of individual acts of bravery, but the society had allowed itself to be controlled by a small group of people,  perhaps less then a thousand at its rotten core, that had swallowed Darwin whole. Yes. The Nazis were Darwinists. They believed in the new orthodoxy of natural selection. It was proven science! Human behavior, like all animal behavior was genetically controlled. The goal of the race was survival, and survival meant the control of resources and land. The Jews were a mutant race. They had lived without a land for two thousand years and were thus parasites, sub-humans who like all parasites must be eliminated. Hitler believed this. He believed it was science and he convinced enough people that it was good science to enable him first to move the Jews out of Germany. There were only 500,000 German Jews, but as he conquered the lands that his master race would need to fulfill its racial destiny, he found millions of Jews in Poland and Romania and the Balkans and Russia and he could not deport them fast enough, so why not just kill them. It would be to the ultimate benefit of the stronger species. Had not Darwin himself said in the “Descent of Man, that “no one allows weaker animals on his farm to breed and thus weaken the stock?” Well, so it is with man the animal. The weaker should be allowed to live only as long as they were in some way useful, then cull them out of the herd. They were weak, and thus bad for the breed. They could be killed, so they should be killed. Thus Darwin made murder reasonable. His book was well named, “the Descent of Man,” a descent into the hell of Auschwitz and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen to name a few. 

Darwin “de-privileged” human beings. We are not God’s special creation. We are just organic molecules on a speck of dust on the edge of one of an almost infinite number of galaxies who by some coincidence are self aware and can peer out at the stars and wonder. Sorry. Just a fluke. We are an accident, not a creation. Our design is unintelligent. Thus Darwin. It is bad science because it is not true. There was no simple cell at the beginning of it all. Each tiny cell is a marvelous world of complexity .God is not only infinitely large. He is infinitely small. After the amazing complexity of the cell, there is the wonder of the molecule and the glory of the atom and so on. We have not yet found the simple even in the infinitesimally small. He is the Lord of the Universe and the Baby of Bethlehem and His eye is on the sparrow.

Dr. Dawkins, believer in the possibility of creation by outer space creatures, is not a scientist. He is an ideologue as dangerous as any Torquemada, or any Cromwell. He is the practitioner of the intolerance of which he accuses the Church. He asks a question of Mr. Stein. “What can the existence of God possibly contribute to science?”  The answer is simple: meaning.

I have a dear friend, Rabbi Yehuda ben Yiddishkeit. Perhaps you’ve heard me mention him. He likes me because I’m orthodox; not Jewish, but at least I’m orthodox. Well Rabbi, I try and perhaps on a good day I manage. You may ask “Is orthodoxy and isn’t scientific orthodoxy the problem you’re complaining about?”  Well yes it is, because scientific orthodoxy is a contradiction. I am reminded of a story about Freud and Jung, two of the great loons of the twentieth century.  Freud applied science to dreams. Interesting. Then he came up with the sexual theory, into which I needn’t go here. It’s a family column. However, when the medical establishment of Vienna turned on poor Dr. Freud, he said to his disciple, Dr. Carl Jung, “Jung, we must defend the sexual theory at all costs!” Jung realized that Freud had ceased to be a scientist. He was a dogmatist. Science need not be defended. Freedom needs to be defended, but not science. Jung soon parted company with Freud and went on to become one of the great wackos of the twentieth century in his own rite. When science becomes orthodoxy, it ceases to be science. 

Darwin was wrong.  Galileo was wrong.  Columbus was wrong. What? Didn’t Galileo prove that the earth revolved around the sun? Didn’t Columbus prove the world was round? And didn’t Darwin prove that we were all descended from monkeys?  Well Galileo got some interesting data to back up the ideas of Copernicus, ideas which had been taught in Alexandria almost two thousand years previously by Aristarchos of Samos, (300 BC, excuse me, 300 BCE. Don’t want to offend any pseudo-scientists who might be reading.) The curia in Rome, mostly Renaissance liberals at the time, were very interested. Then a friend of Galileo’s became pope and Galileo decided he could point out the errors in the Bible which had the temerity to disagree with him. Galileo was wrong. His theories didn’t explain the data. He believed that the planets revolved around the sun in perfect circles. They don’t. They have some very odd ellipses. But there was no arguing with Galileo. He was the founder of a new orthodoxy, Bible, pope and Church be damned! And that is the orthodoxy we all inherited: poor Galileo, nasty Church! 

What about Columbus? We’ve all swallowed the myth that the hide-bound ecclesiastical courts of the University of Salamanca laughed at him. Well, it turns out they were right and he was wrong. Columbus believed in a small ocean and a large land mass. The estimate of the size of the world, which everybody knew was round, was much larger than Columbus thought. The University of Salamanca was correct and if Columbus had not come upon some friendly indigenous people on some islands in the middle of the Ocean Sea, he would have starved to death. He went to his death believing that they were Japanese, or some such ethnicity. It didn’t really matter though, they were almost all dead in a century and would have all perished, had not some hide bound-Dominican and Franciscan friars insisted that the peoples of the New World were human, not subhuman, and had the rights of the children of God, the very same rights as the European Conquistadores who wanted their land and gold. I suppose that Hitler and Margaret Sanger and other followers of Darwin would have thought, well if they can be killed, then they should be killed. It’s just fascinating to me that Nancy Pelosi, by her own standards a good Catholic, and President Obama want to take up where the Conquistadores left off, killing the descendants of those indigenous people by providing abortion funds to poor Mexicans, descendants of those who survived the conquest. Busy, busy, busy! 

Scientific orthodoxies are evil. Science is the pursuit of truth and scientific truth is always partial, always theoretical. How different the world would be if Hitler had not believed so wholeheartedly in the idiotic genetic determinism popular in the age of Darwin. What if Hitler had said, “Now this is only a theory. We need to work on it and maybe we’ll find out where it’s right and where it’s wrong.” Do you think had he been a little less sure of his own infallibility, that he would have convinced an otherwise decent group of people that, for the good of the world, six million Jews should be slaughtered?  In our own times, the new political orthodoxy holds that a woman’s right to abortion is so sovereign that all must help her have one if she so desires, every doctor, every nurse, every pharmacist, every taxpayer, every Catholic hospital and every Catholic elected to public office, here in America and all around the globe. After all, a fetus (correct speak for “child in the womb”) is really just a bit of tissue, really not quite human, just like Jews or Native Americans or anyone we cannot see, or rather would not see. Thank you, Darwin, for letting us kill without consequence.

True orthodoxy is not the same as dogmatism. The Rabbi and I differ vastly on certain points of belief, yet we can sit down to a good plate of noodle kugele and brisket  and tell some of the funniest jokes and ask some of the most profound question. He likes me because I am orthodox. What then is orthodoxy? It is the awareness that the Creator of this marvelous universe has spoken. It is my job to hear and obey, always improving my skill at hearing. It is the unending and humble search for truth, whether through science or art or theology. It seeks the beauty and perfection of the Creator while admitting the weakness and fallibility of the searcher. It understands that wisdom is knowledge tempered by humility and morality that the Unseen reveals in both natural and revealed law. Dogmatism is the death of inquiry.  Orthodoxy is its source. God’s word is perfect. My eyes and ears are not. I will strive to know Him, to love Him and to obey Him, imperfect though I am, always remembering, as St. Paul says, “I know in part, I prophesy in part.” I am not greater than His Word, I am less and would know more. If modern scientists and politicians believed in the moral restraints and the intellectual humility that true orthodoxy imposes, perhaps the holocausts would cease.

Yours truly,

Rev. Know-It-All