Proving the Impossibilty of Theistic Evolution - Paula Haigh

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Outline of Thomistic Principles On Creation: Proving Impossibility of Theistic Evolution1

by Paula Haigh

The Church has taught in ancient, medieval and modern times that God and God alone has created. Some examples of this teaching:

If anyone does not say that the Father made all things through the Son and His Holy Spirit, that is, the visible and the invisible, he is a heretic.2

If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing... let him be anathema.3

It was Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who most fully elaborated the theological and metaphysical principles that support the above doctrinal pronouncements of the Church. It is no exaggeration to assert that every explanation of Creation by God that is not in agreement with these Thomistic principles is in error. The fact can be seen clearly when certain basic ideas are grasped.

First of all, it is well to understand what Saint Thomas means by the analogy of being. Being, or existence, is what God is, absolutely, but what all creatures only have from Him. Saint Thomas says that to exist is God's very essence or nature. We creatures possess an essence, which is expressed logically in a definition. Thus, man is a rational animal. But our existence is what makes us to be actual, what makes us to be and to be this specific individual person or thing. God is all Act, all actuality, all being; but we and all creatures have our existence from God, and it is an essence or nature that is thus given existence. All creatures are thus a mixture or composite of essence and existence; whereas God is all Being and admits of no such imperfect mixture. The mixture of essence or potency and act is, by its nature, limiting and limited, imperfect. But there can be no such imperfection in God.

The fact that we have our existence from God constitutes the relation of creation. This relation of creation is only in us, the creature, and is not in God the Creator because He is absolutely self-sufficient, self-existing, and depends upon nothing. Thus God as our Creator is utterly transcendent. The relation of creation or our absolute dependence upon God for existence is confused by many philosophers today (most notably Paul Tillich) with Creation itself, with the Creation of the universe that took place "in the beginning." Thus it is necessary to have a very clear appreciation of what it means for God to create.

Only God can create because to create is to bring into total being, that is, to bring into being the whole substance, the entire creature, from nothing (ex nihilo). Ex nihilo simply means from no pre-existing being. The best possible expression of God's Creative Action is to be found in the First Chapter of Genesis. There the Creation of the universe is reduced to certain specific Acts on God's part that correspond to the kinds of creatures brought into being in the first six days of the world. It is to be noted, too, that time itself is a creature, having come into existence or begun, with the first material or corporeal being. Time is, indeed, as Aristotle defined it, the measure of motion and cannot exist apart from some corporeal being in space and in motion. It is thus impossible, in a true cosmology, to conceive of a separation of time from beings in motion or from the space in which they live and move. Einstein's system is fantasy and was made-to~order for the literature of science fiction which builds its other worlds upon this false cosmology.

God's Act of Creation, or as in Genesis 1, His multiple Acts of Creation according to the creatures brought into existence on the different successive days of the first week of the world, is an Act and not a process. It is most important to distinguish carefully between God's Act of Creation or His Creative Activity and any kind of process, because all processes, as Dr. Henry Morris has pointed out, are decayings or un-doings, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. After the conception of a new individual, even the process of cell division by which the animal or human zygote grows into an embryo and is finally born, even this process of coming to a certain state, is ruled by the Second Law written into the DNA code; and biologically all corporeal beings begin to die as soon as they are conceived.

The difference between the human zygote and the animal zygote is worth noting in this context of Creation. The life principle of plants and animals inheres in the material of the DNA code and is passed on by generation not requiring a special act of creation by God. But the human soul is a spiritual immortal substance and as such can only be created directly and immediately for each human person by God Himself. This creation of the human soul which immediately, at conception, informs the zygote and causes it to be a human being, is well illustrative of God's Act of Creation over and against the process of growth, development, aging and dying that leads to biological extinction. The generative and degenerative processes of growth and dying constitute what Saint Thomas terms the order of generation as opposed to the order of creation. The entire order of creation or the universe, the whole natural order which was brought into existence "In the Beginning" with time itself, came to be not by any kind of process but by God's a-temporal Fiat. Processes belong to generation and degeneration, not to Creation.

God did not create from all eternity, however, nor is He creating now except for human souls. Even though His Act of Creation is identical with Himself because He is absolutely simple and contains no potencies, still His Act of Creation, this Act of God's Will, resulted in creatures. The effect of God's creating Will must not be confused or identified in any way with God's Nature. God infinitely transcends all of His creatures and the relation of creation is not in God but in the creatures only. This distinction which is a most real one, is necessary to grasp in order to avoid Pantheism.

The immanence which modern philosophers and theologians so ardently desire is to be found in the relation of creation, in the fact of our absolute dependence upon God for our existence every moment of time. Our being is from Him alone and thus Saint Paul said: "In Him we live and move and have our being." This is in the purely natural order. In the supernatural order of Grace, the Divine intimacy is even more marvelous, and beyond our power to understand. The Grace of God can only be answered with love.

Essence or Nature is the area of secondary or instrumental causality. In the order of generation, creatures give rise to creatures of their own nature and essence; like produces like, in obedience to God's command in Genesis I that every creature reproduce "according to its kind." Saint Thomas says that each creature causes or effects "what is proper to itself." But that any creature should produce something greater, of a higher order of being than itself, which would amount to creating, such hypotheses are absurd and against all the observed laws of nature, of logic, and of Grace. Even Grace only perfects human nature; it does not elevate it to something higher than human nature. Man will never become an angel nor even a "super-man". Should he aspire to be such, he will fulfill the promises of Satan (Genesis 3) rather than the Promises of our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ. The "new man" spoken of by Saint Paul is man conformed to Christ through Divine Grace.

And yet, this is what the theistic evolutionists are telling us to believe and to do! They would have us believe that all beings evolve and have evolved from lower to higher planes of being. This is against both reason and Faith.

Saint Thomas says that matter cannot exist without form, and the form of every creature, of every being, limits and defines its created nature or essence, essence being the principle of potency and limitation as well as of individuation. But if each creature is limited, as it is, by its created essence or nature, according to Genesis 1, then no creature can produce something of which it is not capable, something the potency for which it simply does not possess within itself. It is thus metaphysically, which is to say, philosophically impossible for a sea-creature to give rise to a land-creature, no matter how much time it be allowed, or for an animal to issue into a human being.

The question of time is somewhat irrelevant here, for if the potency were within the creature to evolve into something higher, then it could be done in six or six hundred as well as in six hundred million or billions of years. Nor is the question of life from non-life of any greater import than that of the bird from the dinosaur or that of the man from the ape, or that of the amphibian from the lung-fish. The question that must be asked first of all is this: on the side of reason, is the nature of the being capable of producing something that is not in its nature; and from the side of Biblical Faith, is evolution of any kind, theistic or otherwise, in accordance with Scripture and the teaching of the Church?

In both cases, of course, the answer is a definite NO. Evolution makes of Creation a process; it reduces the Order of Creation by God to the Order of Generation by Secondary Causes, thus placing the Creative Power itself within nature. And this is Pantheism. This heresy of Pantheism, and thus of Evolutionism, militates against and is destructive of the Truth of Faith.

The words of Saint Thomas about instrumental causes are relevant here:

The proper effect of God creating is what is presupposed to all other effects, and that is Absolute Being (Existence).

In other words, the entire natural order is presupposed to all other talk of creating and/or producing.

Hence, nothing else can act dispositively and instrumentally in this effect, since creation is not from anything presupposed which can be disposed by the action of the instrumental or secondary agent.

So therefore, it is impossible for any creature to create, either by its own power, or instrumentally, that is, ministerially.

No created being can cause anything unless something is presupposed; which is against the very idea of creation.4

Evolution presupposes that nature possesses truly creative power and has thereby given rise to the entire created order that we observe; which presupposition is blasphemous, an insult to God's unique and supreme creative power. It is also absurd to our God-given reason, God's great gift, with His Grace, to man. Even Divine Grace in us presupposes the created human soul.

Neither is Creation by God rightly termed a miracle since all miracles, whether physical or spiritual, presuppose the natural order of Creation with all its laws and processes.



Endnotes

1 Originally published in Creation Research Society Quarterly, March 1979, pp.210-211. Slightly revised March 1979.

2 The Council of Rome (382 A.D.). See Defarrari, Roy J., 1957, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, translation of Henry Denzinger's Enchiridion Symbolorum, B. Herder Book Co., St. Louis & London.

3 Lateran Council IV (1215 A.D.) and Vatican Council I (1870 A.D.). See Denzinger 428 & 1905.

4 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 45, Article 5. The topic of Creation is discussed also in Questions 45-67 & 65-74. Related Questions include 92 on the production of women and 95-102 on the State of Innocence and the Garden of Paradise.

Source

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THIRTY THESES AGAINST THEISTIC EVOLUTION
By Paula Haigh

. . .based on the conviction that "Theistic Evolution" is heresy, debilitating the Church today and causing more harm ultimately than atheistic evolution because of its reduction of God to a mechanism for the supposed natural processes of evolution, its lack of reverence for Holy Scripture as the revealing Word of God, and its insidious attack upon Catholic doctrine and tradition. - December 1976

Dedicated to Mary Immaculate, the Woman of Genesis 3:15
Who Crushes the Serpent's Head and Destroys All Heresies Throughout the World.

I cannot stress enough...the absolute necessity for a Catholic to understand, to know, what is meant by CATHOLIC FAITH. In order to have a deep love for this priceless possession, a Catholic must know what it is, and how it is different from any other Faith. We...read the warning of Pope St. Pius X: that the axe is being laid at the very root, that is to the Faith itself... (from F. Albers, The Hidden Schism, p.5, International Catholic Priests' Assoc., St. George's, Polegate, E. Sussex, BN26 5DG England)

Now therefore fear the Lord, and serve Him in sincerity and in truth; put away the gods which your father served on the other side of the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24:14:15)


Introduction

The following theses are offered as an outline of one possible way to construct a defense of Creation against the error of evolution. A book could be written on each single thesis, developing the theology, supporting it with quotations and examples from Holy Scripture, from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, from empirical science, analyzing the pro's and con's of the question from traditional and modem sources. And this is work which needs to he done.

Perhaps students will see in the material indicated here the almost infinite possibilities for elaboration, for analysis and for synthesis. And perhaps some will be inspired to commence research in this field and come to realize, as l have, that here, indeed, is the most exciting and vitally important area of study confronting us today. It is a new frontier, for the old materialism causes nothing but unhappiness and tragic waste of talent and of life, as modern thought becomes more and more confused, turning in upon itself only to find either the emptiness and disillusion of the cultic counterfeits or the "No exit" of a Sartrean hell.

Creation theology and Creation science offer the one true solution for our age, obsessed as it is with the mysteries of the cosmos, with the vastness of the universe, and with the history of earth and Iife. Here is the possibility of a real breakthrough and with it, a return to sanity for the academic disciplines and a return home for the cheated and dispossessed of the world.

The humanists tell us that "No deity will save us; we must save ourselves." This is spiritual and intellectual suicide for modern man. Belief in evolution leads to the death wish and self-destruction. Man is a creature and can only destroy himself by denying his creature-hood and his Creator. Christians who realize this and who love mankind, even as Our Divine Lord did when He died on the Cross to save us all and to manifest His love, will not he able to confront this modern humanistic attitude of God-rejection with anything but grief. Only those nominal Christians who are themselves infected with this deadly poison of unbelief are able to view the modern scene with complacency.

Some think to save modern man by concurring with his evolutionary "faith" and injecting God into this false system. But this does not work, for evolution rejects God as surely as Creation rejects evolution. The Humanist Manifesto states:

“Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created. Science affirms that the human species is an emergence from natural evolutionary forces. As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context. There is no credible evidence that life survives the death of the body. We continue to exist in our progeny and in the way that our lives have influenced others in our culture”.

It goes on to assert that "traditional religions" are obstacles to human progress. This is nothing but the mind of Satan proposing again and again to man, the original temptation to the original sin of rejecting God in favor of self. Christians must realize that the evolutionary system is per se, of its very nature, God-rejecting. Its raison d'etre is to be rid of God, our Creator. What folly, then, to hope to redeem it by making God its cause and planner. You will just as soon redeem Satan himself.

Therefore, the purpose of our theses is two-fold:

1) to demonstrate that the theory of evolution is incompatible with the doctrines of Catholic Faith and;
2) to defend those doctrines of the Faith that evolution most directly attacks.

There is no doubt in my mind that eventually the Church will be forced to condemn evolutionary theology, also called process theology, as the dangerous novelty that it is. Pope Saint Pius X singled out evolution as the principal doctrine of the Modernists in his encyclical, Pascendi (1907, #26, D 2094). And in 1950 Pope Pius XII condemned polygenism as absolutely against Faith (#37, D 2328). Catholic theologians and scientists, however, were not deterred by these warnings, and so, as Solange Hertz said, "We cannot wait for formal condemnations before side-stepping heresy. When these are made the disease is already admittedly out of control, and we may be stricken."1

We cannot go wrong if we follow the "Rules of Faith" laid down by Saint Vincent of Lerins (d.445) in his famous Commonitory or "Reminder":

“... in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus). For that is truly and in the strictest sense "Catholic" which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which, it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all or at the least of almost all priests and doctors.” (Chaper II, 6.)

A fourth note could be added under the name of novelty as a sure sign of heresy or at least suspicion of heresy, for St. Vincent speaks frequently of "novel misbelief, "novel doctrines" and "the garbage of heretical novelty," quoting Saint Paul: "Though we or an angel from heaven preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.(Gal 1:8) We rely not upon our own ability but upon "the authority of the Divine Law [Holy Scripture] and by appeal to the Church's determinations." (Chapter X, 27)

Such is our attitude towards evolution in the absence as yet of any formal determination and definite condemnation of this so-called scientific theory which has spawned a false theology and philosophy and leads, in turn, to many scandalous and heretical practices.

What is threatened today is the continuity of all true doctrine, even its very survival in any kind of socially visible form of witness. And this is particularly true of the doctrine of Creation which is so fundamental to the central doctrines of Original Sin, the Incarnation and Redemption. People who think that submission of the human mind to Divine Truth as revealed in Holy Scripture and in the teaching of the Church is submission to repression and boredom or an obstacle to true progress, only reveal their own prejudices and superficiality. It is the contemporary dominance, even tyranny, of positivist science, of God-less and skeptical empiricism, it is the willful exclusion of theology and metaphysics from their proper place in the hierarchy of the sciences and it is the rejection of the unity of the sciences including theology and metaphysics and according them their proper place that has brought about our contemporary impoverishment in knowledge. This reduction of all things to the physical threatens more and more to result in a fatal confusion of priorities and rejection of saving truth on the part of too many people within the Church. One example of this fatal confusion is the exaltation of physical needs before spiritual needs.

Today, in practice if not in theory, it seems much more important to ensure three meals a day, proper housing, clothing and a high standard of living than to dispel the double darkness of sin and ignorance by a strong and steady proclamation of the Truth without which there can be no true or lasting love. Thus we witness an unprecedented neglect of Catholic doctrine. The Church exists for no other purpose than the preserving, transmission and nourishing of the Truths of divine Faith. All else must flow from this, as all the other Commandments flow from the First. The reduction of all doctrine and all moral precept to the second great commandment, to love one's neighbor, and the reduction of the First Commandment itself to the Golden Rule is nothing less than the triumph of secular humanism in the Church and a betrayal of the Church's
mission.

Furthermore, with respect to Holy Scripture, the constant teaching of the Church upholds the view that the Bible is Divine Rhetoric and teaches scientific and historical as well as religious truth in the mode of discourse of this Divine Rhetoric. To allow Holy Scripture to be sliced up, fragmented into religious truth and some other kind of non-inspired error is to return to the Reformation and to sanction private interpretation where before it was condemned. For who is to determine what is religious truth in Holy Scripture and what is non-religious and therefore not important or not relevant truth or error but only Scripture interpreted by Tradition and the Magisterium?

And so these theses are submitted to the judgment of Holy Mother Church even while this judgment is happily anticipated. And I submit with the earnest prayer that some word of encouragernent will be given so that this portion of Catholic Truth may once again become a living and enlivening influence in the Church and in the world where it is so desperately needed to meet and offset the Satanic doctrine of evolution that would obscure in our minds the knowledge of our Creator, and root out of our hearts the love we owe to our Father, Redeemer and Sanctifier.


The 30 Theses

1. The Three Divine Persons are one single, common Principle of the Creation.

2. God alone created the world.

3. To create means to produce from nothing.

4. The world had a beginning in time.

5. All that exists outside of God was, in its whole substance, created out of nothing, in the beginning, by God, the Blessed Trinity.

6. God has created a good world.

7. No creature can as principal or secondary-instrumental cause, from or by its own power, create anything from nothing or bring new beings
into existence that transcend their own nature.

8. The action of God termed Divine Preservation or Conservation is not a communicable attribute but is proper to God alone because it
involves the continual pouring out of existence of which God alone is the Author and Source.

9. The Action of God termed Divine Concursus, by which God cooperates immediately with all secondary causes, can in no way be invoked as
an agent or mechanism for evolutionary ascent from kind to kind or from species to species.

10. The Action of God is without either motion or time, without effort or work.

11. The Gift of Divine Grace in the human soul and the elevation of man to the supernatural order by Divine Grace is not a fit analogy or any
kind of analogical basis for arguing in favor of evolutionary transformation from lower kinds to higher by means of a self-transcendence granted
by God in the natural order analogous to that in the supernatural order.

12. The Thomistic relation of creation gives no support to a theory of continuous creation.

13. Creation is not a miracle but rather the very initiation and constitution of the natural and supernatural orders which miraculous as well as all
non-miraculous processes presuppose.

14. All things were created to glorify God.

15. The Hexaemeron (Six Days of Creation Week) plus other affirmations of Holy Scripture, such as the 10-fold repetition of according to its
kind, constitute positive guiding principles for all scientists.

16. The first man, Adam, was created directly by God from the dust of the earth and his body as well as his soul were created immediately by
God on the Sixth day of Creation Week.

17. The first woman, Eve, was, in the words of Genesis 2:21-22, made from the side of Adam while he slept.

18. The whole human race stems from one single pair, Adam and Eve.

19. Man, as human nature, consists of two essential parts, a material body and a spiritual, immortal soul of which he is one composite being,
unified by the substantial form of the rational soul.

20. The rational-intellectual soul of man is per se, of and by itself, as formal cause, the essential substantial form of the human composite, that
which causes it to be human. Without the rational soul which is a simple, immaterial, spiritual, intellectual and immortal principle, there is no
human being.

21. Every human being possesses an individual immortal soul.

22. Every individual soul is immediately and directly created by God out of nothing at the moment of conception.

23. Adam and Eve were endowed by God with supernatural life in the form of sanctifying grace and with other certain preternatural gifts,
namely, bodily immortality, perfect control of nature by reason of freedom from irregular desire, i.e., concupiscence, freedom from suffering and
a knowledge of natural and supernatural truths infused by God. Adam and Eve received these gifts not only for themselves but for their
posterity.

24. Our first parents in Paradise sinned grievously through transgression of the Divine probationary command.

25. As a consequence of the grievous original, personal sin of pride leading to disobedience, our First Parents
1) lost sanctifying grace
2)provoked the anger and indignation of God, and 3) became subject to death and the dominion of the Devil.

26. Adam's original personal sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation or by being born into the human condition, but by natural
generation of biological descent and is inherited by us along with our human nature which, by reason of this sin, finds itself in a state of
deprivation that can only be remedied by the application of the merits of the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Baptism and other
Sacraments of the Church.

27. In the beginning of time, God created spiritual beings, Angels, out of nothing.

28. The Bible is both inspired and inerrant in all that it asserts, enunciates, and suggests because God is the principal Author thereof.

29. The Deluge described in Genesis 6-8 was a Flood that covered the entire globe, that is, it was universal both anthropologically and
geographically, and the fossil record of the geologists is a Monument-Memorial-Reminder for modern man of this watery catastrophe sent upon
the earth as a punishment for sin.

30. The theory of evolution undermines divine Catholic Faith, poisons the mind in which it takes residence, obscures the supernatural truths of
Faith and warps the natural powers of reason. It is incompatible with divine Catholic Faith and in its theistic form, constitutes a major heresy
infecting the Church today.