EVOLUTION AND THE POPE
According to the Vatican Information Service in a news release
on October 23,(1996) Pope John Paul II was reported as saying
that evolution is "more than just a theory." This seems to mean,
despite the tenuous wording, that he now considers evolution a
scientific fact. His written message to his science advisers, the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences, speaks of "a series of
discoveries made in different spheres of knowledge" which have
convinced him to make this bold statement supporting evolution
and suggesting that his millions of followers do the same.
One cannot help suggesting that the recent spate of events and
media articles "puffing" evolution is being orchestrated
somewhere to combat the modern resurgence of creationism around
the world. The facts are so trivial but the propaganda has been
so high and mighty. There was that widespread furor, for example,
about the lone Colorado student who had the temerity to ask his
local school to tone down its dogmatic teaching on the
naturalistic origin of life.
And what about the sudden media announcement that a small rock
found in Antarctica has now "proved" that life has evolved all
over the universe? There is also the widespread publicity about
Bill Moyer's series of public telecasts rethinking Genesis. And a
new series of anti-creationist articles in such establishment
journals as Time, Harper's, Life, Scientific American, Newsweek,
and others.
Now comes the Pope with his "surprise" announcement that it is
acceptable for Catholics to believe and teach evolutionism. He
did include the small provision that they should still allow God
to create each human soul. Atheism thus remains inappropriate for
Catholics, and that's a relief to know!
As a matter of fact, this public papal evolutionism is hardly
a surprise to anyone who had followed the pronouncements of the
last four popes, or who is familiar with the teachings of the
various Catholic colleges and seminaries in this country. Even
the last true conservative pope, Pius XII, in his famous 1950
encyclical, Humani Generis, while not promoting evolutionism and
still seeming to lean towards special creation, did make a point
of allowing Catholics to study and accept evolution as a
scientific theory of origins, again with the limitation that God
created the soul, and that all men are descendants of Adam, along
with the doctrine of original sin as inherited from Adam.
The freedom to study and teach evolution with this constraint
seemed very quickly to result in the widespread acceptance of
theistic evolutionism in Catholic institutions and churches
everywhere. As far as the present pope, John Paul II, is
concerned, he had been an evolutionist in this sense probably
since his youth. Despite this sudden supposed surprising
pontificating, it is nothing new to his personal beliefs.
Pope John Paul II was Karol Wojtyla, Cardinal of Krakow when
he was named pope in 1978. He had earlier been an actor and was
apparently quite comfortable as a government-approved
ecclesiastic in Communistic Poland. When he was elected pope, his
election was enthusiastically endorsed by Poland's communistic
party and by World communism in general. Since his election, he
has seemingly been promoting a syncretistic agenda, not only with
Protestants but also with Hindus, Lamaists, and others. In any
event, he is not a recent convert to evolutionism, as the media
implied.
Perhaps the most influential evolutionist among Catholic
theologians was the Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin, now
considered in effect to be almost the "patron saint" of the New
Age movement with his strong pantheistic evolutionism. Teilhard
was involved in the controversial discoveries of both Piltdown
Man and Peking Man, and vigorously promoted total evolutionism
all his life, greatly influencing such leading secular
evolutionists as Theodosius Dobzhansky, George Gaylord Simpson,
and Sir Julian Huxley. His books were banned at one time by the
Catholic church but have apparently become acceptable, and even
very influential among Catholics during the reigns of recent more
liberal popes.
There have been many other leading evolutionary scientists in
the domain of Catholicism, and this description would certainly
apply to most of the scientists of the Pontifical Academy. On the
other hand we need to recognize that there are many strong
creationists, not only among lay Catholics, but also among
Catholic scientists as well. We could mention Dr. Gary Berthault
of France, for example, whose studies on sedimentation have been
profoundly significant in refuting geological uniformitarianism.
Two Italian creationists, Dr. Roberto Fondi (paleontologist) and
Dr. Giuseppe Sermonti (geneticist) have published important
scientific books and papers refuting evolution. There are many
others.
In this country, Dr. Wolfgang Smith, born in Austria but
educated in this country (at Cornell, Purdue, and Colombia, in
physics and mathematics) and having served since 1968 as
Professor of Mathematics at Oregon State, after previous faulty
positions at M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., has written a devastating
critique of de Chardin's teachings and evolutionism in general.
In this book, he says that the doctrine of macroevolution "is
totally bereft of scientific sanction:" (Teilhardism and the new
Religion. Tan Books, 1988, p. 5; emphasis his.) He then adds that
"there exists to this day not a shred of bona fide scientific
evidence in support of the thesis that macroevolutionary
transformations have ever occurred." (Ibid., p. 6.)
It is too bad that Pope John Paul II (who is not a scientist)
did not consult such real Catholic scientists as Wolfgang Smith
before glibly stating, as he did, that "new knowledge leads us to
recognize in the theory of evolution is more than a hypothesis."
Just what new knowledge would that be, Pope John Paul II?
Possibly the Mars rock? Or the fantasy of a walking whale?
One wonders whether he might be thinking of Teilhard's famous
definition of evolution when he says it is more than a
hypothesis. Here is what Teilhard said:
'Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much
more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all
systems, all hypotheses must bow... Evolution is a light
illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow. (The
Phenomenon of Man, Harper and Row 1965, p. 219.)
Evolution was, to all intents and purposes, Teilhard's "god,"
and his goal for globalism, a unified world government, culture,
and religion, with all religions merged into one.
There are more and more signs that such globalism is also the
aim of Pope John Paul II and other modern liberal Catholics. If
so, this publicized commitment to evolutionism would contribute
substantially to such a goal. All world religions - including
most of mainline Protestantism, as well as Hinduism, Buddhism,
and the rest - except for Biblical Christianity, Orthodox
Judaism, and Fundamentalist Islam, have embraced some form of
evolutionism (either theistic, deistic, or pantheistic) and
reject or allegorized the true record of Genesis. The pope has
participated in important meetings with leaders of Communism,
Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Lamaism, and others, as well as
the World Council of Churches, the Trilateral Commission, the
B'nai B'rith of liberal Judaism, and a wide assortment of still
others. He has traveled to India, Australia, the United States,
and all over the world in his bullet-proof "popemobile" speaking
to immense crowds everywhere.
All cults and movements associated with the "new world order"
of the so-called New Age Movement have two things in common-
evolution as their base and globalism as their goal. It is
disturbing now to see even many large evangelical movements
(e.g., Promise Keepers, charismatic ecumenism) inadvertently
drifting into the same orbit while eulogizing this evolutionist
pope.
The pope insists, of course, that Catholic evolutionists must
still believe that God started the universe with its Big Bang and
still creates each human soul. The scientific establishment,
however, will never be content ultimately with anything less than
total evolutionism.
The man who is believed by many to be the world's greatest
living scientist, Stephen W. Hawking, has an insightful comment
regarding his own audience with the pope, in his best-selling
book, A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books, 1988). He had been a
speaker at a high-level papal scientific conference on cosmology.
After which he describes his encounter thus:
'At the end of the conference the participants were granted an
audience with the pope. He told us is was all right to study the
evolution of the universe after the Big Bang, but we should not
inquire into the Big Bang itself because that was the moment of
creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he
did not know the subject of the talk I had just given at the
conference- the possibility that space-time was finite but had no
boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of
Creation (p. 116).
That being the case, according to his cosmological
mathematics, he concludes: "What place, then, for a Creator?"(p.
140). Hawking's book refers frequently to God, but he ends up
concluding in his heart: "There is no [G]od." And such must
inevitably be the ultimate logical conclusion of any consistent
evolutionism.
Among the most poignant verses in the Bible, with its reality
coming more and more into focus these days, Are the words of the
Lord Jesus in Luke 18:8:
["..when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the
earth?"]
By Dr. Henry M. Morris, Founder and President Emeritus of ICR
If you would like to receive his newsletter then write to:
Institute of Creation Research
P.O. Box 2667
El Cajon, CA 92021
It's free.
Or check out his page on the World Wide Web:
Institute of Creation Research
I received an article written by some
Roman Catholics in another town who sought to 'prove' that the Pope
didn't really mean what he said about evolution. I hope this
helps to show that he most certainly did mean every word. The
Pope of the Roman Catholic Church is an evolutionist.
Back to the Ekklesia Communicator Main Page