Exploring Our Origins: How Evolution Contradicts Both Faith and Reason (Guest: Steve Greene)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:14] Speaker B: Okay, so before we get started, we are live here. I want to tell everybody we did not coordinate this, that we would look like twins here. [00:00:23] Speaker A: I would never do that to someone. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Eric, we have, I mean, look at this. Both gray heads with gray beards, glasses. We got the bookshelf behind us. You even have books. I have on my bookshelf. We have the blue blazer. I mean it's like you have a little bit more style with your shirt than I do, but I mean, this is getting a little ridiculous. [00:00:40] Speaker A: Well, Eric, I assure you, if I have more style than you do, that is purely to be blamed on my wife and my 15 year old daughter if left to my own devices. I'm red, green, colorblind too. So I am not allowed to dress myself and then go out, show up in public. [00:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I can understand that. That's very good. So, yeah, so that was not planned. But anyway, so we have Steve Green with us today and we're going to talk about this book, Creation or Evolution, A Catholic Dilemma and in which he was part of. And I think we'll get into the details of that in a moment. We're going to talk a lot about what that book is talking about. But before we really get started that give me your background a little bit like why you're interested like in this science, faith talk type of arena, like why did you get involved in this project? [00:01:26] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. Thanks for the, that question. A couple, a couple of different tributaries flow into that river, Eric. So I've always been at least moderately interested in the question kind of just on its own merits when I, when I was growing up. So first of all, I guess I should say I'm not from a science background. I really, I. My undergraduate degree is in English literature, which of course qualifies me to do absolutely nothing professionally. And then I'm a former seminarian, so I actually did a master's degree in seminary which was heavily weighted toward philosophy. So that's kind of my academic background. So I don't have, I don't have a science background per se, but I was always just interested in kind of the interplay between science, philosophy, theology and the Catholic tradition. I'm a cradle Catholic, so I grew up with a sense that, you know, knowledge has to kind of be coherent across all three intellectual disciplines. And so I, over the years, just in bits and pieces, generally by presenting and teaching, which I've kind of done professionally most of my career, I came across just, just some of the, the areas where Darwinian evolution seemed to Me a little incoherent or seemed to lack explanatory power, but as a non scientist, I just kind of shrugged it off and figured, well, if someday I ever did a deep dive, I imagine there would be answers to these questions, which to me just sort of seem a little bit strange and disconnected. So fast forward a number of years. I was actually teaching a course in our catechetics program for the diocese. I used to direct the Catechetics Institute for the Diocese of Phoenix. And the question of evolution came up and we started talking about it and, and I just kind of gave a very brief overview. It wasn't the topic of the class necessarily, but I sort of gave a brief overview of some different possible views for Christians, including theistic evolution, gave them a brief description of what that was, and then we moved on to the topic of the day. Afterwards a couple of students that were, that were taking the course came up and they said, you know, hey, just very respectful about it. But they said, with all due respect, kind of the way you described theistic evolution is a little bit simplistic and naive. That's not actually the way that that theory works. And so they actually recommended, interestingly enough, they recommended the books by Father Michael Hobarik, who's the co author of this kind of interview book, Creation Evolution, A Catholic Dilemma. So I read his books and they just, they were eye opening. And so that, that then launched me on kind of a deep dive into the whole question of evolution and Darwinism and sort of the state of the science on that particular question just on its own merits. And then additionally by way, I think of kind of my background in philosophy and theology. I was also very interested with how that would all then intersect with a Catholic worldview. Our traditional understanding of Scripture and the Genesis creation account and on and on and on also led me into my first actual contact. Reading books and watching debates and dialogues with intelligent design theorists. I kind of heard about them in a tangential sort of way. So that's about, that's about a dozen years ago now. This has kind of been one of my main intellectual side hustles now for a decade plus. Then it culminated in the opportunity to go out to Poland and actually interview Father Michael, do a video series with him. And this book. [00:04:53] Speaker B: Okay, so I want to make sure I mispronounced everybody's name. I could probably mispronounce your name if you gave me enough chances. It's Father Michael Hack. Is that what you said? [00:05:03] Speaker A: It's, it's, it's technically Habaric the emphasis is on the second and it's spelled with a C. H. He's Polish. He's a Polish Dominican priest out of the province of Warsaw. But yeah, Habaric. [00:05:14] Speaker B: Okay, so from now on it's Father Michael. [00:05:18] Speaker A: Perfect. [00:05:19] Speaker B: I actually have one of his books, Catholicism and Evolution, which is a little bit over 10 years old now. And I, I've read, I read that a while back. I can't remember, but then. So this one is Creation Revolution, Catholic Dilemma, in which you're basically in conversation with him and we're going to get into details, but I kind of want to set the table here and I, if I'm, I'm. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is also part of a like documentary. I would say that you, that you've done. I can't remember now what status, if it's finished or not. I apologize for not remembering that. [00:05:51] Speaker A: No, no, not at all. Not at all. So what ended up happening is through. Through the mutual friend who introduced me to his work and that Catholicism and Evolution was the first book by him that I read. That's actually the first in a series of three books. The second is Aquinas and Evolution. The third is Knowledge and Evolution, where he kind of lays out an academic case for progressive creation, which is basically a third wave faith science synthesis that we'll dive into here in a minute. The mutual friends put me in touch with Father Michael. My wife Becky and I host a podcast called the Catholic Conversation, which you've been kind enough to join us on a number of times. And so we had Father Michael on a few times and he and I began just kind of talking in the wings about at some point we should look into doing kind of a deeper dive into these topics. You know, we could address it briefly in the podcast with Becky and I, but give it a little bit more serious treatment. That eventually led to a conversation about trying to do a video series. And the video series is actually based on the book. So Catholicism and Evolution, A Catholic Dilemma is a book that Father Michael published in Poland several years ago, but has only just now been published in English. So it's an updated English edition with some of the questions that he and I worked through really kind of over the years that culminated then in a trip out to Poland last summer. So I actually flew out to Poland for two weeks, accompanied by the gentleman that I work with on all my video and post production work. And we basically spent two weeks in a museum of religious art in Kieltsa, Poland, which is in between Warsaw And Krakow doing a 10 part interview series on the whole question of Catholicism and evolution. So the book and the video series are meant to go together. The video series is actually available for free. That's on my YouTube channel, which is reasonably rational. And so all 10 episodes are now up and available. And in the process of doing the videos, we got to talking about the book, which again was kind of the foundation for the video series, and decided it would probably be a good idea to translate it into English, find a publisher and make that available sort of for those who might be interested in doing a deeper dive. Obviously in the book you go into more detail than you can in the videos, but yeah, that's kind of the whole scope of the project. And it's meant to be a resource for Catholics, seekers, random folks who are interested in the whole question of evolution, religion, faith, science, synthesis, all that kind of stuff. [00:08:20] Speaker B: Okay, so let's get into what the book's about, kind of your take on this. Because here's the thing, everybody when they see creation, evolution, like, okay, where's this guy coming from? What's his take? And there's, and there's multiple takes possible. It's a spectrum, I sometimes say. But right in the beginning you say in the book, you know, I think it was in the introduction, it says like, this is an alternative to the false dichotomy between fundamentalist creationism and Darwinian evolution. So you're kind of setting up. Those are the two, two ends of the spectrum and you're setting up an alternative that. And so what I think you. What I'd like you to do, if you don't mind, I'd like you to like steel man, give the like a quick best argument for what you're calling fundamentalist creationism. Explain what it is and also an argument why people would believe it. And on the other hand, also do the same thing for Darwinian evolution. Like why is it that so many people believe that? And what is kind of the best argument? And of course we'll talk about their weaknesses and what your alternative the alternative is. But I think that'd be a good practice. You know, try to be like Thomas Aquinas here. You know, give the best arguments for [00:09:26] Speaker A: those two worldviews with the unnecessary caveat, Eric, that me trying to be like Thomas Aquinas is a fool's errand on the best of days. Yeah, I agree. I think it's always good to try to present a view that you're going to oppose or question in its strongest possible light. So starting with maybe the young earth creationist position, I think its real strengths are a deep devotion and respect for the Catholic tradition of biblical interpretation. I think it aims very intentionally at protecting and keeping intact the traditional understanding of the Genesis account, where God acts directly in creating new kinds of creatures. We know the Genesis account, of course, repeatedly says that he creates living things according to their kinds and then culminating with, of course, man. They also are very keen to make sure that we're protecting the traditional understanding of the direct creation of man and woman, Adam and Eve as a first human couple from whom all human beings descend. And, and that they're also. They're keen to protect the direct and special creation of Adam and Eve both as to their body and their soul. There are different accounts of evolution which are open to the possibility that the human body was produced by an evolutionary process over, you know, eons and eons and many, many millions of years. So young earth creationists push back against that, say, no, God created man from the dust of the earth, formed his body from the elements, and then breathed a rational soul into him. And I think young earth creationism also has a healthy skepticism of taking science at face value just on the fiat of scientists alone. In other words, if a scientist comes forward and publishes a paper and says, hey, great news, everybody, We've been cranking away in our laboratory and we're now, you know, just. Just a couple of tiny, insignificant steps away from demonstrating how pre organic chemistry could actually cause life to come into existence in some, you know, warm, slimy pond on the early earth. Young earth creationists are not going to just take that at face value and say, okay, well, then there it is. I guess that's how it worked. They have a healthy skepticism. The degree to which the skepticism remains healthy, of course, is an object of debate as we get a little further into the question. Yeah, I would say in support of young earth creationists, there's a deep respect and reverence for tradition. And by way of that reverence, I would say another one of their strengths is they would be unlikely to modify the traditional understanding of scripture and the traditional teaching of the church on science that is not thoroughly proven and demonstrated. They would have a very high standard for science before they would allow some scientific finding to require a modification in our theological and philosophical understandings of the tradition. On the Darwinian evolution side, I've often said this, talking about this topic over the years. Obviously we can't speak for dead guys. And so I don't want to try to put words in Darwin's Mouth. I have often wondered, especially as I've gone deeper into the science of Darwin, of Darwinism, Neo Darwinism now, or the extended or modern synthesis, as it's now called. I've often wondered if you could magically transport Charles Darwin here into the 21st century, download a chip in his brain that would just give him immediate access and comprehension of all that has come and gone in the sciences since 1859, when he published Origin of Species. So he'd immediately be updated on all of the complexity of life, life that we've discovered, what we know of the fossil record. I wonder if he would still sit down and pen the Origin of Species as he penned it. I don't know, but I will say the strength of it, of Darwinian evolution. When Darwin wrote, I think he produced a fairly elegant mechanism to explain how nature might possibly have produced biodiversity on its own powers. He was using the best information available at the time. He was using the best instrumentation available at the time. And given what he was able to see, I think that there was some level of plausibility to it. For instance, what a cell looked like under a microscope in Darwin's time was as his famous supporter and proponent, Thomas Henry Huxley said was basically an undifferentiated blob of protoplasm. It looked like a little bag of jelly. And so they knew that things were made of living, things were made of cells. But based on what they could see of a cell, they thought that basically just means a living thing is an interesting conglomeration of those little undifferentiated bags of protoplasm known as cells. And so for what he could know and see at his time, I think it was a fairly plausible hypothesis that perhaps all nature has to do to generate the vast biodiversity that we all observe and experience was just come up with novel reconfigurations at the cellular level. And then that maybe natural selection acting on favorable variations within species over time, could actually bring about new kinds of things. And so I think actually Darwin remains fairly strong as mechanism of natural selection acting on variation. And now genetic mutation, which is kind of the neo Darwinian model. I think it remains fairly strong at the level of micro evolution. And that's an important distinction to make, as, you know. So micro evolution, broadly speaking, would be adaptation and change over time at the level of, say, species and genus. So we think of, you know, the taxonomic levels that we all learned in high school biology class. You have, you know, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species. And you get more and more specialized and specific as you move down the chain. So at the level of species and genus, that's actually just observed science. We have empirical data demonstrating that that happens over time. Natural selection does work in environmental pressures, et cetera, modify the features of different kinds of creatures, and there's new species and even, even new genera or new genuses. However, when you get to the level of family, which is this, these are the basic kinds of creatures. So horses, dogs, cats, you know, elephants. When you get to the level of family now, you don't have observation anymore. You have extrapolation from observation. So Darwin observed microevolution, you know, his famous Galapagos finch beaks and all the different sizes and thicknesses and lengths. Yeah, that's micro evolution. That's adaptation according to the environment that they're in. And natural selection favors those who are well adapted to the circumstances around them. And over time, you have different species. But Darwin extrapolated from the observed microevolution and postulated that given enough time, it could actually create new families, new kinds of creatures, new natures or essences. That would be the point at which Father Michael and I would pump the brakes and say, I don't think we're warranted to reach that conclusion based on the scientific observations. [00:17:06] Speaker B: Okay, so that was good. I think we want to be fair as much as possible because there's a lot of straw men out there. And so what I would like you to do now, though, as you are probably expecting the next question to be now tell me what the weaknesses are. Because obviously you and Father Michael don't accept either of those fully. And so you must believe there are some weaknesses in each position. Both the young earth creationism, which I think is a better term than fundamentalist creation. Creationism, because people want to speak fundamentalists as an insult. We're not meaning it like that, but. But yeah, Young earth creationism is an accurate term. And then Darwinian evolution, like, what are the weaknesses of each of those and why you're not embracing either one. [00:17:45] Speaker A: Yeah, so the young Earth creationist position, there's actually a lot of compatibility, I think. I think we're sympathic on a number of fronts. So in terms of just a creationist conception of origins, the progressive creation position, which Father Michael and I hold, I think would sync up in general quite nicely with the young earth creationist position. That's just to say when it comes to creating new kinds of being, that's a work that's proper only to God. Because creation and the traditional understanding in The Catholic Church and in the Catholic tradition, creation always meant the bringing of new being into existence. So not modification of previously existing being, but actually bringing something new into existence. And to bring into existence something which did not exist before requires. Requires divine power, the power of a first cause. It's creation from nothing. And so when it comes to the question of the origin of things, we would agree with young Earth creationists that, yeah, that's something that's proper to the purview of Almighty God alone. Nature doesn't have the power to generate new kinds, new natures, new essences. Where we would part ways, there's actually kind of three questions. So there's the question of the age of the universe, there's the question of the origin of life and species, and then there's the question of the days of creation. So we would probably part ways with young Earth creationists on the age of the universe. As progressive creationists, we would hold to the current scientific consensus that the universe is probably about 14 and a half billion years old. The Earth is four and a half billion years old, and would be open to modification of those numbers based on new scientific discovery and data as well. We're not pinned to any specific number where that's concerned. And then where the days of creation are concerned, again, we would hold to the day Hebrew Yom being used in a long but definite period. So not an interminable period, but a long period that has a beginning and an end. Interestingly enough, in 1909, so this would have been under Pope Pius X, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which at the time was actually an official arm of the magisterial teaching office of the Church. In other words, the Pontifical Biblical Commission in the early 20th century was actually part of the official magisterial teaching arm of the Church. They published a document which specifically took up the question of the historicity of the first three chapters of Genesis. And in that document, they took up the question of how we are as Catholics to understand the Hebrew term yom or day in the Genesis account. And they said it can be understood either as a natural day, that's an option to understand as a 24 hour period, or it can be understood as an indefinite. A period of indefinite length, but which has a beginning and an end. So we would simply take that approach. I think the critique of young Earth creationism in general would be it tends, again, with the motive of protecting Catholic tradition and defending the understanding of Genesis and of human origins particularly. That's been handed down to us. I think it can trend in the Direction of the being science, denying of refusing to take the science into account. And maybe like I referred to earlier, in some cases an unhealthy and unwarranted level of skepticism about the science. The other critique would be that in reality the young earth creationist model, a strict adherence to six 24 hour days and a young earth certainly no more than 10,000 years old, probably more on the order of about 6,000 years old. And generally calculated from the genealogies in Genesis, that position is actually fairly new in the Christian world. It's hovered around in bits and pieces over the centuries, but as kind of a coherent and committed position that really only comes back around in the mid 20th century. And it's a reaction against modernism and against kind of modernist biblical interpretation. So again, the motive is maybe understandable, but I think it's an unwarranted view view. And although the, the ancient fathers and doctors of the church, which young Earth creationists will point out, were all of them of the opinion that the Earth is only several thousand years old, none of them held that as a matter of faith. It was simply a matter of accepting the historical record given the data that they had at the time. And again, I think most of them would modify that view if they were able to be fast forwarded to today and see the evidence in favor of the older universe and the older Earth when it comes to Darwinian evolution. Oh golly, where to begin with the critiques? First, I guess I would maybe to just frame the critiques in sort of a meta narrative. The purported explanatory power of Darwinian evolution, which like I said was probably fairly plausible in Darwin's time, has now been subjected to 165 years of scientific discovery of more sophisticated observation brought about by far more sophisticated and powerful instrumentation. In other words, we've seen far deeper into the microscopic level of reality. We've seen much further into the, you know, the cosmos, et cetera. And so then the question would be reasonable to ask, given the staggering amount of new scientific knowledge, has that new knowledge served to confirm and strengthen the Darwinian hypothesis or has it served to undermine and challenge it? And the the answer unequivocally on almost every level scientifically, is new discoveries have actually made the case for Darwinism harder and harder to maintain, undermined it, undercut it, and profound and significant way. So again, if, if you were Darwin, you would never have seen the inside of a cell. We've been inside the cell now. And far from being just a little blob of undifferentiated protoplasm, as Huxley said, we find in the cell stupefying complexity. And not, not just, not just complexity in terms of. There's a lot of stuff in there, but there's stuff that has specific functional roles. And those roles are ratioed to one another, they're coordinated with one another, they're sequenced so that certain things have to happen at certain times and at certain rates prior to other things happening at certain times. In other words, the level of coordination for life to exist even at the cellular level turns out to be almost incomprehensibly complex. In addition to that, of course, the discovery of DNA comes along. So now you have this, this code of nucleotide bases on the double helical structure of DNA, which are producing proteins, but which are also generating regulatory information, which remains a mystery. We have no idea where the information bearing property of DNA comes from. And so it's actually functioning like a written language or a computer code specifying the building of certain proteins that are ratioed to one another, that are necessary for building the organelles, which are part of the cells, which are part of the organs, which are part of the tiss, which are part of the organic. I mean, in other words, there's, there's so many layers of complexity, and at every layer of complexity there are just millions of functional features that require explanation. And not just explanation for their coming to exist, but explanation for their existence and then their ratioed coordination and their sequencing with all of these other features. So in other words, the, the complexity of life, which at one point maybe could have plausibly been described by natural selection choosing favorable variations and then eventually over time bringing about new configurations at the cellular level and getting new kinds of things is just, is, is completely sunk by the actual complexity that we witness. In addition to that, there have been calculations done now on the mathematical process, probability against chance and necessity. So just, you know, Darwinian evolution insists that there's no guiding intelligence in this process, that it's simply happening by virtue of the powers inherent in nature itself. And then chance events over, over eons and eons of time. So they've done the calculations. And even getting something as simple as an amino acid, which is produced by DNA, but is prior to proteins, which are prior to organelles, which are prior to cells, which are prior to organic tissues and organisms, etc. Even to get something like an amino acid by pure chance, you're talking about statistical improbabilities so vast that if chance were the actual explanation, you would basically Call that a probabilistic miracle. You know, something on the order of winning the Powerball every week for a thousand years in a row just by randomly picking numbers. And so there's that difficulty. And then in addition to that, we find that the fossil record simply never came around to demonstrate Darwin actually knew about this in his own time. He said, if we don't find the fossils that demonstrate the very slow, very gradual transition in little micro steps from one kind of organism to another, then my theory about the origin of species falls apart. He knew the fossil record was incomplete. We know much more about the fossil record. 165 years on, that problem has not gotten better. It has gotten much, much worse, as we now see in the fossil record, this regular pattern of stasis and explosion. In other words, the organisms that we see remain with variation, again at the adaptation, variation at the level of species and genus. They remain for thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years in some case, and then they go extinct. And what happens next are these explosions in geological time of completely novel, completely new and complete animal types or plant types. So the Cambrian explosion is the famous one. There's this sudden appearance of all the basic body types of sea creatures, including the aquatic arthropods, just out of nowhere. No prevening forms in the fossil record. But that's true of all kinds of things. Flowering plants just appear out of nowhere in geological time. Insects out of nowhere, birds out of nowhere, winged insects out of nowhere. So just throughout the whole fossil record, we have this explosion. Brand new things appear in the virtual snap of the fingers of geological time. They endure, some of them, for millions of years. Some of them are even still with us today. And then they go extinct. And then there's another explosion of totally new kinds of things. That in itself should really be a defeater for Darwinian evolution, because it flies in the face of Darwin's tree of life, everything descending by common descent from a single first living ancestor. And it completely destroys the mechanism, which he said had to be true for his theory to work. And that is gradual change by little micro steps over vast stretches of time. [00:29:29] Speaker B: Okay, so that was good. And I was going to ask you actually talk about a little bit about theistic evolution, but honestly, you've kind of debunked evolution, so you're kind of silly to go with theistic evolution. We might come back to that. But I want you to describe a little bit what you're calling the progressive creationist view of. Okay, so what did happen? Um, and I. I Feel like. And if you think there's more to this, let me know. But I feel like there's three main questions that have to be answered. Why is there something rather than nothing? Is the first one, why is there life instead of just all inanimate, non life? And then why is there intelligent life instead of just unintelligent, you know, life? So those, those are kind of the three moments where you have the creation of something, you have the creation and, or evolution, whatever, you know, whoever, depending on who you're talking to, of life. And then you go, the next one is to intelligent life. So how would progressive creationism explain those major, those major three steps and kind of when did they happen? [00:30:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So you put, you put your finger, Eric, on I think one of the fundamental disconnect between the traditional Catholic understanding and an evolutionary worldview. So the traditional Catholic understanding, we were really as Catholics in peaceful possession for 1800 plus years of a traditional understanding of the origins of the universe, origins of life, origins of the human person with all of our faculties, of course, our rational intelligence being one of the most fundamental. And the traditional understanding of the origins of all those things was beautiful, it was coherent, it was illuminative. And so as you just pointed out a minute ago, to walk away from that inherited narrative, from our traditional understanding, that's a serious thing we have to ask, what's the return on investment? Is it a warranted move to throw over that traditional understanding based on the current state of some scientific hypothesis or theory? So as a progressive creationist, what we would say is, listen, we want to be very careful to make good distinctions. So we want to think carefully about what is the proper purview of science. And here we mean the natural empirical sciences as understood in the 21st century. And then what's the proper purview of philosophy and theology? There's gray area, of course, there's some borderlands there. But to help clarify it, there's a clarifying question that Father Michael uses that I think is actually quite useful. And that is when we're asking the question how, we're generally asking a science question, how old is the universe? How hot, how heavy, how long, how many? Those are quantifiable kind of questions. Those are generally science questions. When we're asking origins question, the question isn't about how. The question is from where, what is the ultimate source? And when you're asking from where you're asking a metaphysical question, that's generally going to be A theology or philosophy question. So you pointed to some origins problems. Yeah, these are gigantic problems for the evolutionary worldview, the origin of anything. So where does the universe itself come from? Richard Dawkins, of course, world famous atheist and a huge promotion, huge promoter and proponent of Darwinism. Dawkins said, listen, the cosmos, we don't know where the universe came from yet. The cosmos is still waiting for its Darwin. In other words, we're waiting for a scientist to show up to create a plausible naturalistic explanation for the origin of the universe. But it hasn't happened yet. So he admits we don't know. The origin of life is another huge origins question. And evolution is absolutely clueless. If you've heard that we're on the brink of figuring out how pre organic chemistry can generate life, I'd encourage you to look up Dr. James Tour, t o u r who is a world class nanochemist and takes on origin of life research and just puts cannonball holes in it left and right. They're nowhere close to figuring that out. And then like you said, the origin of consciousness, the origin of rational intelligence. So as progressive creationists we say, listen, the source of all of those origins, the answer to the from where question is God. And we're not pulling a God of the gaps there. I want to make that clear because that of course is oftentimes the accusation that's hurled at creationists of any stripe is, well, whenever you find a gap in science, you just insert God and then back off and say, well, God did it. Well, it's a God of the gaps fallacy. We're working very much from the inability of science to explain these things scientifically. Now, as a progressive creationist, I'll say it's because these aren't really properly science questions to begin with. But nonetheless, when you look at the question of the origin of life, you're saying something is super added to matter at the first life, which is not a property of matter. And so you can't give what you don't have. If you're going to say that matter itself, given enough time or enough heat or enough pressure or an electrical charge is going to just generate life, you're asking matter to give something it doesn't have. Matter is not living, so it can't generate life. So as a progressive creationist we say, right, yeah, God breathes life into matter. The fire of life is a divine gift to matter because he intends living things and so he brings them about. When it comes to the origin of the universe, there again we just hold with the Genesis account, God brought it into existence, created it ex nihilo from nothing by an infinite active power, because it requires infinite power to bring a thing which exists, the infinite distance from non existence or nothingness into existence, into being. And then of course, the advent of intelligent life and of consciousness is also. That's a divine gift. It's not something that matter has. It's not a property of matter. And so matter can't give the gift of consciousness or rational intelligence. Rational intelligence, of course, applies particularly to men and angels, the two creatures that God creates with an intellect and a free will. And so, yeah, so on all those counts, as progressive creationists, we just, we just hold to the biblical account, the traditional understanding that these are gifts that God gives certain created things because he intends them to have that. And there's just a quick side point that might be worth noting there. As a progressive creationist, we look at the great hierarchy of being and we see there, not this, not this process of random natural evolution with a bunch of left behinds. You know, some things move up the chain of perfection and then they leave in their wake these less perfect things, which are just basically little evolutionary failures or little evolutionary. Not yet. They might evolve upward at some point, but they haven't done it yet. We just see instead what the Catholic tradition is always presented, and that is the manifest dignity, power, glory and goodness of God as expressed in every kind of created being. The same God that can create the highest of the angels, the seraphim, is the same God that can create human beings. This little microcosm of the universe, this nature which combines both the physical and spiritual orders of creation, is the same God who can create mooses, mice and marmots and rose bushes and subatomic particles, meaning everything which exists in creation is a particular manifestation of the wisdom, goodness and power of God. And then in terms of when did all this happen There, we're asking a how question. How old is the earth? How old is the universe? How long has life been around? How long have human beings existed? Great. Those are science questions. So scientists have at it. Do, do your, do your archeology, do your paleontology, do your geology, do your cosmology and your astrophysics. And then as progressive creationists, we're happy to let science do what science does because again, we adhere to the Catholic tradition of its faith and reason. These are two lights by which, as John Paul II says, at the beginning of feet as it rots you, faith and reason are like two wings on which the spirit of man Rises to the contemplation of the truth. So by light of faith and light of reason, we're meant to grasp as much of the truth as possible to grasp with our, our finite mind. So yeah, if the latest science says that the universe appears to be 14 and a half billion years old, and there's converging evidence from a number of different fields that say that as a progressive creationist, we're like, great, that sounds good. Earth has been around for four and a half billion. Good, sounds great. Evidence for human culture, rational intelligence, bipedalism, you know, 150 to 250,000 years ago. Yeah, okay, good, sounds great. So it's meant to be a faith science synthesis predicated on all three levels, science, philosophy and theology, staying in their proper lane, doing their proper job, and then being synthesized within the Catholic tradition. [00:39:07] Speaker B: Okay, so progressive creationism. Okay, so you talked about how microevolution. Sure. That there's a lot of evidence for that, a lot of reasons to believe that, but not macro of all of a sudden from one kind to another, just kind of magically happening without any intervention of, of a intelligent creator. But then what about like cosmic evolution? So the universe, let's say it's 14 billion years old. Well, obviously didn't, I should say this. The current scientific consensus is it didn't start the way it is now, that over time it evolved. I mean, the Big bang theory, of course, you know, from a Catholic priest, and it, you know, expanded. The universe is still expanding. The, the whole idea of there's like the, the stars form with the helium and hydrogen, all that stuff, and then they, they, they explode and then more stars forming in the iron, all that stuff. The point is it's, it's, it's very evolutionary. The, the current consensus on how the universe got the way the matter around the universe got the way it is. Is that something progressive creationists be like? Yeah, that's, that, that's, there's nothing really problematic about. Or is there something that you feel like there's a problem with that type of aspect of the scientific understanding of it? [00:40:22] Speaker A: Yeah, good question. So the word evolution, of course, gets tricky when you're talking about cosmic evolution. What we focus on in the book and in the video series is specifically biological macroevolution. The idea that in living things over great periods of time, there can be natural generation unaided by divine, by divine will of new kinds of things. When it comes to cosmic evolution, if we want to use the word evolution, the little caveat I would throw in There with the term is essentially there is no new kind of thing. So you look out in the cosmos and you see all of the elements of which stars and supernovas and nebula and planets and asteroids and etc are made. And of course, as we realize now, one of the astonishing things is materially those are all the same kind of elements that we find here on Earth. They're just in different configurations, different orders of magnitude in terms of the size of whatever celestial body or event you're looking at. And so if you want to use evolution in a very loose sense of just sort of reconfiguring of the same elements, given their natural properties, you know, their, the gravitational force, strong and weak, nuclear force, electromagnetism, etc. Etc. Then yeah, I'm happy with the term cosmic evolution. It's kind of evolving in terms of, you know, from starting from the Big Bang and then the combination recombination there. I think we just say, well listen, science has observed and demonstrated that over time this is the way that stars form and then they live, quote, unquote. And again we're using, you know, life terms like evolution, live, stars don't live, but you know, they, they exist as stars for a certain amount of time and then given the laws of physics, eventually they begin to dim and then they implode and then there's, they go supernova, etc. So in terms of just that, that is just sort of the way that God created the physical structure of the universe to function. And we see that repetition over time of formation of stars, the death of stars, the formation of galaxies, and then ultimately of course, that's all headed to some terminal point at the end of time. So we know that the universe is on the clock, as they say. And so in terms of like cosmic time and cosmic evolution, we're just watching a created natural process moving much more slowly than say the, the life cycle of a living thing here on Earth. But it's sort of the life cycle of the universe as it was created to be. And then of course, one of the cool things about it too is when you think of the, the intentionality of God as creator, he, he fine tuned the universe. It runs by these staggeringly precise overlapping and interpenetrating constants which allow the universe to be life supporting. And so he creates it, he engineers it in such a way that even in its vast movements over eons of time, from the beginning of the universe till its end, whenever that will be, it's the type of universe which makes life possible, which Is life supporting? As we know, statistically, that's stupefyingly unlikely. So the fact that it's been engineered to be life supporting just speaks to the fact that when we look out in the cosmos and we see all that flux and change over these huge, vast sweeps of time, we're just watching what God has engineered in his life supporting universe, moving through its own kind of cosmic history to its own kind of cosmic conclusion. [00:44:09] Speaker B: Good. Yes, that sounds good. I want to now jump to, you know, where life from non life. I want to kind of skip over that because I want to go to the one everybody cares about, which is intelligent life, us. And like so the, the younger, on one hand you have maybe young Earth creationists would say 6,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago. Around that time God created everything, including intelligent life, man. Soon after he had created all the other animals and, and the beasts, the field and everything else. So man is, is just a few days older, literally just a few days older than Earth. And in the evolutionists would say that we just came straight from apes. You know, we evolved and each progressively. And then, you know, one day, you know, a kid was born to an ape that just was smarter than the ape and somehow crossed some barrier that we call intelligence, because obviously apes have a certain level of a certain type of intelligence, not, not what we call consciousness. And so as a progressive creationist, would you, maybe it's agnostic on this, but would you say that like, for example, Adam was the son of an ape and just who happened? God put consciousness, a soul into that, that that person. Or would it be more that, yeah, there's a, there are apes and whatever living on Earth, maybe elephants and cats or whatever. And then, but then he created out of nothing, so to speak, man, he created Adam, which, you know, clearly is a little closer to the biblical account and just said, okay, now this is a new creation that I created at that. I, what is the current? I, I can, I always keep track of how long it is since the universe is created, like 13 and a half, 14, half billion years. But I never remember how long they in the earth. But how long, say man's been around a hundred thousand years, something like that. But is it just a matter of God at some point in that history said, okay, now I'm going to put man in there. Like which, where, where would a progressive creationist come in on that? [00:46:12] Speaker A: I love the questions, Eric. There's just so many fascinating elements to the question. Let me start with the simple answer and then I'll try To nuance it out a little bit, to hopefully make a little more sense where we arrive at it. So the simple answer is, as a progressive creationist, I hold with the traditional understanding of the biblical account that the origin of man is by special and direct creation as concerns both the soul of man and the body of man. So I do not hold with the hypothesis that at some point in ape and then hominid and then hominin evolution, something happened or maybe God intervened to put a rational soul into a pre human ancestor. I don't hold with that. I'll explain a little bit more why in a second. So as progressive creationists, man is a new kind of thing. The difference between man and other animals is not a difference of degree, as evolutionists say, well, we're just the most highly evolved animal, we're just the most specialized animal, we're the biggest brained animal. Hence somehow rational intelligence is an emergent property from the matter in our brains kind of thing. I think that makes absolutely no sense. I think it falls apart scientifically, philosophically, theologically. And so, yeah, so because man is a new kind of thing, that's something that God creates directly. When we say special creation, I just want to make a quick observation on that phrase, special creation. It's sometimes used even in like theistic evolution circles. So people who would say God created the universe at the beginning, but then he lets evolution kind of run the whole show of life and biodiversity, they would say, and then the creation of man is special creation because man is special. We're different. We're creating the image and likeness of God. We have a spiritual soul. That's not what special creation means. That's a change in definition. Special creation means direct and immediate supernatural creation. God himself brings this thing into existence. And so we would absolutely take a literal interpretation of the account in Genesis 2 of the creation of Adam, that God formed him from the dust of the earth, from the slime from the clay, fashioned a body and breathed a rational soul into that body, thereby creating human nature, which is of course, as we know at one time a union of both a physical body and a spiritual soul, and then subsequently created Eve by taking a rib from the side of Adam and fashioning Eve from that rib. So absolutely hold to the traditional account. Here's an interesting thing to note about the attempt to come up with an evolutionary origin for the body of man. Again, a theistic evolution is someone, you know, a Christian, a believer, Catholic or otherwise, who would say God just used evolution. They would all stop short of saying that evolution can produce the soul. They say, no, God creates the soul immediately, that's a special creation. But evolution could have produced the body over millions and millions of years. So you have a catch 22. So according to Catholic teaching, our spiritual soul is the form of our human body. It's our spiritual soul that makes our human body a human body. And the human body is the fit receptacle for a spiritual soul. There are just a multitude of unique features about the human body, which we've discovered more and more about in the the centuries since Darwin, which speak to its compatibility with a rational soul. And so this is the kind of body that's fit for a rational creature. A rational soul does not work in the body of an ape. It's not a fit receptacle, it's not compatible with a rational soul. And so you have that problem, first of all, is an ape or a hominid or a hominin is not a fit receptacle for, for a rational soul. So you'd already be dancing dangerously with a miraculous supernatural intervention at that point. Because if God is going to put a rational soul into a subrational pre human hominid, he's going to have to do something miraculous to make the physical matter generated by the pre human hominid a fit receptacle for rational soul. That's problematic. The other problem is this. Prior to the alleged human ancestors, the hominids and hominins, prior to the infusion of a rational soul by God, it's impossible to explain that evolutionary pathway on the principles of natural selection. And here's what I mean by that. So apes are very well adapted as apes, they fit their ecosystem, they function very well in terms of mating, obtaining nutrients and food, breeding and propagating as a species. So they're highly functioning animals, they're well adapted for being apes. But in order to get from an ape body to a human body on a purely animal level, which is all that evolution can consider because it's saying that it's a purely naturalistic process, you actually have rather stunning devolution. In other words, man as an animal, as merely an animal, we're not talking rational intelligence yet, because we don't have the infusion of the rational soul. Man as a mere animal is not the best animal, it's not the most highly evolved animal. We're the worst animal ever. We're slow, we're soft, we're weak, we don't see well, we don't hear well, we don't have fangs and claws and fur and we're not naturally suited to any environment on Earth. Man as a mere animal is the kind of animal that evolves on Wednesday and goes extinct by the weekend. Natural selection is like, hard pass on that. That's just a defective ape. And so the idea that somehow ape bodies could have evolved down into human bodies lacking all these high animal capacities that apes have that make them so well adapted, and then somehow at the end of that, that makes no sense. Even. Even on an evolutionary calculation, that's evolution working backwards. If anything, it would evolve from a human body to an ape body on a mere animal calculation, because apes have much better animal, but they're much stronger. They have much better instincts in terms of just finding food in a natural. We thrive because we have rational intelligence. So there's a. There's a deep disconnect there, no matter which end of it you're looking at it from. [00:52:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, okay, so if God created through special creation, Adam and Eve, at some point, let's say 100,000 years ago, whatever, you know, some point in time ago. But the Earth, of course, had existed for millions of years, billions of years. And so the Catholic view of, like the Garden of Eden and the scriptural view has always traditionally been that there was no sin and there was no death. Now, of course, I think we could all agree that even in this scenario, the progressive creationist, there's no sin because you can't have sin without rational beings. And so there's no sin before Adam, but there's death everywhere, at least in the scientific understanding of the Earth universe. I mean, we already talked about stars are dying and things on. All these animals have been around for millions of years or however long, and they're dying left and right. And yet we very strongly believe that death comes through sin and sin. If it didn't show up until Adam, what was going on before that? How do you kind of see that as a Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve are put in that is compatible with this world that is very old and has, you know, had been going around for a very long time with death? [00:54:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's. That's a great question. So when God says to Adam and Eve, you know, do not eat of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die. He's not joking. That's not just some kind of nifty metaphorical poetry for you'll not thrive as much or things. No, he means that but of course, when Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, they don't die at that very instant physically. They do die spiritually. They cut themselves off from God. You know what we would say in the Catholic tradition? Commit a mortal sin, a grave matter, with full knowledge and free consent. They reject the will of God and has very clear instruction. So they die spiritually. And so there's an interesting conversation there. I would have to refer people to experts, I hate to use the term, but above my pay grade in terms of working out the theological nuances of it. But essentially, to say that, yeah, there were organisms that lived and died and even entire species, genus families of organisms that lived and then went extinct before man ever even showed up is to simply interpret Genesis as meaning spiritual death, the immediacy of death predicted by God. If man and woman should disobey is spiritual death, which happens. How do we know that it happens? Well, first of all, there are consequences immediately. And we also see that the original innocence and harmony is shattered by that sin. And this is a spiritual innocence and a spiritual harmony. They were naked and unashamed. And then immediately after sin, they realize, we can use one another instead of. Instead of existing in harmony, we can commodify one another. And so they hide their nakedness, and then they hide from God. So we see the spiritual kind of aftershocks of that spiritual death take take root immediately, and then, of course, the consequences, and then they're kicked out of the Garden of Eden. So, yeah, as oppressive creationists, we would simply say what God is referring to when he says that death enters the world is the death according to sin, the spiritual death, but that it is possible that there was physical death prior to that on Earth, including the extinction of whole species. [00:56:33] Speaker B: Okay, we could go down that path a little bit more, but I think I want to switch to something I'm trying to bring out all the greatest hits of, like the. The. In the controversies. And so monogenism and polygenism. And so the scientific consensus, I always put that in quotes, I guess, is that, you know, polygenism, dinism, I can't pronounce it very well today, this idea that we come from many parents, that biologically we just couldn't come from just one man, one woman. In fact, if you took a husband and wife, you put them on an island all by themselves, and somehow they were able to survive and stuff like that, they would not be able to continue on forever. If that happened today, it, you know, that's the scientific belief, you know, because they have kids. And so how do those kids reproduce? It has to be brothers and sisters. And then you have, and then it would be cousin, you know, it would just go on. And so the idea is that just doesn't work. You don't have enough genetic, you know, building blocks or whatever to, to make that happen. And so with progressive. But yet the church has been pretty clear that we come from a single man and a woman, from Adam and Eve. I think it was Pius xii. I think one of the. Pius, Pius XII who basically said yeah, that's what we believe as Catholics. And you basically as a Catholic have to believe that. So that's, that really seems to be a direct conflict with the scientific consensus. And of course the young Earth creationists are, are able to get out of that by just saying, well we reject all this in scientific consensus. The progressive creationists are accepting some of it. So where, where do you kind of stand on that? Because I have seen theistic evolutionists who basically said the church doesn't really teach monogenism. They really, that that's actually not true. And so we can accept polygenism. And so what would you say to all that? [00:58:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm a, I'm a firm monogenist. And so a couple reasons for that. First of all, as you say, you put it in air quotes and I'm going to join you in your air quoting of the scientific consensus phrase when it comes to polygenism. That's definitely the current thought. I think that's accurate to say among mainstream scientists for whom this is an issue that they study. The current thought is that somewhere in the African plains, 150 to 250ish thousand years ago, there was an original population of pre humans from which human beings evolved. And so no original couple. Without going into all the science which would take us forever. And again, I would refer to experts who are far more versed in it than I am that scientific consensus is based on a number of assumptions in fields like population genetics which have their own particular ways of calculating genetic inheritance and the timelines involved. None of those. This would just be the point I would make about that is none of those is a closed case final word. Scientifically it is kind of the going consensus now. It is not unassailable science. It's not science which has answered all possible challenges or questions to its methodology or its assumptions. In other words, we're at a stage in an ongoing conversation which is by no means finished. The case is by no means closed. So that actually does not worry me much. At all. It's like yeah, that's where they seem to be at today. But it wasn't all that long ago that they were writing peer reviewed papers that demonstrate our descent from a single human female in the ancient past. So who knows, we'll see where the science goes. In the meantime, this is again an origin question from where do human beings originate? And with the origin question in mind we're going to turn to theologies progressive Crucius and say that's a properly theological question. And so in terms of monogenism, it's very clear in the Genesis account that there's a first human couple from whom we all descend and of course tragically from whom we all inherit the great burden and wound of original sin. And that is, that's dogmatic in the church. So as Augustine says, if there's a conflict between a dogma of the church and science, try to reconcile them. If they can't be reconciled, you stick with the dogma. But here's the other thing about, about monogism versus polygenism, I think is, is interesting. So polygenism does nothing whatsoever to solve the problem of the origin of human beings as rationally intelligent. If you have a million pre human sub rational hominins, you still lack the cause necessary for rational intelligence. You still have the how does a non rational or sub rational creature produce a creature with rational intelligence? Polygenism doesn't help you, it doesn't solve the problem problem you can't. It's actually worth question. [01:01:42] Speaker B: It's actually worse if you think about it because it's saying it's happening over and a bunch of times all at the same time. [01:01:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:48] Speaker B: A bunch of subrational creatures have, all have kids that are rational all about the same time so they can then reproduce that. Yeah, that, that seems kind of crazy. That's actually worse. I'm almost. If I was a somebody who believed in like evolution like from non rational to rational, I would be more likely be a monogenous because I'd be like, well it's probably going to, it's going to happen luckily once. [01:02:11] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. You're asking for the stupefying odds against the evolution of a single rational creature to happen multiple times simultaneously. Yeah, that, that gets in the same [01:02:22] Speaker B: area of the world and everything. [01:02:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, very true. So then just back to monogenism in terms of, of what we're talking about there. We're saying that God intended human beings in his image and likeness, that he creates an original pair of and that there's a unity in human nature. That's only possible on monogenism. If Adam and Eve, even if there was a first pair, Adam and Eve, who evolved separately, there's a discontinuity in human nature. Then there's one line of evolution that produces Eve, there's another line of evolution that produces Adam, and these two evolved rational creatures find one another and hey, you're rational, I'm rational, let's get together. So there's still a discontinuity, and there's also a disconnect on the human hierarchy, right? So man is created first and then woman, and they're made as helpmate and equals to one another. And so the dogma of monogenism is actually really significant because it's the only fit explanation for a single human race afflicted by the wound of human sin. If you undo that, you actually begin to have really serious theological problems down the line, like, well, then what exactly? How does Jesus accomplish the salvation of a single human race if they're not a single human race, if there's multiple different evolved lines, etc. When it comes to the generation of children? So remember, Adam and Eve are created perfect. And although after the fall after original sin, they're afflicted with a broken nature, a wounded nature, by virtue of their disobedience of God, it takes a long time for them to die physically. They die spiritually immediately, but it takes a long time for them to die physically because they're perfect. So there's no entropy acting on Adam and Eve. Originally, they were meant to be immortal, they weren't meant to die. That's a consequence of sin. And so they live for hundreds of years. And slowly entropy takes over and it shortens the human lifespan. But because they're perfect, they're also reproductively perfect. And so it's entirely plausible, and would have been an assumption, by the way, of all the church fathers and doctors, that Adam and Eve would have had a multitude of children over their reproductive life, and that initially their children would have intermarried. But remember, in the first generations of human beings from an original human pair, although I guess technically you would call that incest, incest by definition is just sexual relations between close kin. In the first generations of human, there is no close or distant kin. These are just the human beings. And notice if you reject monogenism, sorry to just close that point. So mathematically speaking, Adam and Eve, who live for centuries and probably have a reproductive life of centuries, have multitudes of children who themselves are also slowly succumbing to the entropy that follows on original sin. You could have a human population of tens of millions in very short order. Not that there were that many, but it's mathematically entirely possible. And that would have been the view of the church fathers, that, yes, they had many, many children, who had many, many children. Which is why already in the lifetime of Cain, who is a son of Adam and Eve, you're talking about a city, like Cain founds a city. Well, that's a bunch of folks. Where are they all coming from? Okay, that being said, so some people then balk at the incest part. Well, if you're saying there's an original human pair, like that's brothers marrying sisters. And again, there is no distinction in kinship in that first generation of humans. But more than that, even if you insist incest, ooh, yuck. I don't like that. The alternative polygenism is bestiality. Sex with subrational pre human animals. Bestiality is far worse and in a much more fundamental way than incest. So if you insist that there's a problem, you're picking between two problems, and incest would definitely be the preferable problem. There's more to say on all that. And here's then, here's then one last thing. The polygenist view of human origins, I think, has a massive, massive problem for Catholics that is almost virtually invisible at the moment in this conversation. So I just want to highlight it here. If you look at certain theistic evolutionists who are wrestling with how could we possibly sync up polygenism with the Genesis account? We have to keep the doctrine of original sin in place. How does that work? So they've come up with some interesting hypotheses. One of them is to say that pre humans are divided from human beings, not biologically, because of course, biologically, many of these alleged pre human races are actually biologically human. They have this. They have the same human genome that we have. There's different species. You know, there's heidelbergensis and Africansis and denisovans and Neanderthals, etc. But these are species of a common human genome. So they say, well, there's a distinction. Then there's a distinction between biological humans, meaning pre humans who share our human genome, and theological humans, which are the humans in whom God infused a rational soul. So that's a possible workaround of how you could have a polygenist origin of human persons from a population, and it would be a pre human population in which God infuses rational intelligence and theological humanity into certain biological humans. If you stop and think about the idea of pre humans who are biologically human but not fully human in the sense of us human, that's the abortion debate, that's the Nazi holocaust, that's the slave trade, that's euthanasia of the disabled or the terminally ill. In other words, that distinction. Yet technically they're biologically human beings, but they're not full human persons like us. Fill in the blank. White European colonists or Teutonic Aryan Nazis or that move has been used over and over and over again throughout human history to demote a certain group of humans from personhood and then to violate them. We do that with the unborn. I think it is a disaster to start walking in the direction in order again to salvage some kind of polygenist human origin and try to sync that up with Genesis, I think it is a disastrous miscalculation to go the way of biological humans versus theological humans. I would steer clear of that with a million mile radius if I could. [01:09:31] Speaker B: I want to ask one final question here, and that ultimately is why does this matter? And what I mean by that is the Church has been pretty open and flexible to what we can believe. You can be a young Earth creationist and be a faithful Catholic. You can believe in a form of evolution and be a faithful Catholic. Obviously there's certain guardrails. We have to believe in a creator who created everything out of nothing. We have to believe in monogenism and you know, some other things like that. But generally if you can fit evolution into that, those guard rails, the church isn't going to like excommunicate you. They don't do that anymore. But you know what I mean, you're able to go to communion and all that. You don't have to confess it. And so. Or if like you, if you're progressive creationist, that's allowable as well. So I think a lot, sometimes I talk to people about this because I'm interested in the subject a lot too. But some people, like, I just, I don't know. So I don't care. I'm not a scientist. I'm just gonna, I'm kind of agnostic about. I don't really care. So what. It's obviously interested you for a very long time, but why does it really matter? Why should Catholics actually care about these, these different issues? [01:10:37] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's a, that's not only just a good question, it's a vitally important question. I think I would say that My experience has largely been very similar to yours. There are some people who care passionately about it, some people who are definitely interested. And that's probably the two ends of the bell curve. I would say in between, most people are kind of like, yeah, okay, God did it somehow. Great. I'm not gonna lose sleep over whether he used evolution or didn't. Um, why does it matter? Actually, I think there's. There's more in this question than one would suspect. And that has also been my experience. When I. When I began kind of this deep dive, I was interested, but I didn't realize how much this question touches. I think I have a deeper appreciation of how much it touches now, which is. Which is why I. Which is why I would fly to Poland for two weeks and spend that time not doing fun touristy things, but hunker down in front of a camera recording a video series and than editing a book. First of all, Genesis, of course, says that God creates in six days. However, we understand the days, but six definite periods. And then creation is finished. And of course, in the Genesis account, creation finishes with the creation of man. And then God rests. He has completed the work of creation. Now, the traditional Catholic understanding is that what happens after the initial Christmas creation is what's called the work of adornment. So he brings about more variety, right? So he's like a painter. He paints the background of his painting just like, you know, good old Bob Ross used to do on public television with his happy little trees. So, you know, he paints the background, and that's formless and void. And then he paints sky and earth and water and clouds. And then he. He starts to populate it. There's now plants on the land, and there's now birds in the sky and fish in the sea. And he's adding layers of being. He's adding perfection. He's adorning the fundamental creation of matter, which he brought into existence out of nothing. And so he's adorning his creation. He's bringing forth more being. So when Genesis says that God creates on six days and then rests, that doesn't square with evolution, because in evolution, creation is never finished. It's always in progress. Nature is generating, creating, and I put that word in air quotes. Nature is creating new kinds of creatures all the time. So if on a theistic account, God is using evolution to create, we have a problem because he hasn't stopped yet. So what does Genesis mean? Where is the Sabbath in the evolutionary account? I don't see that you can sync that up in Addition, on an evolutionary account, things are not good in themselves. Things are always in process. And so on an evolutionary account, when we look at any given living thing, we're not looking at a stable, unified nature, which is willed into existence for its own sake as a particular manifestation of the goodness and the power and the greatness of God. Instead, we're looking at a thing in transition. Everything that we look at and notice, ourselves included, is at every moment, on the evolutionary account, a no longer what it was and a not yet what it will eventually be. And so there's no unity or stability of the natures of created things. But this also cuts against the Genesis account, because Genesis says that God created things according to their kind. He intended them and he gave them their own sets of perfections, their own specific and defined type of being, which doesn't mean it has to last forever. Species come into existence, they go out of existence, they have their time on the great, the stage of the great drama that God has woven into all creation, but nonetheless, they have goodness in their own being. That's not compatible with the evolutionary account, even on a theory, theistic evolutionary account, because everything is then transitioned to something else, possibly even us. When it comes to human beings, I think we see the ramifications in a more jarring fashion. If it's true that we are products of a polygenic population, that there's no unity in human nature, we lose the coherence of the doctrine of original sin, which then casts doubt on the efficacy or necessity of the sacrifice of Christ. That's obviously a dogma undermined or at least diluted at the very heart of the Catholic faith. But in addition to that, we look at in our time the fact that there's this profound struggle over human identity. And as we see the rise of artificial intelligence and the transhumanist movement, there's a very conscious push now, and it's very public and it's very vocal and it's even increasingly well funded to move beyond this stage, human evolution. To say, listen, there are all kinds of defects in human nature that need to be solved, and evolution is the process by which we expunge those defects and bring about a greater form. And so this push to actually use technology to advance human beings beyond what we are now is a deeply evolutionist push. This is also the heart of the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement, of course, was just the idea that given the fact that humans are just the most highly evolved animals and we're still not perfect, we ought to interbreed first of all, identify the best humans and then interbreed the best humans in order to speed up human evolution. We're essentially just kind of taking the wheel of the evolutionary process where the human race is concerned and using it to breed better humans. Now of course the problem is the minute we identify the superior humans, the fit humans, the kind of humans that we want to produce, the next stage in human evolution, we've automatically also identified inferior and unfit humans, those who should not be permitted to breed. Read any history of the eugenics movement. That is a monster making idea. As we begin institutionalizing, castrating, lobotomizing, the feeble minded, the weak and the unfit, but on an evolutionary calculation that makes 100% sense. And it's actually something we ought to do for the future benefit of mankind. Which means we're going to feed certain human beings into the wood chipper of doctored evolution in order to produce some better future result. It also means that we get into evolutionary racism, which is something that Darwin was well aware of in Descent of Man when she wrote about human evolution in 1871. He actually makes the point. He says the superior races will eventually exterminate the inferior races of human beings. You know, he sailed on the Beagle, he'd been around the world, he'd run into savages in the jungles of South America, etc. He was very aware of the fact that there was high European culture and then what appeared to him as savage and barbaric culture and other places on the earth. For Darwin that was, that was a gradation of human evolution. There were certainly, there were just simply higher and more evolved human beings as represented by their higher culture, and then less. And when that was handed off to Ernst Haeckel, one of Darwin's proponents in Germany, Haeckel said that the lower races of human beings are actually closer and more akin to the highest apes than they are to the highest humans and they ought to be eliminated. Well, the Nazis took him at his word. So I think there are actually a ton, there are a lot more I could say about that. But, but in the interest of time, and given that that was your final question, maybe just gestured a few of them. There are significant social consequences, moral consequences, theological consequences and even scientific consequences. [01:18:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I've been doing a lot of study recently on artificial intelligence. I'm actually writing a book about it. And there's one. Yeah, there's one constant with the artificial intelligence movement and like their leaders and their proponents is it's 100% evolution based. I mean it's very much just like, this is the next evolution. And. But more important, it's not even like, yeah, some are very much a transhumanism next evolution thing is that. But the bigger deal is the fact that they believe, because consciousness was just kind of a accident of nature, just kind of happened. Therefore, they believe you could make a robot one day AI conscious. Because if it's just a natural process, we can recreate natural processes. I mean, we do it all the time and in science. And so their idea is since. Since consciousness is just a natural process. And so on the one hand, I always. When I see that, I kind of think, well, you guys are just going to be chomping at the bit for a very long time because you're never going to create consciousness. It's just impossible. But then on the other hand, I think they're going to probably redefine consciousness somehow, and they're going to like. And they're going to have AI that can replicate what appears to us as consciousness in a lot of ways and say, okay, this is now conscious. And there's a whole bunch of consequences to that because, I mean, now you open a whole can of worms. As a Star Trek fan, it's like the whole does data have rights? Type of thing. And so. Yeah, so, yeah, so the point is, is that the belief in evolution is very much underlying. It underlines a lot of things going on in the world today. And so it does matter. So, okay, so what I want to make sure everybody does. I'll put a link to it. The Creation or Evolution? A Catholic Dilemma. Father Michael. Oh, I already forgot, Barrick. Yeah, okay. And in conversation with Steve Green, which is you. And also I will link to the YouTube. Actually, I'm just gonna tell you right now, so don't forget. If you could email me. So I make sure I put it in there, the link to the YouTube and where people get the book. But you with the documentary, I think people will be very fascinated to. To listen. This was, you know, an hour. So that's. What is it you say, 10 episodes? Are they each. [01:20:38] Speaker A: Each. Yeah, each episode is roughly an hour. So it's about 10 total hours of video content. Yeah. [01:20:43] Speaker B: And we really want to get into it. That's the way to do it. And. [01:20:47] Speaker A: Yeah, and it's free. It's. It's just. It's up and available for anybody, so. Absolutely. Have at it. [01:20:52] Speaker B: Awesome. Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you, Steve, very much for being on the program. You know, people who follow this podcast enough know that I could just go on and on for a very long time about this, so I'll try to. [01:21:05] Speaker A: We have that in common, too, Eric, in addition. [01:21:07] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:21:08] Speaker A: Backgrounds. We. We could have. We could say much more about this. [01:21:11] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. But this is a good starter. And like I said, people, get the book. Watch the documentary as well. Okay, everybody, until next time. God love you.