Confessions of a Creationist

Before I bring up the sacred cow of Darwinian Evolutionary Theory—something that, sadly, too many Catholics worship—I must make clear what is the scope of this article.

I am not, in this moment, engaging exhaustively with the detailed and precise claims about biological facts that are hotly debated between Old Earthers and Young Earthers or Theistic Evolutionists and Creationists. That being said, I am a Creationist, and I believe the Earth is much younger than we are told, likely under 10 thousand years old.

I know, I know, we aren’t supposed to say those things out loud, lest we be taken as “fundamentalists” or some sort of flat earther.

Well, in my case, I have no issue being called a fundamentalist, as I believe all the Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, which, ironically, point to the historical aspects of Scripture being exactly that—historical.

Is there room for mystery? Of course! Even if Genesis were written as a dry history textbook—which, thankfully, it wasn’t!—there would be a billion things that would not be recorded about that magnificent beginning of the world.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

That being said, I believe that many Catholics are embarrassed by much of the Bible, and they are squeamish about attesting to the truth that the Church Fathers, Aquinas, and virtually all the popes before the post-Vatican II era attested to.

We are embarrassed by those pesky verses that cause us to do mental gymnastics, especially the ones about God doing things like miraculously creating the universe by Divine Fiat. Imagine, God creating everything out of nothing, you know…like as if God could just speak and then stuff would exist fully formed…

Something about water into wine comes to mind.

You see, to the modern Catholic intellectual, we need to interpret the Scriptures as if all of the scientific statements held by some—not all!—scientists about the age of the world, the descent of man from apes and ape-like hominid things, are true. 

I struggle to understand why that is the case. Sure, natural science is a great thing, and many great scientific advancements have helped us immensely. But evolutionary science is historically about as reliable as Faucian Bugle Science.

The history of evolutionary science is filled with frauds relating to pig teeth being called evidence of hominids, alleged zillion-year-old hominid jaw bones being hundreds-of-years-old animal bones, and fake drawings about embryos that were published in science text books the world over. This small list barely scratches the surface of all the frauds and dubious “discoveries.”

There was also a dinosaur bone discovered that looks like it was only a few-thousand-years old—yes, few thousand, not tens of millions.

Now, really smart and serious intellectuals will tell you that it doesn’t matter if there are numerous frauds or discoveries that so-called “creationists” (what a silly name for an insult) have misrepresented to buttress their claims. You see, really smart intellectuals are used to dubious claims, frauds, and hoaxes. Just ask them about climate change, 10-minute-old safe and effective vaccines, and the settled science on sexuality that is unsettled every time an angsty 25-year-old writes a thesis. 

Granted, many Catholics are willing to cast aside some of the strange excesses of evolutionary theory—thereby picking and choosing the parts of Scripture that they decide are worthy of historicity—but still cling to the ancient nature of the earth and universe as an indisputable fact.

“It was a Catholic priest who discovered the Big Bang!” they say. As if the fact that Fr. Georges Lemaitre opining about the age of the universe about a hundred years ago constitutes some sort of infallible dogma. This is not to disparage Lemaitre, but it should be noted that he believed in an alleged age of the universe that is billions of years different than the current orthodoxy.

I know we are used to throwing around insane numbers when it comes to “pre-history,” but how is it that we take such claims seriously when there are disputes of billions of years?

I wouldn’t trust an account manager who misplaced 50 dollars, let alone scientists whose theories have changed in the billions and billions year after year.

As an aside, the idea that there is a “pre-history” is, to me, a bit nonsensical. As if there were a history before there were a history.

In addition, have we considered just how difficult it would be to discern the age of a created world?

Just for a moment, allow yourself to imagine that the Bible is true and that God created Adam in a special way—which is a dogma by the way, a strong one—and hear me out.

If Adam was created by God as an adult, like it says in the Bible, then we have an issue when it comes to scientifically assessing Adam’s age. You see, Adam would have been chronologically only a few minutes old, but biologically he would be no different than a 30-year-old man. Thus, if Adam was put under a proverbial microscope, it would be decided that he was not 10 minutes old but 30 years old. The same could be true about everything else.

If God created all things out of nothing in their whole substance, then a created thing could be new while appearing old. If God can spring a mountain up out of nothing, He can create that thing without relying on an abstract process that would appear millions of years in the making, in a way analogous to what he did with Adam.

Our ancestors believed these things, and they were willing to be martyred rather denying the truth of Scripture, which is to say they had the sense to not believe the consensus of their day. They were not embarrassed by the Bible, like we are today. And they were not so puffed up on their own understanding that they explained away the beliefs of the great saints who built the Church.

To conclude, I am not here to anathematize anyone who disagrees with me, but given that it is now clearer than ever that The Science can be bought and paid for, we should be careful about trying to square the round peg of biblical history to fit a consistently changing hole of atheistic evolution.