Mystagogy
Mystagogy
The Church and Science in the Writing of Pius XII and Saint John Paul II
In this session, we will consider the nature of the relationship of the Church to science using the key document by Pope Pius XII that has the ominous title, “Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine The Foundations of Catholic Doctrine” (Humane Generis). In this work, the Pope lays out the vital role that the Church plays in the world and in the sciences through her moral guidance and teaching. Among other topics, he lays out the Church’s official view of evolution and polygenism. You can peruse a copy of the document here.
Pope St. John Paul II returns to the issues raised in Humane Generis and clarifies the Church’s relationship to science in his famous speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences “On Evolution.” You can read the short speech here.
This presentation will be a fascinating consideration of the Church’s actual teaching on the origins of our species. It will be of particular interest to anyone who is interested in science or works in a scientific related field.
Our guest presenter for the evening will be Dr. Michael Goodrich, a member of St. Stephen’s parish and a theoretical physicist.
Intro: Hello and welcome to the Mystagogy podcast, offered as part of the Adult Faith Programs at Saint Stephen Martyr Church in Chesapeake, VA.
In a tradition dating back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, newly initiated believers were prepared for ongoing lives of faith through mystagogy, a period of formation designed to deepen their spiritual, liturgical and community life. Mystagogy is a Greek word which means "leading through the mysteries."
This program has been developed by Barbara Nicolosi Harrington, a university professor of screenwriting, cinema, Great Books and theology.
The guest presenter for this session is Dr. Michael Goodrich, a member of St. Stephen's parish and a theoretical physicist. He will consider the nature of the relationship of the Church to science using two documents: Humane Generis, a key document from the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, and a speech on evolution given by Pope Saint John Paul II.
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Dr. Michael Goodrich: A couple of documents concerning the church and science are of relatively recent origin. And so that means that it has had time to address a lot of modern developments in the sciences.
Which we'll see. So the first document is Humanae Generis on the of the human race. And it was written by Pope Pius XII, notice in 1950. So this is well before the Second Vatican Council just shortly after World War II. And as I said, this gives it time to address a lot of issues modern issues that that the church is concerned about.
Modernity has been a big area of concern for the church for the last hundred years or so. Roughly or so, and the tone of this document is the Holy Father expressing various concerns and calling attention to issues in the church particularly among, is that really the first page? Yeah. Okay.
Among the theologians in the church the the clergy, the researchers he noticed some. Patterns of activity going on at church, you want to call attention, give some warnings, some advice, provide some restrictions and so forth. So he says that for example, unproven in natural science, men often use the theory of evolution for bad purposes.
For example, communism. And the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, you may recognize Marx, Karl Marx, the father of communism, more or less, Das Kapital. I'm not sure if Engels was on that, took part in writing that book, I can't quite remember, but Engels was Marx's compatriot there. And he is warning that the theory of evolution says a lot of things that the church cannot support.
For example, the denial of the absolute essence of some things and a support for a form of existentialism which denies a mode of existence in which things have a permanence and a transcendence that goes beyond things like the natural world and the changes that go on in the natural world.
And unfortunately this allows man to spurn the teaching of the church. Now, by the way, these statements here are practically verbatim out of the document. I have not editorialized any of this. Some people here know that I have some strong opinions in this area, but this is practically lifted right from the document.
So it seems that the Holy Father and I have some similar concerns. He goes on to say, That there has been some developments particularly again in the research arm of the church and the theologians in which they are. There, there is some, apparently some mindset of rejecting a living teaching authority.
Particular, worldly fear. Of recent scientific findings apparently caused some of the Catholic philosophers and teachers to begin to make departures from teaching authority in the church. Evidently out of a concern to perhaps look foolish in the world's eyes, as the heavy onslaught of a modern science is making some very bold statements about some things, which we'll see here coming up shortly... very much. And so again, the tone of this document is lots of warnings and expression of concerns. And he is saying that they are free to discuss some unproven scientific ideas or some scientific speculations, but they must not they can only consider things that do not oppose church teaching.
So this is not a, they're not at liberty to use any of this material to oppose church teaching. In particular, human evolution, even if one wanted to consider the origin of man for pre existing living matter is up for discussion. But cannot contradict the doctrine that God is the giver of the soul.
And we will see later the spirit as well. He goes on to say that this doctrine here, polygenism, which you may not be familiar with, but this is the doctrine that the different races of man have different origins actually. And he says that is simply not compatible with the doctrine of original sin.
So this doctrine is out. While it may be the mainstay within the evolutionary naturalism community, it is off limits, he says.
And this next statement surprised me a great deal. Genesis 1 through 11, he says, does not fit the modern concept of history. However, he seems to be granting that it may in fact include some folklore. But if it is, it's a divine folklore. And so we are to use it for its truth value. There are not imaginative myths, but expressions of of truth.
This is a highly debated area. There are your six day creationists. There are those who are old earth creationists. The interpretation of Genesis has got some challenges. I always, many times, thought thought of the one scripture I believe it's in Genesis, just before the flood of Noah.
It says something like, Up until that time, it had not rained upon the earth. Which I thought was a remarkable statement. Seems to be right in your face, kind of support of something like a six day, literal six day creation, creationism. Modern science would. Certainly not to support that view.
And I'm not saying that I support that view either. But I have noted often that there are statements like this, in the scripture that really give you pause to to try to understand what does it actually tell? Is it trying to tell us something about history? Or is it more of these expressions of truth perhaps?
Or something perhaps To go along with what may possibly be storytelling in the form of some divine folklore. That's a rich area for discussion. I have no particular opinion about it. As I said, this whole statement was very much a surprise to me. Pardon me just a second.
He is Again for teachers particularly and it says Catholic doctors here to be careful about any erroneous opinions creeping into into any of their teaching because some people may not be able to handle this. It may be a challenge to their faith possibly.
But so to be careful. Incautious thinkers is the term he used, and he is charging that the bishops and head heads of religious orders, so forth. Be careful to restrain the spread of odious opinions that make may be creeping in from worldly scientific affairs and think other kinds of thinkers, outside the church and so forth.
And particularly for students and young clergy and I forget quite, I forgot exactly where this, there's a reference to a younger clergy in here somewhere, that he is concerned about these impressionable people that they're young and inexperienced, inexperienced with these kinds of matters.
So he is he is making a warning here to be careful not to lead others astray and to protect the faith, in at every turn.
I'm moving fast because there's a lot of material coming up which I will also only be able to touch on, I'm afraid. My real problem with putting this talk together was trying to figure out what to leave out, frankly. There's so much that could be said, there's so many topics, so many areas of controversy that ought to be examined and we ought to say something about.
I can really only skim the surface in the time that we have here. Okay. That's Humanae Generis. I remember in 1950, this is well before Vatican Council two, it shows that there are some issues going on in the church related to some modern developments, particularly in the sciences that have already crept in to to the church and is beginning to cause some.
Rejection of teaching authority of the church and possibly some of the younger folks are not being taught correctly, et cetera. So this is something you might call this an addendum of some sense. This is from, this is a letter from John Paul the second in Britain in 1986. This is a little bit more directed towards evolution proper where he goes on to say, That there is some, there is evidently a apparent clash between church teaching on man's origin and the theory of evolution as it is widely disseminated.
But he says that some precedents have been have been laid down and he's, he explicitly mentions Humanae Generis. And he says that there is no conflict between evolution and the faith provided with the proviso. that evolution not be considered a certainty nor can church revelation be set aside in, in anyone's thinking as they examine this doctrine and as they consider it.
They must be mindful of church revelation as it butts up and, has points of friction with this doct with this doctrine. But he does go on to say that evolution is more than a hypothesis. However, it is not really a single theory, and that is true. It is not really a single theory.
There are multiple theories associated with the theory of evolution, which we'll get into. We'll touch on those a little bit later. My own opinion and I heard this line from a teacher some years ago, Is that evolution is not really a good theory. It's just a low grade hypothesis, at least in that person's opinion.
Oh, by the way, one thing I did want it to say, I should have said it first. I know that the, when I did the Chesterton thing some months ago, I touched on this subject and I may have given some of you the impression that I'm against, somehow I'm against belief in evolution. I want to reassure you that it's not really my concern, whether you believe in evolution or not.
I'm really, my real passion and concern is how science is being used to promote certain world views. You could say that evolution is one of those, or the naturalistic world view. Because, and it's a pity because if you can put your opponent into a position where he appears to be arguing against science itself.
That's a very powerful beating stick to beat down your opposition and make them look like they're just cranks and they shouldn't be taken seriously. There are other issues going on today, I will not say what it is, in which some of the same tactics are being used, by the way. Again, it's my hope to get everyone to think a little bit more about the nature of science, what it can do and what it really cannot do, and we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't grant it more power than it actually has.
But he does go on to say that the convergence of results from several discipline favors the theory. We will see later on that when the term evolution is used, there are about 20 different things it could actually be meaning in the context in which it's used. This is one of the problems. This is one of the big problems.
There is a certain amount of bait and switch that goes on where Some people are asked to grant that evolution has occurred in some sense. And then it is used to say, see, this other sense then has just been proven or supported or strengthened or something. Fallacy of equivocation is what that's what that's known as.
And by the way, I I learned the hard way That it's possible to go from first grade. All the way through a PhD and never be taught the fallacies of reason. I know because I was never taught the fallacies of reason. The only way I learned it was some years back when I was doing a lot of debating and online forums with evolution is that most of the arguments that were being used were flashes, but I had to actually go make a personal study of the fallacies of reason.
And you can find them out there. They're all out there. There are. There are formal fallacies of reason in logic. But then there are a lot of informal fallacies of reason, which are just like debating and rhetorical tactics to try to get your opponent to grant you something when they're unsuspecting.
So beware. There's a lot of that goes on. And politics, of course, naturally is full of this kind of thing. And that's the other thing to be concerned about is the politicization of science now. It seems to be very very strong. So trying to separate the politics from the actual science now is becoming very difficult.
But in any case, he charges the magisterium to protect the dogma. Now this is important because this is pretty serious restriction on the theory. Man is not part of the evolutionary continuum, he says. But it's unique in that God wanted him on the earth for reasons apart from what he wanted for the rest of nature.
Now, natural an evolutionary naturalist would probably not, certainly not agree with that statement. He would simply see man is just yet another species in the continuum that's probably going to morph into something else in the future, perhaps, but JP2 is saying, nope, we cannot hold that.
We're not, we Catholics are not allowed to hold that view. That's a pretty strong charge, I would say. Okay, and then he says echoing some of the statements in in Humanae Generis that if the human body comes through living matter, which previously existed the soul is given by God. And he also says that We cannot regard the spirit as having emerged from living matter either.
These are incompatible with we, what we Catholics teach about the nature of man. That he's a special creation of God given things by God that no animals that no animals are granted. Further he goes to say that the passage into the spiritual realm is not something that you can observe according to scientific practice.
Now, Truthfully, I'm not entirely sure what he meant by this statement. I assume he, he may have been alluding to, I know that there are some theories that man may, man, as we know him, may have descended from the primates, the apes. But he was, at some point, given a spirit by God and he actually became a human being.
I know there's, some people hold that view. I've heard this. Possibly that's what he what he has in mind. Okay to sum all of this up we Catholics evidently if we are to whatever we hold about evolution, we are restricted from some things that we evidently must not hold.
We must hold that the theory is provisional. We're, it is not certain that it is true to us Catholics. God is the immediate creator of the soul as we said before, polygenism is irreconcilable with the doctrine of original sin. So all of us, regardless of our racial background, we all come from the same source of humanity.
We do not have separate origins. We have a single origin. Another, a general, another reference to Genesis 1 through 11 and the possibility that it might be divine folklore. Again, man is not part of the evolutionary continuum and man's spirit does not come from living matter. Okay? All that said, I do have some thoughts about science.
And a lot of these I developed over, along long years of practice, but also as I watched things go on in the scientific commun community. I remember the first. There was a time not long, not too many years ago, which I felt obligated to believe all the results of scientists, of science.
As a scientist, I felt like if some community over there published a paper and claimed some result, I was more or less obligated to believe them. They're scientists, aren't they? Don't they put on their white lab coat, walk into the laboratory, carefully test everything? To the nth degree, leaving no stone unturned, making no unwarranted assumptions, bringing no biases to their analysis and their viewpoint about what they're looking at.
Don't they do that? If only they did do that, things would be a lot simpler, but unfortunately they don't quite do that, as we will see. Okay, so what is science? Oh yes the end of the story was the first chink in the armor, you might say, was was the Cold Fusion Fiasco, if any of you remember this.
This was back in the late 80s. These two guys, Fleshman and Pons, they were out in Utah or something, published this paper that took the world by storm. They had achieved fusion, nuclear fusion, at room temperature. This was going to be a cheap source of energy for, this was going to revolutionize everything.
It was a great celebration and hoorah. For several months. Until the first couple of guys that tried to repeat the results were having trouble repeating the results and they couldn't do it. Eventually they had to retract their claim and it was found out that it was false. I asked myself, how can that happen?
This is science. That can't happen, can it? Don't people go in and calibrate their instruments, and measure things carefully, and write all the equations down, and do all the math, and then the peer review people come and look behind them and say yeah, no mistakes. It's good stuff. Don't they do that in science?
You would hope so, but it turns out, not so much. Science is, unfortunately, a business like a lot of other things. It's very it's very unfortunate. So anyway because of that, I began to wonder about some of these things. And this is about the time in which, again, I felt oblig I felt this strong tension between I was a Protestant at the time.
And I felt this strong and there's a very strong sentiment of six day literal creation out of Genesis in the Protestant community, as most of you probably know. Protestants usually regard Catholics as being hopelessly liberal on this issue because so many of them, the Pope had said you could believe in evolution, didn't he?
At least that's the story in Protestant circles. Anyway, so I was aware of this tension between my feeling or my desire to be with my Protestant community on this. But also as a scientist, I mean hadn't they proven evolution? This was pretty much a done deal, wasn't it? Yeah. It was at that time that I began to pay attention to the idea of whether there was any fallacious reasoning in the way scientists go about making their claims and stating their propositions.
I say that science is empirical, meaning observational, data centric, versus imaginative. And believe it or not, this is a controversial statement. Plenty of scientists would disagree with me about this. I say it's fallacy free. You cannot, even the rules of logic tell you that your conclusion is invalid if you do not observe the rules of logic.
Cannot offer a fallacious reason. You accomplish nothing. Unfortunately, it takes someone else often to come along behind you and look at your reasoning and say, I'm sorry, but you made a mistake here. As Richard Feynman once said, if you know who he is, he was, he's a very famous, one of the most famous, next to Einstein, he's arguably one of the most famous scientists in the world.
He was one of the fathers of quantum electrodynamics. He worked on the Manhattan Project, was one of the golden boys in the Manhattan Project and so forth. He said you must not fool, you must not fool anyone in your science and you are the easiest person to fool. That's sadly true. I've learned this many times when I do things that it's easy to get a little incautious about things until you have to present it to someone else.
Suddenly you realize, I have to tighten this up, that's not quite true. What I said here I was, I took some liberties over here, I shouldn't have taken, et cetera. Anyway, science must be aligned with the truth. That may seem self evident to you, but I'm going to talk about a few things coming up in which you'll see that's that others do not necessarily hold to that proposition, believe it or not.
It must be objective. It should certainly be repeatable. These are usually considered to be a golden tenets to science. And certainly it ought to be humble which it typically is not. When I say humble here, what I mean is that we should not make our claims any stronger than they need to be.
We, we should in fact make them as weak as we can, consistent with the data and the results that that we've achieved. This is a conservative view of science, where we never overstate our claims. You will see that some of these items. Or the flip side of some of these things that science is not.
And one thing it is not, even though the general populace often feels that it is it is not consensus based. Now you hear this all the time, 94 percent of scientists accept this, or 97 percent of scientists believe this other thing. Believe me, none of those statements mean a thing. Not in science.
Those are political things. The fact that 97 percent of people believe this or build a consistent. That's a political thing. That's not a scientific thing. Galileo, it was that said that the reasoning of a single humble individual could overturn the entire edifice of hundreds of years of arguments and beliefs and statements by other scientists, one person, one person could come along and topple the young thing.
He was one of those people. Was he not? So it was Copernicus. And a few other people. They overturned the entire thing that had been believed for a long time. One person. Science is also not expert expocratic. I pretty much already said what that was. This idea that that the experts have a kind of an expertocracy where they say 94 percent believe, and if you don't believe, you're therefore a heretic.
You are to be barred. You will not be allowed to teach at this university because you do not agree with the rest of us. You will not be allowed to publish in these journals because you do not toe the line on the consensus. A lot of that goes on, surprisingly. There, science is also not the best ideas about some applied philosophy, and I'll explain what that means just a little bit later.
Here's a big one. How about, how many of you have heard that science is self correcting? I'm here to tell you it's false. Why? Because science should never overstate its claims, ever. It should say the least possible has been achieved, that it can, under any given set of circumstances, and never over, overstate its claims.
It doesn't, shouldn't need correction. I used to say, when people would say to me science is self correcting, I would say, good, I'll wait until the corrections come in. Why not? You've opened that door. You're telling me that corrections might come in. Why shouldn't I wait then? I'll hold what you say provisionally.
There's no need to get too excited about it. Okay. Certainly it should not be biased. And it should not be promoted as a comprehensive world view known as scientism. The idea that science is really where knowledge comes from. This, there, there are many great famous scientists who you may have heard of.
People like Richard Dawkins and some other people who are great promoters of this idea. In fact I don't know if you've heard of Stephen Jay Gould. He was a fair, he was a famous paleontologist. Died here not too many years ago. He even promoted this idea called Separate Magisteria. He said the church will be the magisterium over faith.
And science will be the magisterium over knowledge. Now swallow that one for just a second. Anything that's true knowledge is false. Science is to be the master of those things. Faith the church is to be relegated strictly to faith. These things that are just hopeful, wishful thinking ideas that are just high in the sky that no one needs to believe because there really isn't any evidence for it, right?
Notice, of course, the church says what? Fide et Ratio, right? Faith and reason, that's how we do our business here at the church, right? We don't just limit ourselves to faith. We use reason too. Okay. Let me give you a little bit of a laundry list of some issues in evolutionary science.
So there is what is called the central dogma. Nice that they recognize that they have dogmas in science. I think this is a way, this is a place we can start to cut in here. We know about dogma over here in the church, right? We're very familiar with that. Central dogma. Basically, the idea is science is to be based on unguided naturalistic processes only.
Please, there is no need for God to explain anything in the material universe in any way. Not even human, the human being because we only allow unguided naturalistic processes. So you may remember I asked, was science objective and is it really searching for the truth? How can that be a search for the truth, question mark, if there is the possibility that's not a sufficient explanation for things?
We'll see some little other little digs I have coming up about, about that particular issue. Here's one, abiogenesis. Anyone familiar with this? Issue, abiogenesis. This is the, this is a very, this is a tremendous problem in the evolutionary community. How did life begin from non life, from just chemicals, just molecules and just chemicals?
How did a living system actually come to be without, only with unguided naturalistic processes? It is a Big unsolved problem in the evolutionary community. There are some historic experiments that try to address this issue. There are a lot of speculations about what might've happened if some chemicals fell on the side of a rock or something.
And, maybe it is again, a lot of ideas out there. Nothing of a particular substance that I know of has been produced in the laboratory. That's what I would accept. I'm an empiricist, you might say. How about this one? This is a big one. This is perhaps the most significant challenge is the biological information in DNA.
And I'll have some more a little bit more to say about that coming up. Some of you may know Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Philip Johnson, some of these people who have been on this train now for some time with the idea that The cell is so rich, the DNA molecule is like a library encyclopedia of information that is so dense and so rich and so expansive that the idea that it could have just come together by accident is gotta be considered a stretch.
As I say, I'll have a little bit more to say about that. How about thermodynamics? Something as simple as thermodynamics. I'm a physicist, so thermodynamics, we study this kind of stuff. Thermodynamics is basically the properties of heat. Heats a form of energy but it's a form of energy that it's not all that easy to get useful mechanical work out of.
There's a lot of there's a lot of limitations for how much you can really achieve with it, etc. But think about just this one point. My body right here maintains a temperature of 98. 6 degrees Fahrenheit inside my skin envelope, which is off the ambient temperature in this room by 98. degrees, how is it that my body is able to maintain a temperature that is above the mean temperature of this room?
Because the laws of thermodynamics would argue against that, by the way. It would argue that energy necessarily spreads out into the available degrees of freedom evenly, as even as possible, as even as the mechanical constraints of the situation would permit. So think about how that can happen by, quote, accident. unguided naturalistic processing. Again, I can only skim the surface here. I'm going to hit and run a little bit, I'm afraid, and just maybe give you a little food for thought. You might want to look into a few of these things. Okay, here's the other big thing. Now this is this is a good reason why these documents are of a relatively modern origin.
They were written in the time of what we call the modern synthesis. If anyone's looked into evolution, we now live in the time as what is called the modern synthesis. Which is really Darwin's original ideas, which was natural selection. That was his big thing, was natural selection. He didn't know about random mutations in the genes because he didn't know about genes.
He didn't know about microbiology, cellular biology. None of that was known to him at the time. That was discovered later. Watson and Creek in the fifties discovered the DNA molecule. The whole they Darwin In Darwin's time, they thought that the cell was just a little blob of jelly.
That didn't, that wasn't very complicated. Later on, they discovered that the, that every cell in your body is like a busy city with trucks running around everywhere and a control network controlling things and super highways for things. And believe me, it's a very sophisticated thing. The reason I point that out is that in Darwin's time, and actually among, typically among the general public is, and you often hear it said, that natural selection is the big thing that makes the diversity in the biological world.
And that's false. What actually makes the biological diversity is random mutations. It's the random copying errors in the, as DNA is copied to, to build proteins. They have, are things called frameshifts and some other little thing, dropouts and deletions and frameshifts and so it's things like that, that are thought to be the reason that the genome changes over time as it accumulates these little errors.
And something good comes out of that, a whole new body plan. You change, you get birds from lizards by this. By this process, for example. So it's really the random mutations that actually bring novelty into the gene, the genome that is supposed to be able to make brains where there didn't used to be brains, and lungs where there used to be gills, and things like that.
That's supposedly that's what the modern thinkers said. Okay, anyway. That's something of an issue because I'll have a few numbers to throw at you. The one little slide that has a little math on it. I'll have a little something to say about that in a second. The fossil record is also and I'm sure you've heard this is also a challenge to the the The theory of evolution.
The joke is there was a little kid one time looking at a big display and, the museum of natural history or something like this. And it has, there's all these little species and all these arrows showing how this went, this species gave rise to this one and that one and everything. And all down the line of descent, et cetera.
And the little kid says, and the the presenter is saying we found this one, we found this species here, and this one, And we found that one, and this one, and this other one. And the kid comes back and says, Where did you find the arrows? Laughter Yeah, the arrows were not found. The arrows were put up there by some guy that wants you to look at this a certain way.
You're free to look at this however you want to. And you don't necessarily need their advice. Okay, I've already hit the empiricism thing. Let me say a little something about probability and this thing called degeneration theory, just in case you haven't heard about it. Turns out that it's far less probable that complexity built up from simple organisms into something as complex as a human being.
It's far more likely that God originally made humans and other species in a relatively pristine form, and that their genome has actually degraded over time. Far more likely. That has happened. That's called Degeneration Theory, by the way. Then there's this thing called Haldane's Dilemma. This is another serious problem for evolution.
What this is all about is that the breeding rates, especially of human beings, is far too slow to introduce novel changes into the genome that will amount to anything over any appreciable amount of time. You can look this up. This is this is all these things you can easily look up. How about this?
Do we have any biologists in the room? No biologists? Any medical people in the room? Okay, how about the undifferentiated cell issue? So this is related to stem cell research. You know about stem cells. Stem cells are what are called undifferentiated. They can literally become anything. They can become bones, muscles, brains, nerves, again, undifferentiated.
That's their big promise. It is a naturalistic mystery how when the sperm and the egg come together and you have an undifferentiated cell and it begins dividing, eventually, and they don't exactly know where or how, but eventually some of those cells start to become heart muscle cells.
Some of them start to become brain cells and some of them start to become bone cells and others become livers. How that happens how that can happen by accident without a control program of some kind to coordinate and orchestrate this thing. Again, the naturalistic community would deny that there is any such thing because that's obviously pointing to the hand of God, right?
And that's verboten. That is verboten in the naturalistic science. You've all probably heard of junk, DNA, right? Heard about this. You guys know about this. The gn, the genome is this humongous collection of of of DNA and, okay, so how about this one? You've probably heard that the chimpanzee DNA is 98% similar to the human.
You guys heard this? Yes. This is a common thing. What they don't tell you is that they're only actually comparing a relatively small amount of the DNA. The rest of it they consider to be junk. They call it junk because they don't know what it does. And yet, for some reason, we carry it around with us all the time.
And when we reproduce, we pass it on and things like as we see, over time they've begun to realize that this DNA is, in fact, not junk. It actually does stuff. Again, caution. I urge caution. When you hear some of these claims that there's really more to the story. Okay just a word on abiogenesis.
So again, this is chemical evolution. This is how did life start? The mystery of life's origin is what they call it. Origin of life research. I had one of my friends here joking to me earlier tonight about the cosmos and all the galaxies. I was going to tell him, but there's actually one slide I have in here that talks about that.
Talks about the universe. Okay ostensibly you had the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies and so forth and so on. And eventually, some day when the Earth formed we started getting some little prebiotic molecules starting to shape up, by themselves. Again, all by accident, by the way.
Or unguided natural processes, I should be charitable and say that. But eventually there's a certain amount of, the chemistry gets enriched. And so what they think now, that RNA, which is ribonucleic acid, forms first. And eventually, and in fact the whole world is based on this, they say. And then some DNA and proteins form, and then you get somewhere in this process, something becomes alive, somehow.
And capable of self replication, because after all, evolution can't do anything until things can replicate. So evolution itself does not solve this problem. This is a separate problem. This is abiogenesis. This is what the Holy Father meant when he said evolution is not really one theory, it's several.
Because this is one of them. This is one of the, this is a big area of research. Big area of mystery. They've not really solved this problem of how life ever got started. A fundamental problem. Okay, so here's some numbers for you. Here's my one math slide. Okay. If we were to just consider a smaller than average protein, just one, composed of about 150 amino acids, for the information required to sequence this properly, for that number, must be found in a space of this size.
Now, I realize that you may not recognize that number, 10 to the 164th power. This is one of 164 zeros after it. That's how big, that's the number of possibilities, possible arrangements. Evidently only one of which we know would work for this particular protein. And that's only one protein out of many proteins that have to be there for our living organism.
Say a living human being to function. How big is that number? The number of seconds in the entire age of the universe, which is 13. 8 billion years is about on the order of 10 to 17. That's a number. It's a lot smaller. I emphasize a lot smaller than this number. This number is unbelievably huge compared.
How about one more? The number of molecules in the entire observable universe is about 10 to the 82. That number is also a lot smaller than this one. Believe it or not. It would be as if there were, if the observable universe was full of molecules, I was going to find one, a particular one that I needed.
That was the solution. What's the odds you would find it? Not very favorable, it turns out. Alright, then one last thing. There's something called the chirality issue. Turns out that It turns out that the proteins and actually, most molecules, come in either right handed or left handed versions.
Turns out that light only uses left handed ones. If you were to attach a right handed one to a molecule, you would fail to build the protein properly. In fact, they have found some problems in medicine where some of the drugs that they synthesize had some right handed molecules in it, and they were very detrimental to your health.
Anyway, it's called the chirality problem. It's been around for a while. Fairly well done. Okay, let's have a look at this. Here's a good one for you. Here's one of my favorite ones. So this is a DNA molecule. Okay. This is the infamous double helix of Watson and Crick. And DNA is basically, it twists like this.
But if you were to untwist it and just lay it out flat, we could look at it like this. And so what you have is the infamous double strand. So these are the strands. And what you have here are what are called codons. pairs these pairs are always paired the same way. So it's redundant.
There's nothing special about the fact that this, these Gs and Cs always occur together. So this is just the circle that I'm present. But here's what's important, what happens is a little molecule comes down here and runs down here like a kind of like a zipper and reads this, And this is a little piece of RNA that then goes off and runs down to some other place in the cell, so it can help build a certain kind of protein.
So these are essentially the gene regions in the DNA, but here's the thing that's interesting. While there are chemical bonds like this across the supporting structure, there are no chemical bonds along the sequence, and it's the sequence that's the thing. The sequence is how the cell knows how to build a protein.
The information is in the sequence. And there are no chemical bonds this way along the codons, which means there's no chemical reason why the sequence should be what it is. How do you explain the, how this sequence ever got built? When The only apparent answer is that they just randomly assembled in that order.
Because there's no chemical reason to come up with why they should be in that particular order. But this is like ink being on a sheet of paper. The sequence of symbols is the meaningful information. It's the book you're writing. It's the manuscript you're writing. But the chemistry of the ink and the paper do not determine the letter sequence That was the point.
They don't explain it at all. You have to find an author somewhere that wrote those words. That's outside the system. Many of us say, many of us say that's evidence that the naturalistic, the essential dogma, is inadequate to explain how that could have gotten to be in this particular condition.
Now, this is a modern result, this is a relatively modern result. They didn't know about this back in Darwin's time. Back in, back when not Aldous, who was Aldous Huxley's father? I forget. He was the other one, Thomas Huxley. Thomas Huxley was called Darwin's Bulldog. He was the guy that really went out there and sold the theory of evolution to the world.
Darwin was a relatively meek, retiring kind of man. But Thomas Huxley went out there and really You know went on the campaign trail, so to speak. So this was this was not known in, in, in their time. They didn't know about this. This is just another picture of this really showing molecules, again, stressing that while there are bonds across the sub the supporting ribbons here, there, there are no logs this way, but down the sequence.
Okay? So this is another central dogma. This is the central dogma of molecular biology. And I see that we're getting close here, so I'm gonna try to wrap this up here. Somehow actually I already explained this, that there, there was the, there's what's called transcription, where the little where the little molecules read down the sequence, build the little pieces of RNA, go on to construct something called messenger RNA, and go off into other other sites in the cell.
Where the actual proteins are in fact constructed. So they're not co located. One mechanism is happening over here inside the cell, and it goes, the information is transcribed, is recoded in the form of messenger RNA, goes over to another part of the cell where the actual protein construction machinery happens to be.
Again, how did all this come about by accident? It boggles the mind to think this could actually be the result of. naturalistic process. At least that's how I see it. Whoops. Then there's the whole, and this is a vast area. This is important. Evolutionary psychology. Evolution has to explain the workings of the human mind.
It has to explain morality, free will, self awareness. How about theodicy? Theodicy, that's a college word that means the problem of evil. This is one of the This is the attack you get most often from those who wish to attack Christianity and Catholicism is, Why does God allow evil in the world?
You might as well say the same thing about evolution. Why does evolution allow evil in the world? After all, wouldn't species thrive if they were more egalitarian and cooperated with one another? Wouldn't evolution have found that solution, rather than all this hostility? Dog eat dog, etc.
Anyway, these are lively debates. Finally I'll say a few things about what I have encountered as the kind of typical common tactics one encounters. If you try to have a serious discussion with say an atheist scientist, let's say, and I know lots of them. Most of them are it seems for some reason.
It's a pity. But they tend to appeal to credentialism. We, we're the big brains up here. We got the PhDs up here. We're the guys who studied for, we got all these awards and honors and we're professors. And so you should listen to us. You should, how many have you heard? You should believe the science, believe the scientists.
Ad hominem attacks.
Let me instead of using that bullet, let me use this one instead, it's a better one. This is something that Richard Dawkins said. Richard Dawkins is still alive today, he's he's the leading evolutionist on the planet these days. You've probably heard of him. He says that anyone who denies the theory of evolution is either ignorant, stupid, wicked, or insane.
You've Now I ask you, is that a scientific argument? It is not a scientific argument, it is an ad hominem, it is a looking down your nose at these stupid infidels who refuse to get with the program. Okay, anyway, that's it's been my experience that you run into this attitude when you try to have a serious discussion, when you really say, hey look, I'm I think there are some serious problems with the theory.
You've immediately identified yourself as ignorant, stupid, wicked, or insane. And that's typically how you're treated. You're dismissed. You are dismissed from class. No need to talk to you anymore. You are dismissed. You can't have a job at this university. You will never get research funding for anything.
You will not be allowed to teach or you'll not be allowed to write a book for high school. Except maybe a private Christian school, but you know how they are , they're six day literalists. Those people are idiots. Alright anyway I'll get, I'm going to get to the equivocations on the term revolution.
I actually have a slide on that, so I'll skip that. But I already talked about the definition of sciences. Materialism only unguided, naturalistic processes only are allowed for the discussion. And here's another one. Oh yeah. I already talked about how the common tactic is to pit your opponent as arguing with science, right?
Notice that and I know that this is a hot button, the climate change thing. There's probably a lot of people in this room who are all on board with the climate change thing. I happen to not be personally. But I noticed that a person like me who's skeptical is said to be against science, right? Again, an easy bully tactic to just beat someone and not even have to, listen to their argument.
But I have always noticed that when these debates start, how often some scientist wants to know if I believe in evolution. Why are they so concerned whether I believe in it or not? I tell them what's really important, I think, is what I believe about science. And that's really what I want to know when I'm debating with them, is I'm not particularly concerned about whether they believe in evolution, and the truth is I'm, I grant you the liberty to believe in it if you want to, but I'm vitally concerned what you might believe about science, and how far science has actually substantiated these ideas versus not or how much of this is really just rhetoric and just some wordplay, and grandiose claims, etc.
That's really what my concern is. Okay I think this might be the last one. This is the last one, so I'm almost on time. Okay, so it turns out that the term evolution is, unfortunately, it's equivocated on often in a discussion. It can mean many different things depending on just how it's used.
It can just mean any sequence of events in nature. We dig up these fossils and those fossils, and they look like those. And it looks like they were just another version of this, but slightly different. And any sequencing like that is generally considered to be evolutionary in nature.
This one I won't go into too much. This is a kind of a detailed term. There are, besides genes, there are these things called alleles, which are like alternate genes. You could think of them that way. It turns out that in a popular so Darwin got on a ship, the HMS Beagle, right? He goes off and he lands in the Galapagos Islands.
This is how the whole thing got started. And he observed that in some years, it was relatively dry. And so the seeds were a little harder this year than they were previous years. So the beaks on the finches got a little bit bigger. So they could crack these. Hard shells, but then when it would, the rains would come and it would soften up, the finch beaks would shrink back.
So there's this oscillation variation that goes back and forth. Some years the fi beaks are bigger, some are not. That's basically what this allele frequency thing is all about, is a mechanism to explain that at the gen, at the genetic level. Very often the term evolutionists use, they mean common sense.
They mean all life came from the one primordial ancestor that somehow got the thing started. Back to the abiogenesis problem, right? Some will say that it happens multiple times. Imagine the odds of that. To explain the different, what are called different, the different major groups of life forms.
They sometimes will say that it must have happened because it seems very difficult to really connect them, frankly. I already mentioned the modern synthesis. But this is the bottom line. A coin, a general coin by Richard Dawkins, the blind watchmaker thesis. Again, unguided naturalistic processes only, please.
That's all that's allowed in their view. Okay. Questions or comments?
Maybe you'll need to install. It's difficult. Okay. I'm sure you've heard this. Maybe I just had to answer this question. But when you showed that diagram where you had the predecessors and successors going from the McBain theory, Oh, the yeah, my question, what was the predecessor to the big bank right?
So I assume you mean that as a loaded question. What's the predecessor to the big bank? Yeah. So yeah, great question because, someone said, put it this way, and I think this is a great way to put it. The fact that anything exists means logically, and this is just pure logic, it means something is eternal.
You can't get away from it. If you think about it logically, something is eternal. Now the debate is over, what is eternal? Some would say the universe is eternal. It goes through these endless cycles of big banging, and then the big crunch, and then the big bang, and another big cra In other words, it blows up and expands, and then it co then it coalesces and comes back together, shrinks back down to another point, another singularity.
So some say that is the eternal nature of the universe. Others would say like us, we're real beings. That, for us, God is the eternal thing. But we all agree, and I think this is very significant, we all agree that something has to be eternal. And we need to leverage this when we talk to God.
But Aquinas says, again, there's a cause and effect, right? Yes. But he's saying that God is the uncaused cause. If you look at most decent apologetics books, and we, a group of us some of who are here tonight, I have, not too long ago, read Peter Kress book on apologetics. And any, and this is, I think, one of the most significant things that came out of it, is that you find out that and I think there was a statement in here earlier, in Humanae Generis, should be, if I skipped it I apologize, Somewhere in here it should say, unless I cut it out, that the light of natural reason alone tells you something is eternal.
And in these apologetics books, in other words, they will go on to say that something has to be the first cause. And that thing which is the first cause, we call God. That's what we call it. We call that first cause God. Something has to be the primordial mover. The one that gets everything moving.
That thing we call God. That would be Theus. How would a monotheist explain the origins of any motion, any energy any causes, cause and effect of change? It's something that looks all problematic, I would say. It's a mystery. They call it a naturalistic mystery. However, they're prone to use this to their advantage because they'll say it's a mystery how evolution did this.
That's why we need more of your money for research funding so we can investigate this. Thank you.
Any other questions?
I was just hoping you could clarify something. The humans not being part of the evolutionary continuum you said is not it's not allowed to be taught in the Catholic Church, right? That means that humans can't evolve into a different creature, right? That doesn't account for the fact that we don't.
I don't know what the appendix does anymore. The fact that people are starting to not be born with wisdom teeth. That's not an evolutionary continuum. It would be becoming a completely new creature. Can you just clarify the difference between that and mutants? Yeah the idea that The human being has perhaps seen some changes since times of antiquity, like maybe we won't have a wizard, or something like, anything like that, I think is not what the Holy Father is saying.
By the way, this is his claim. That we are not to understand man as part of the evolutionary continuum. I think what he's implying there is that we're not to be understood, to be in the chain of species that come and go, and set the precedent so that new species that depart from that can branch off and, start a whole new world.
Another branch of tree. Yeah. I do not think he's referring to some of the things that you're talking about. Like maybe well consider the different, the different races of Mint. How did the different races of Mint come about? It is something of a mystery if we all understand ourselves to come from the same original pair so forth.
Some of us came along, our ancestors grew up in different parts of the world, which is perhaps why their skin color is different. Other changes like that. And just possibly, you have the time of battle and incident. Exactly what that's trying to say about the differentiation of humans across the planet.
It's a matter of speculation, or debate. I was just gonna, I was just gonna say in addition to what you just said, the fact that man can't be part of a continuum because man has an electric free will within it and so it just cannot be explained. Via evolution, right? That's it.
That, that's just, so their worldview, as he was saying earlier, the worldview of materialistic worldview and the and the theistic worldview theirs is deficient. They can't explain several things that he already mentioned, right? They can't explain the initial Big Bang, what happened what caused that motion.
They can't explain it. It can't explain intellect and free will. There's a whole number of things that it just can't explain. Which they relegate to, their realm of mystery.
Barbara Nicolosi Harrington: Well said. I think we've gotta bring it to conclusion, thank you very much.
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Outro: Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Mystagogy podcast.
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Until next time, be well and God bless.
