Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Christ is risen! Alleluia!
In our travels around the world, we often encounter Catholics whose understanding of the origins of man and the universe has been deeply influenced by the Benedictine physicist and theologian Fr. Stanley Jaki. Unfortunately, for all their differences, Stanley Jaki, O.S.B., and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., agreed on one fundamental point--that contemporary natural scientists are much more reliable than the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils of the past in explaining the origins of man and the universe.
In his book Genesis 1 through the Ages, Fr. Jaki recognized that bringing Genesis 1 into harmony with the views of mainstream natural science required a radical departure from traditional exegesis. Calling Genesis 1 "a marvelous story", Fr. Jaki confessed that:
As I reviewed one after another the great commentaries on Genesis 1, I could not help feeling how close their authors were time and again to an interpretation which is strictly literal and yet at the same time puts that marvelous story at safe remove from any comparison with science, old and new.
Determined to reconcile Genesis with the majority view in the natural sciences, including its acceptance of biological evolution, Fr. Jaki argued that Genesis 1 was a "post-exilic" work whose sole purpose was to show that God is the creator of all things, without conveying any information as to when or how He created the world. Since this view contradicts the constant teaching of the Church Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils, it is not surprising that Fr. Jaki's argument for his thesis breaks down quickly under scrutiny. In an article written for the Social Justice Review on "The Sad Legacy of Fr. Jaki's Writings on Evolution," just posted on the Kolbe website, we expose some of the fatal flaws in Fr. Jaki's exegesis of Genesis 1. In this newsletter, I will just mention a few of the main points of the article.
Fr. Jaki's rash and unwarranted dismissal of the constant teaching of the Fathers and Doctors on Genesis 1 was compounded by his public endorsements of the evolutionary hypothesis right up to the time of his death. In a talk entitled "Evolution as Science and Ideology" he argued that
Darwin's theory is the only scientific approach to the vast sequence of living beings because its two pillars, the difference between parents and offspring, can be measured as well as the impact of the environment on that difference.
Some have argued that Fr. Jaki is a theologian in the Thomistic tradition, whose great strength lay in the knowledge of metaphysics that he brought to bear on his reflections on creation and evolution. But the statement cited above lays bare the fact that Fr. Jaki's approach to origins differed drastically from that of St. Thomas and the Church Fathers. It was St. Thomas who summed up the patristic teaching on the distinction between creation and providence by arguing that natural processes and operations are not themselves instances of God's creative activity; rather, they show his Providence at work in maintaining his prior work of creation, which is presupposed by the way these processes and operations now take place.
Like all of the Fathers and Doctors who wrote on this question, St. Thomas recognized that the creation of the different kinds of creatures in the beginning could not be explained by the "works of nature" that we observe in the present order of providence. Like them, St. Thomas taught that
the corporeal forms that bodies had when first produced came immediately from God, whose bidding alone matter obeys, as its own proper cause. To signify this, Moses prefaces each work with the words, "God said, 'Let this thing be', or 'that', to denote the formation of all things by the Word of God.
Like them, St. Thomas taught that only "divine power, being infinite, can produce things of the same species out of any matter, such as a man from the slime of the earth, and a woman from out of man." But Fr. Jaki, like Teilhard, denied all of this.
Ironically, Fr. Jaki wrote extensively about the importance of the Catholic dogma of creation ex nihilo and about the distinction between the initial work of creation and the subsequent autonomous operation of nature in the order of providence. He even pointed out that this distinction made possible the development of the natural sciences within Christian civilization. But Fr. Jaki divided the work of creation "in the beginning" from the order of providence, not according to the data given by God in Divine Revelation, but according to the speculations of Lyell, Darwin and their disciples. Rather than accept what all of the Fathers and Doctors had accepted unquestioningly on God's say-so--that He had brought all of the different kinds of creatures into existence by His Word for man--Fr. Jaki relegated the creative action of God to the remote beginning of time and accepted evolutionary theory's unproven premise that material processes could explain the origins of all of the different kinds of living things over long ages without the direct creative action of God. Ironically, Fr. Jaki correctly called the Catholic Church "the Savior of Science," but, by promoting theistic evolution, he grotesquely transformed God into "the Savior of Evolution."
Fr. Jaki claimed to find support for this aberrant view in the psalm which speaks of God passing through the waters and no one finding his footprints--as if the slow and gradual production of the variety of living things through material processes somehow redounded more to the glory of God than direct creation. But here again Fr. Jaki joined Teilhard de Chardin in renouncing the constant teaching of all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church who held that all of the different kinds of creatures were the product of a divine creative action, and that, as such, they evidenced divine design and reflected some aspect of the divine nature. One can see how far the view of Fr. Jaki and of Teilhard deviated from that of the Fathers by reflecting on the words of St. Basil the Great, a man quite familiar with evolutionary thought, and effective in its refutation.
Let us glorify the Master Craftsman for all that has been done wisely and skilfully; and from the beauty of the visible things let us form an idea of Him who is more than beautiful; and from the greatness of these perceptible and circumscribed bodies let us conceive of Him who is infinite and immense and who surpasses all understanding in the plenitude of His power.
Contrary to Fr. Jaki's opinion, the presumption of function and design in nature on the part of Christian natural scientists like Leonardo de Vinci and William Harvey led them to discover and describe the workings of the human body as no one in recorded history had done before them. When asked how he had discovered the working of the circulatory system, for example, Harvey explained that he had studied the system of veins and arteries in the confidence that it had been intelligently designed-and so made the discovery!
By embracing Darwinian evolution as the "only scientific" explanation for the origin of the different kinds of living things, Fr. Jaki not only jettisoned the constant teaching of the Fathers, Doctors, Popes and Councils; he also unintentionally impugned the goodness and wisdom of God. This is because, unlike St. Thomas and the Fathers and Doctors who taught that God created all of the different kinds of creatures, perfect according to their natures, for man, in a perfectly harmonious cosmos, Fr. Jaki joined Teilhard in teaching that God deliberately produced--through evolutionary processes--many different kinds of creatures only to destroy them so that something more highly evolved could take their place. Moreover, this evolutionary god used a process of mutation and natural selection that littered the earth with diseased and deformed creatures in the process of producing the alleged "beneficial mutations" that transformed reptiles into birds and chimpanzees into men. Whatever one wants to call this evolutionary god, it is not the God of the Bible, of the Fathers, and of the Doctors of the Church, of whom St. Thomas says again and again that "all his works are perfect." Rather, Fr. Jaki agreed with Teilhard that the "only scientific" explanation for the origin of species requires that God be made responsible for filling the earth with genetic mutations, disease, and deformity, rather than holding with St. Augustine that in the original creation, had no one sinned, the world would have been filled and beautified with natures good without exception.
Had this misguided Darwinian faith in biological evolution contributed anything to scientific progress, there might be something to weigh in the scales with its affront to the goodness and wisdom of God. But, far from contributing anything to scientific progress, Darwinian evolution has retarded and often crippled the advancement of natural science, channeling enormous human and material resources into blind alleys, all in deference to Darwinian dogma. How many millions of dollars and lifetimes of scientific research have been wasted trying to produce beneficial mutations in the laboratory through mutagenesis, all because Darwinian dogma anathematizes the very thought that the genetic information that specifies the development of specific organisms can only have been created by the Divine Programmer, God, and cannot have arisen through the neo-Darwinian process of genetic mutation? How many decades of fruitful research have been delayed because of the Darwinian adherence to now-totally discredited articles of faith such as embryonic recapitulation, vestigial organs, and "junk DNA"? Sadly, Fr. Jaki's (and Teilhard's) "only scientific" account of the origin of species has turned out to be a complete chimaera, casting God in the role of a blundering monster while crippling the progress of the natural sciences.
Please keep the Kolbe Center in your prayers.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh Owen
P. S. I will be traveling to Texas a week from today and to the Midwest in early May. If anyone would be willing and able to organize a seminar, a debate, or a talk anywhere between Virginia and Wisconsin after May 7, please let me know as soon as possible.
P. P.S. Our annual regional leaders retreat will be held at Conception Seminary in Conception, Missouri, from June 10-16. The retreat equips attendees to be regional leaders who can advance the mission of the Kolbe Center in their local areas. The retreat is open to adults, to teenagers 16 years of age or older with their parents' permission, and to families with children. Activities will be organized for the children every morning except Sunday throughout the retreat. If you are interested in attending the retreat, please contact me at howen@shentel.net as soon as possible.
