What Is Faith?… The Origin Of Life And Of Living Species

By RAYMOND DE SOUZA, KM

Part 20

In these lessons we have been considering the bluff of the evolutionist theory. Those who love to uncover dead bones and present them as proof of their own ape ancestry have been sorely disappointed. They see that the sheer lack of fossil and biological evidence for evolution disproves their theories. Even Darwin admitted it.
But they do not give up. If one theory fails, they will come up with a new one. And this is what they have done: The absence of fossil records has led some scientists to formulate theories about evolution that ran totally contrary to their previous explanations.
Despair led them to imagine that if their supposed gradual small changes (micro-mutations) over millions of years did not produce the evolutionary results, what about proposing the new idea of sudden big changes (macro-mutations) or “saltations” (big leaps), by which a new type of organism would suddenly appear in a single generation?
Now, this is really wishful thinking! To expect that, in the course of an earthquake or something like that, a cat would pop out of a dinosaur egg requires a miracle to make it!
But this despairing theory destroys the Darwiniac one because Darwin proposed the micro-mutations over millions of years, and he himself agreed to say that, if such macro-mutation evolution occurred, his theory was finished, because a saltation is equivalent to a . . . miracle.
Without invoking divine intervention, science cannot explain how a living creature, an intricate assembly of interrelated parts, could generate by chance, or blind forces, a new organism with a new complex assembly of different interrelated parts, and having entirely different chromosomes. Saltation means, for instance, that a snake’s egg could hatch and a bird emerges.
As a child I remember watching the Disney cartoon Cinderella, when mice became horses and a pumpkin became a carriage, but unfortunately they reverted to their normal condition by midnight. It was a beautiful cartoon. But at least there was a powerful fairy godmother with a magic wand, because the mice could not become horses by evolution — that much I understood as a kid!
The evolutionary “theory” of saltation is, therefore, not even worthy of being called a theory, but is merely a supposition to escape a difficulty.
But our creative scientists produced something brand-new: A later theory called “punctuated equilibrium” has been proposed. A nice name, of course, “punctuated equilibrium.” It sounds scientific, or pseudo-scientific, but it explains nothing and has no evidence of anything whatsoever; it is just proposed as a nice title to confuse the unaware. It is a similar hypothesis which explains nothing, but hides the lack of evidence behind an impressive pseudo-scientific term.
But let us not be too hard on the descendants of the proposed ape-man. If evolution, in some cases might be a fact, there is no scientific proof of it. I have no problem whatsoever with an authentic scientist who proves in a laboratory by the unbiased examination of fossil records that there has been an intermediary species between two complete distinct creatures.
A proof is truly scientific only when some incontestable law of nature has been discovered, which can be tested by experiment, and which will account for all the transformations alleged by evolutionists. Anything less than this is just wishful thinking — not science.
While there may be evidence for the modification of living things within many of the smaller groups, there is no evidence as to how any of the greater groups originated.
Let us make it very clear: Mutations within the species are a fact of nature, and have been observed ad nauseam. But the species remains the same species, it does not become something else. In plain English, there has never been any proof that a mutation has changed a species into another, entirely different, and with a different set of chromosomes.
When astronomers tell us that there have been changes in stars and galaxies, they explain those changes by modifications in the gravitation laws or other unquestionably well-known physical laws that have worked in the past and continue to work today. Fine.
But evolutionists have to this day failed to discover any true and verifiable law of development of nature that enables a less complex being to transform itself into a more complex one, all by itself. Had they succeeded in discovering such an elusive law, and proving it in a laboratory as proper scientists do, the debate would come to an end. Besides, since it is a purely scientific issue, it affects nothing in Catholic faith, but would prove that God created nature and endowed it with the power to improve itself, all by itself, even against the existing laws of thermodynamics.
Interestingly enough, many scientists agree among themselves that evolution has occurred, but they do not agree as to its cause. There are competing and even contradictory theories, which in themselves, suffice to prove that even the evolutionists themselves are not content with their own theories, and that evolution has not been proven to their own satisfaction. Unfortunately for them, the facts do not prove their theories.
It was Vladimir Lenin who wrote something to this effect: “If the facts disprove our theories, it is just tough luck for the facts!”
The irrational dogmatism of certain evolutionists was epitomized by Stephen Jay Gould when he wrote that “our continuous struggle to understand how evolution happens [he refers to the theory of evolution, and takes it as a fact awaiting proof] does not cast our documentation of its occurrence into doubt.”
His phrase “documentation of its occurrence” is pure bluff. Scientists have theorized about it, but have never documented a single example of one species becoming another.
In any event, as was shown in a previous lesson here, every creature, whether animate or inanimate, is dependent on God at every instant for its existence and its activity. It therefore follows that, even if we assume evolution as a theory, we must assert that God is its author. It must have been He who gave the living thing its capacity to vary, and so ordered its surroundings, and all the influences affecting it, as to make it develop precisely as it did. If evolution did occur, divine intervention would have been necessary for:
Creation itself of the first matter from which the whole universe is composed;
The appearance of basic life;
The elevation of vital organisms to plant level;
The elevation of plants to animal level;
The elevation of an animal body to be fit for animation by a human soul;
The creation of the soul of the first man, something which could never arise from subhuman life, since it is spiritual.
In the past, some great men like the Roman emperors, believed that they were descended from the gods. Today, great men like some scientists believe they descend from the apes. And you call this “progress.”
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Next article: The Unity of origin of the human species.

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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)