Br. Alexis Bugnolo
As a graduate of the University of Florida, at Gainesville, with a Baccalaurate in Cultural Anthropology, I perhaps know more than the common man about the theory of human evolution. But you won’t see me talk about it much, because I recognize that the theory of evolution is an absurd philosophical error, a unscientific myth, and a heresy regarding the truths revealed by God concerning Creation. — I use, “Creation”, here as the proper name for all which God has brought into being out of nothing.
Evolution: the philosophical error
Evolutionism is in the first place, and historically, not a scientific theory about biology, but a philosophical position of the insane. Its founder or author is Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903), a philosopher who followed in the footsteps of John Locke, the British philosopher, who in his work, An Essay concerning human understanding, in 1689, insisted that all human knowledge was a posteriori, that is had after the fact of observing things. He therefore denied that there as in the real world an order of causality which not only explained how A caused B to produce C, but by which every A which caused B to produce C does not even exist.
The absurdity or madness of the position is self-evident: you throw a jar at a stone wall and it breaks. It breaks because it hits the wall, and it hits the wall because you threw it. Even if John does not see these things happen, they still happen. Locke denied all of this.
This philosophical error is called Empiricism, and in its application to living things, Herbert Spencer denied that there is purpose in biology. He set forth his ideas initially in an essay entitled, Progress: Its Law and Cause, published in the Westminster Review in 1857.
Thus, according to Spencer animals do not eat because they are hungry, and hunger as a feeling does not exist to make you eat, and the stomach does not have the function of digesting, that is just what happens when you put food into it. The eye does not exist to enable an animal see, nor the ear to enable it to hear, nor the foot to enable it to walk. That is just what all of these things do, without any purpose whatsoever.
That such a theory as Spencer’s would ever gain traction is the consequence of a lot of bad will. Because such a theory is on the level of what a drunk might tell you on a city bus, but no sane man would embrace it as it denies the very rationality of the world.
That everything has a purpose, or telos, is a fundamental truth of being. Because for anything to be it has to be of a certain origin, be of a certain form, be by a certain thing and be for a certain end or purpose. These are the four causes of a created being. The first is called the material cause, the second the formal cause, the third the efficient cause and the fourth the final cause, or telos. These philosophical truths were first enunciated coherently by Aristotle, in his work De Anima, and embraced by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Bonaventure all all the subsequent Catholic philosophers and theologians, because they form the very architecture of reality.
If one denied that things have a purpose, then there would be no explanation why they were of a certain form, made out of a certain matter, or why they were made by a certain cause. The whole rationality and reason for everyone would crumble.
It should be obvious that the human mind which embraces Evolutionism or Empiricism has renounced reason itself. Because Reason is the faculty of the human intellect where by we give an explanation, a ratio, an account, for that of which we speak. It is the second highest degree of intellectual act possible, and those who cannot exercise such an act are either imbeciles or too young yet to think, or are so old that their brains have weakened to no longer allow their intellects to express themselves.
Evolution, the biologic myth
Evolution as a theory of development for the species of living things was proposed by Charles Darwin, who wanting to remove God from Biology (his words), took a trip to the Galapogos Islands in the Pacific and having returned to England wrote a book called, The Origin of Species, in which he proposed that the cause of the speciation of living things is natural selection. He published it on Nov. 24, 1859.
Like the philosophical error there are fundamental problems with Darwin’s theory. First of all, he attributed the differences in several species of birds he observed in his voyage to natural selection. But the birds he observed were not of the same species as he thought, so he radically misinterpreted the evidence he gathered. Second, his theory of natural selection presupposes by its very name that something is doing the selecting. He appeals to the concept of “the survival of the fittest”, but never says fit for what.
Moreover, he founds his theory on the very unscientific concept of what a species is, in biology. The concept of species in biology is a population of organisms which are able to interbreed and produce offspring of the same kind. But if that is the case, how can it ever come to pass that some of their descendants cannot breed with others of their descendants — a thing which is most necessary if one is to theorize the origin of new species from previous species. It is a self contradiction.
When you attempt to define species with the modern science of genetics, you do not solve the problem. Because according to the science of genetics, every species shares the same genetic code to about 99.99999999% as each of its members. The variations in the code which arise out of mistakes caused in the replication of DNA in the cells are errors which cause malfunctions nearly 99.99999999999999% time — I am using numbers illustratively here, that is not the precise percentage.
So, if it happens that a replication of the genetic code actually is beneficial, what is the cause of it being beneficial? Various answers can be given, depending on whether those responding want to be rational or not. But the rational explanation is that there is a conformity between the new characteristic and the whole ensemble of characteristics of the biosphere in which the living thing lives. And such a conformity implies a correspondence, which in turn implies a rational cause. Because if a created intellect attempted to ideate or think of such a solution, it would take intelligences far beyond what humans are capable of, thinking for eons of ages, because you would have to know every possible cause and agent in the biosphere to know what exact new characteristic would be advantageous. And that would take near infinite information and the processing speed of a near infinite computer to simply manage let alone comprehend.
On top of this problem is an even more fundamental error, namely, that the so-called theory of evolution is not scientific. Because to be a scientific theory it has to be able to be tested and it has to be able to predict in specific circumstances a future outcome, which can be observed. So far no one has ever observed the origin of a species. There is no evidence that any single species had its origin in the population of another. And every species ever discovered is found it its perfect form right from the beginning.
As one can see, when reflecting on Darwin’s theory, it cannot be tested nor can it be used to make a testable prediction of a future outcome. It is not scientific at all. It is rather a presupposition of what happens and why it happens, attributing to Nature a quasi infinite intelligence produced out of a casual occurence for which it gives no explanation but a mistake. This is not scientific, it is mythologizing. It is a creed which holds things are true without any proof, and which demands you believe it without any reason. — Those who believe in Evolution — they even use the word, “believe” — hold it because it absolves them from admitting there is purpose in biology and an Intelligence of infinite power behind all which exists, on account of which our human intellects can observe things, explain them and make rational predictions of future outcomes in the observable world and in things biological.
Evolution, the heresy
It should be obvious, by now, that Evolution, inasmuch as it says all the species of life which exist today, are the product of natural causes and not of a Divine intervention, is a heresy. It is a heresy, because, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says, every denial of the literal meaning of any passage in Sacred Scripture is a heresy. And in Scripture, in the Book of Genesis, first of all, it says God is the author of every species of living thing, including mankind.
Here Saint Thomas is using, “heresy” in the theological sense. The Church has the authority to condemn all heresy, because She has the duty to uphold the truth of everything which God has revealed, and because She teaches that of every book of Scripture, God the Holy Spirit is the author, and there is no error of any kind contained, therein.
Not every such heresy, however, is subject to a canonical penalty, because the Church would need more canons than there are sentences in the Bible to penalize them all explicitly, and the purpose of Holy Mother Church is to tolerate ignorance, be patient with passion, and to forgive sin, since She seeks the salvation of all, more than the punishment of every sin — God will take care of that.
But the heresy of Evolution is a very dangerous and noxious heresy, because those who accept it deny the truth of Scripture and thus begin to destroy their own adhesion to the Deposit of Faith. Also, as Saint Alphonsus says, every denial of a truth which one knows God has revealed, causes the one denying it to lose the supernatural habit of Faith, after which it becomes impossible for that person to ever repent and return to the state of grace, unless they confront that sin directly, because without Faith it is impossible to please God or arrive at the salvation he has promised.
I have seen the same thing in my work of apologetics over the decades. Every Catholic who has accepted the error of Evolution finds it impossible to repent of sin, because for them they do not really believe we have immortal souls, which shall be judged by our Creator according to our moral choices. They are imprisoned in the flesh and cannot conceive a world of the spirit. They look no further than death, because they believe life itself cannot transcend it. And they doubt the truth of the Resurrection as a divine action.
From these observations, I hope you can see, that Evolution is the refuge of the mad, the embraced of the immoral and the superstition of fools, who say, there is no God (Psalm 13:1 in the Clementine Vulgate, 14:1 in other versions)
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CREDITS: The Featured Image is a photograph of Charles Darwin in 1854, and is in the public domain. For more information about it, see here.
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