FUNDAMENTALISTS INSIDE
THE
A GROWING PHENOMENON
Dermott J. Mullan,
Since 1988, the book
“Catholicism and Fundamentalism” by Karl Keating has helped prevent Catholics
from being lured out of the Church by evangelical Fundamentalists. As long as
the Fundamentalists exist as a force that attacks the Church from outside, the book provides
important and useful service.
But what if there are
Fundamentalists actually inside the
Church, rather than outside? How is the Church to respond to such a situation?
I submit that
Fundamentalism is now beginning to infect the thinking of certain Catholics who
are loyal members of the Church. The clearest symptom of infection is the
belief that the Earth is young, no more than a few thousand years old. This
calls for a change of plan from what has worked so far if Catholics are to be
defended against Fundamentalism.
1. IS FUNDAMENTALISM
CREEPING INTO THE LIVES OF AMERICAN CATHOLICS?
Fundamentalists trace
their roots to a series of books called The Fundamentals, published by certain
Protestants between 1909 and 1915. These books contained (among other topics)
accounts of “heresies” (including Catholicism) and “critiques of scientific
theories”. To be sure, no-one should object to criticisms of scientific work as
long as the criticisms are based on sound reasoning. But the critiques that are
associated with Fundamentalism at times involve what is in essence a rejection
of rational thinking.
Three events indicate to
me that American Catholics are now being exposed to Fundamentalist ideas from
within the Church.
First, in the process of
home-schooling some of our children about five years ago, my wife and I
encountered a serious dilemma in connection with certain science textbooks. We
did not want our children to be swept along by the erroneous ideas about
Darwinian evolution that permeate much of American culture. We therefore
selected biology text-books which reject
Second, in 1999, one of
the leading American publishers of orthodox Catholic books released a book
entitled “Creation Rediscovered” by G. J. Keane. This book contains not only a
well-written criticism of Darwinian evolution, but also an extended attack (60
pages long) on the results of modern astrophysics concerning the age of the
Universe. The book suggests that astrophysicists have misinterpreted the
evidence because of their belief in evolution. The book states that the
evidence actually point to an Earth and a Universe which are no more than a few
thousand years old. Although the book does not have an Imprimatur, it does
contain a preface, in which a Catholic theologian writes that the book is “free
of errors in faith and morals”. This choice of words may suggest to the casual
reader that “Creation Rediscovered” expounds formal Church teaching.
Third, in 2001, a
meeting which advertised itself as the “First International Catholic Family
Conference on Creation” was held in
These three lines of
evidence strike me as symptoms of a troubling development in contemporary
American Catholicism. I used to believe that modern claims about a young Earth
were confined to Protestants. For example, when I was growing up in
Now, however, the “young
Earth” aspect of Fundamentalism is being touted by some as part of Catholic
teaching. In fact, selected quotations from Church documents are being used to
say, in essence, that if you want to be a loyal Catholic, you should believe in
a young Earth.
2. AN ASTRONOMER’S
VIEWPOINT
Why do I find the young-Earth
development troubling? Because it flies in the face of reason.
In my profession as an
astronomer, I am familiar with abundant evidence from the physical world
indicating that the Earth and the Sun and the Universe have ages that are
measured in billions of years.
The evidence for these
ages comes from at least five distinct and independent areas of research in
astrophysics: expansion of the universe, stellar structure, isotope dating,
white dwarf cooling, and properties of the cosmic microwave radiation. The
excellent concordance between the first three methods is summarized in a
Scientific American article:
www.sciam.com/specialissues/0398cosmos/0398peebles.html. The fourth and fifth
methods have strengthened the concordance. The concordance is especially
impressive because the five methods rely on completely distinct types of
observations, and different laws of physics, to arrive at their conclusions.
The scientific evidence
in favor of an “old Earth” (in the sense of having multi-billion year ages)
appears to me, and to my professional colleagues of all religious persuasions,
as entirely reasonable and completely convincing.
It is beyond the bounds
of reason to suppose that, if the Universe is actually no older than a few
thousand years (as the young-Earth proponents claim), many hundreds of
researchers from diverse countries and all religious backgrounds would discover
five completely different methods which all yield multi-billion year ages.
3. DILEMMA FOR A
CATHOLIC
The Irish Christian Brothers
taught me the maxim: “The Church has nothing to fear from the truth”. It should
not matter by what means the truth about the world is discovered: Catholics
should be willing to look it squarely in the face. But the message of the
Fundamentalists is very different. They claim that when science establishes
certain truths about the age of the world, Church members should reject those
truths.
What is a Catholic
home-schooler to think about statements in otherwise acceptable textbooks that
the Earth is young? What is an orthodox Catholic to think when his favorite
publishing company says that the Earth is young? What is a Catholic parent to
think when a Catholic Family Conference teaches that modern physicists are
misleading the public in a multitude of ways?
In particular, has the
Church taught doctrinally on this issue?
In order to answer these
questions, it is worthwhile first to be clear about how the claim for a young
age for the Earth arises.
4. CLAIMS FOR A YOUNG
EARTH
The origin of the young
Earth theory is easy to identify. It emerges from a strict calculation when one
adds up the ages of all the patriarchs who are named in the book of Genesis,
and then adds 6 days to the result. Archbishop Ussher was by no means the first
to arrive at the conclusion that the Earth is “young”. In fact, in the writings
of the Fathers of the early Church, one can find indications that many of them
also believed that the Earth was created in six literal days. (A talk at the
Manassas Creation Conference discussed this topic also.) But Ussher’s estimate
is noteworthy for being among the most precise of its kind.
The young Earth theory
results from one particular interpretation of the text of Genesis. However,
this interpretation overlooks the fact that the Church has some significant
teaching about the way in which Catholics are to approach the reading of
Scripture.
5. HOW DOES THE
MAGISTERIUM APPROACH THE EARLY CHAPTERS OF GENESIS?
Young Earth proponents
approach the precise numerical values of ages that appear in Genesis as if the
contents of Scripture were exactly equivalent to a modern history book, or a
modern science textbook. This is certainly one way to approach the Bible.
But it is not the way
that the Magisterium of the Catholic Church teaches us to approach the question
of historical matters in Scripture. Pope Pius XII addressed this key point in
his encyclical Humani Generis in
1950. He wrote: “It has been clearly laid down…that the first eleven chapters
of Genesis do pertain to history in the true sense. However, it is not right to
judge them by modern standards of historical composition…In what exact sense
Genesis 1-11 comes under the heading of history is for the further labors of
exegetes to determine” (para. 38).
Obviously, Pope Pius’s
approach to Genesis is quite different from that of young-Earth believers. The
question is: do Catholics have to believe the Pope’s teaching on how to read
Genesis 1-11? Or can they adopt a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude to this
teaching?
Clear answers to these
questions can be found in Humani Generis
itself. In para. 20 we read: “What is expounded in encyclical letters of itself
demands consent, since in writing such Letters, the Popes exercise the ordinary
teaching authority, of which it is true to apply Christ’s words ‘He who hears
you, hears Me’ (Luke 10, 16)”. The fact that Catholics should follow the “mind
and will” of the Pope has been repeated by Vatican II in no uncertain terms
(see Lumen Gentium No. 25).
As a result of the
encyclical Humani Generis and of
Vatican II, Catholics who wish to follow the “mind and will” of the Pope have
an obligation not to regard Chapters 1-11 of Genesis as subject to the same
rules of interpretation as a modern history book.
6. CHURCH FATHERS AND
CHURCH TEACHING: IS THERE A DIFFERENCE?
But what about those
saintly and wise Fathers of the Church who wrote about the “young Earth”? What
are we to make of their claims?
To answer this, we note
that the Fathers wrote many centuries before Pope Pius XII set forth the above
teaching about how Catholics should approach Genesis 1-11.
Now, it is true that
Catholics rightfully pay respect to the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of
the Church. However, those writings are not in themselves infallible. Earning
the title of Father or Doctor merely indicates that nothing in their writings
contradicted the Church’s formal teaching AS IT EXISTED AT THAT TIME. For
example, St Bernard denied the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, but he is
still a Doctor of the Church because the doctrine was not made formal until
1854, many centuries after Bernard had died.
Therefore, just because
a certain Father or Doctor calculated the age of the Earth by adding up the
ages in Genesis, this does NOT mean that the Church teaches that age as part of
its doctrine. In fact, Pope Leo XIII addressed this explicitly in his 1893
encyclical Providentissimus Deus:
“The unshrinking defense of the Holy Scripture does not require that we should
equally uphold all the opinions which each of the Fathers have put forth in
explaining it. For it may be that, in commenting on matters where physical
matters occur, they have sometimes expressed their ideas of their own times,
and have thus made statements which in these days have been abandoned as
incorrect” (Denzinger 1948).
7. MAGISTERIAL TEACHING
ON CREATION
When it comes to a
question of formal Church teaching about the age of the Earth, one point is
clear. No official magisterial document from either Pope or Council has ever
taught that the Earth is a certain number of years old.
This is not to say that
the Church has taught nothing about creation. Far from it. The magisterium
taught formally about creation at the fourth Lateran Council in the year 1215.
Lateran IV made it official Church teaching that the world (and all of
creation) had a beginning in time. In other words, the world has not been in
existence forever. This was a huge break from ideas that dated back to
Aristotle.
Subsequently, when the
first Vatican Council met in 1869-1870, the Council fathers were confronting
some of the new ideas of modern science, including
Note the phrases that
are used by both Lateran IV and
Note also that neither
Lateran IV nor
Moreover, Vatican I also
teaches (see Denzinger 1805): “If anyone does not admit that the world and
everything in it, both spiritual and material, have been produced in their
entire substance by God out of nothing, let him be anathema”. Two features of
this teaching are noteworthy. First, there is (once again) no mention of a
particular time at which God created spiritual and material things. Second, the
term “entire substance”, also used by the Church in its teaching on the
Eucharist (Denzinger 877), is a technical term that stands in distinction to
the “accidents” (i.e. the outward appearances). Vatican I does NOT say that the
accidents of everything in the world were produced by God out of nothing. In
fact, although the creation of each man’s soul certainly involves a direct
creation by God out of nothing (indicating ongoing creation to this very day),
this is not true of man’s body. Each of us received a body from our parents.
And even the body of Adam himself, as God reveals (Gen. 2, 7), was created
using pre-existing material (“dust of the ground”).
8. GOD MADE THE WORLD
RATIONALLY—THEREFORE SCIENCE IS POSSIBLE
One of the triumphs of
the work of Thomas Aquinas was to point out that God (who [according to the
Christian faith] is a rational Being) created the world in such a way that man
(a rational creature, made in the image and likeness of God) could understand
the world. God did not create the world capriciously, giving different
properties to different particles of the same type. Instead, God created an
orderly world based on particular quantities of "number, weight, and
measure" (Wisdom 11, 20). The ability to use the gift of reason in order
to discover the wonders of God’s world is as much a talent as any of His other
gifts to us. And we will one day render an account of how we used that talent.
It is precisely because
God made a rational world according to "number, weight, and measure"
that scientists have a chance of discovering some specific truths about the
material world. If truth were inaccessible to human reasoning, then science
would make no sense.
As it is, science does
provide access to certain truths about the world. When scientists use their
reason to discover something about the material world, it is as if God allows
them a glimpse of part of the blue-print that He used when He, in His capacity
as divine Architect (
9. THE CHURCH AND HUMAN
REASON
The young-Earth theory
brings to a sharp focus an important question to which all Catholics should
give some thought. Namely, can faith and reason contradict each other?
Surprising as it may
seem, there have actually been certain people in the world who believe that the
answer to this question is Yes. For example, in the middle ages, the Muslim
philosopher Averroes taught that something that is true in religion is not
necessarily also true in philosophy. Averroes believed that a religious truth
might be a philosophical falsehood. Averroes was apparently not concerned by
this violation of the principle of non-contradiction. So troubling did St
Thomas Aquinas find this assault on human reasoning that he wrote an entire
treatise specifically to demonstrate that Averroes was wrong about this. Thomas
established that once an element of truth is discovered, it makes no difference
whether it was faith or human reason (including science) that discovered it.
Of course, this
conclusion of Thomas’s appears eminently reasonable to a Christian. After all,
when Christ entered the world, allowing a divine nature and a human nature to
exist without confusion in a single person, a new day dawned for our world. It
became clear that there need be no essential contradiction between faith (which
has to do with divine things) and scientific reasoning (which has to do with
the material world in which humans live).
At the time of
To achieve this, it is
noteworthy that they essentially elevated Thomas’s ideas about faith and reason
to the level of magisterial teaching. This teaching of
The Church paid a great
compliment to human reason at
And shortly after
Clearly, Pope Leo was
not referring here to arcane scientific truths such as the theory of atomic
structure. The latter theory is certainly based on irrefutable evidence, but it
has no overlap with Church teaching, and cannot possibly be relevant to Pope
Leo. Instead, the Pope was obviously referring to scientific truths that are
pertinent in one way or another to the contents of Genesis 1-11. It has become
evident in recent decades that modern astronomy is an area in which Pope Leo’s
words are highly relevant. And Pope Leo put his money where his mouth was: he
expanded the Vatican Observatory so that the Church would not be left behind by
the discoveries of modern astronomy. Pope Leo obviously believed what the Irish
Christian Brothers taught me: the Church has nothing to fear from the truth.
Where did Pope Leo obtain
his respect for scientific truths? The answer is clearly stated in Providentissimus Deus: the Pope simply
followed some reasonable guidelines that had been laid down many centuries
previously in the writings of
The possibility of
ridicule from unbelievers was of serious concern to Saints Augustine and
Thomas, and also to Pope Leo. It should be a matter of concern for American
Catholics in our day as well.
By including the
guidelines of Augustine and Thomas in an encyclical, Pope Leo raised those
guidelines to the level of magisterial teaching. As a result, since 1893,
Catholics have had an obligation to honor the truths that are established by
means of science, provided that the evidence is irrefutable.
In order to provide
further assistance to Catholics in the correct approach to Bible reading, Pope
Leo established the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Members of this Commission,
appointed by the Pope, are required to respond to questions about scriptures
sent in by writers from around the world. Catholics are expected to take the
decisions of the Commission seriously. Pope St Pius X taught this in 1907: “We
do now declare and expressly prescribe that all are bound in conscience to
submit to the decisions of the Biblical Commission which have been given in the
past, and which will be given in the future”. We will have occasion below to
refer to a document that was issued in 1993, with the authority of Pope John
Paul II, by the Pontifical Biblical Commission.
10. BUT WHAT ABOUT
FAULTY SCIENCE?
It goes without saying
that scientists are not infallible. Scientists can and do make mistakes.
Indeed, large groups of them may at times espouse ideas that are incorrect. For
example, during the 18th century, the
Closer to our own time,
Darwinian evolution is a case in point. There is a widespread belief among
biological scientists in the English-speaking world that Darwinian evolution
(i.e. the theory that numerous slight successive modifications occurring at
random can cause new species to appear from old) embodies the absolute truth
about living things. In fact, it can be plausibly argued that, since the
“monkey trial” in
And yet, there is an
increasing body of scientific evidence to suggest that Darwinian evolution is
incorrect. Processes which are truly random are simply not capable of creating
the high level of information content that is present in living things. Certain
biological systems can simply not be assembled by numerous slight successive
modifications occurring at random. E.g.,
Michael Behe, in his book “
11. DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN
PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY
Now that evidence
against Darwinian theory is growing, there is a danger that people may begin to
regard all science as suspect. This would be unfortunate.
Just because science
does not have access to the charism of infallibility does not mean that science
is incapable of determining certain pieces of the truth. Pope Leo appreciated
this point explicitly. But this raises an obvious question: how are we to
decide whether a scientific theory is true or not? The answer is that we need
to rely on probability. The probability that the theory is correct can be
increased by performing experiments to test certain predictions of the theory.
The more specific the prediction, the more valuable the test. And as more and
more tests are performed, with a successful outcome for each, the theory is
regarded as progressively more likely to be true. At some point, rational
people agree that the theory provides a reliable description of certain aspects
of the world in which we live. To be sure, this is a far cry from
infallibility, but it does provide a credible basis for the criterion
enunciated by Pope Leo: “irrefutable evidence”.
As pointed out by Behe
and others, Darwinism fails to satisfy the criterion of “irrefutable evidence”. The difficulty with
On the other hand,
physics deals with material bodies in the simplest possible terms. As a result,
it is much easier for physicists to perform detailed and extensive tests of
their theories.
This is an astounding
tribute to the genius of Einstein. Surely Einstein glimpsed a true image of a
piece of God’s blueprint for the physical universe. There is simply no
comparison between Einstein’s theory and
In view of the extensive
evidence in favor of Einstein’s theory, it is reasonable to conclude that the
evidence for Relativity Theory deserves Pope Leo’s adjective “irrefutable”. And
according to this theory, the Universe is between 10 and 20 billion years old.
There are other theories
in physics which are also based on equally solid evidence. For example,
calculations of stellar structure are based on the laws of conservation of
momentum and of energy. These have been widely tested over the past few
centuries, and have been found to be accurate descriptions of the physical
world. As a result, when calculations of stellar structure indicate that the
oldest stars have ages between 10 and 20 billion years, these results are
reliable. Other theories that have been used by physicists in arriving at
similar estimates for the age of the Universe are also based on thoroughly
tested evidence.
12. WHAT DOES POPE LEO’S
TEACHING MEAN FOR A CATHOLIC?
Does Pope Leo's teaching
make any difference for a Catholic when it comes to the young-Earth/old-Earth
controversy? I submit that the answer is Yes: it makes a lot of difference.
As was mentioned above,
evidence from five distinct fields of physics point to a universe with a multi-billion
year age. Since five completely independent methods all point to essentially
the same age, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this evidence deserves
the label "irrefutable" in Pope Leo’s sense.
Based on this, it no
longer seems conceivable that the Church could teach that the Earth is young.
If the Church were to proclaim
the young-Earth theory as an item of Church teaching, in the words of St Thomas
Aquinas “Holy Scripture would be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and
this would block the unbelievers’ way to belief”.
13. DOES THE OLD EARTH
THEORY FAVOR THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION?
Almost everyone who
discusses evolution and the age of the Earth can be classified into one of only
two categories. (1) Evolution occurs, and the Earth is old. (2) Evolution does
not occur, and the Earth is young. I have never met an evolutionist who believes
in the young Earth. Nor have I met a young-Earther who believes in evolution.
The question is: are these the only two groups that people can be classified
in? NO: I suggest that there is a third possibility. (3) The earth is old, but
evolution did NOT occur (at least not the way that
In other words, I make
the following claim: just because the Earth is old, this does not mean that
My reasons for making
this claim are based on the fact that evidence for an old Earth comes from the
laws of physics, pure and simple. These claims have nothing whatsoever to do
with biology. In particular, they have nothing to do with the theory of
Darwinian evolution.
Unfortunately, some
Fundamentalists suspect that physicists are in collusion with evolutionists.
Thus, when physicists announce ages of 10-20 billion years for the Universe,
the Fundamentalists claim that the physicists are actually misinterpreting data
so as (secretly) to provide support for the theory of evolution. (This approach
is evident in G. J. Keane’s book “Creation Rediscovered”.)
To counteract this
suspicion, opponents of evolution sometimes choose to fight against evolution
by opting for the young-Earth theory. The argument goes roughly as follows: if
we limit the Earth’s age to no more than a few thousand years for the Earth,
then evolution will not have had enough time to do its work.
However, in making this
argument, the opponents of evolution are surrendering unnecessarily to the
Darwinians. In fact, the claim of the Darwinians is erroneous. Even if 10
billion years have elapsed since the Earth began, this is not enough time for
even the first living cell to appear as a result of chance. Nowhere near enough time.
The phrase “billions and
billions of years” (that was made famous by the late Carl Sagan R. I. P.)
sounds like a long time to us because it is much longer than a human life. But
“long” is a relative term. The relevant scientific question as far as evolution
is concerned is: how “long” would it require for random encounters between
amino acid molecules in the primordial Earth to create even a single living
protein? Even if we choose the smallest known protein, consisting of a chain of
50 amino acids arranged in a specific pattern, then it is easy to show from
probability theory that 5 or 10 billion years is not nearly long enough time to
create this protein by chance.
If not even a single
protein can be created by randomness, the possibility of creating by chance
even one cell (which requires many different proteins to function) are
astronomically small even if the Earth is 5 or 10 billion years old. The first
cell could not have come into existence by chance: it requires the intervention
of an Intelligent Designer. Even if the Earth were a billion times a billion
years old, the first cell could not have occurred by chance. Scientists who
claim that mere access to “billions and billions of years” guarantees the
success of random evolution are misleading the uninitiated public.
Thus, admitting that the
Earth is 5 billion years old does NOT mean that the evolutionists have “won”.
There is still a strict and unavoidable need for God to create life in an old
Earth.
Despite this, our
culture continues to give a lot of credence to the power of random events. An
oft-cited example of the success of random changes is contained in the phrase:
“ if you put a billion monkeys in front of a billion type-writers for a few
billion years, they would type out the entire works of Shakespeare”. This claim
has been made so persistently and so confidently over the years that it has
taken on the nature of dogma in some peoples’ minds. And yet this claim is
demonstrably false. To see this, note that, if each monkey pecks once a second
randomly at a 27-letter keyboard (including a ‘space’ as a letter), it will
take on average a year for a meaningful string of a dozen letters to appear on
even one of the typewriters. After a year, one of the monkeys will have by
chance typed the sequence “Mary had a ”. And it will take 10 billion years, the
entire lifetime of the Universe, before one of the monkeys will type out the
full line: “Mary had a little lamb”. This is a far cry from the works of
Shakespeare.
14. DOES GOD “TEST OUR
FAITH” WITH SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE?
When Fundamentalists are
presented with scientific evidence which suggests that the Earth is old, they
sometimes respond with the following argument. God can do anything. Therefore,
He can (if He chooses) make fossils look much older than they actually are. Or
He can place the stars at a million light years distance, but start their light
traveling towards us at an initial distance of only a thousand light years, so
that the light can reach us today even though the Earth is only a few thousand
years old.
In other words, the
world has the appearance of certain
properties, although in actuality (they say), God created the world with very
different properties. In this way (the Fundamentalists claim), God is testing
our faith in His ability to do anything.
Fundamentalists claim
that support for God’s ability to create the appearance of age (in fossils,
e.g.) comes from the following thought experiment. Suppose someone met Adam and
Eve the day after they were created. Presumably, since God created them as
adults, they would have the appearance of being (say) 25 or 30 years old. And
yet they were actually only a day old. In view of this, the Fundamentalists claim,
appearances of age can be deceiving.
On these grounds, they
suggest that scientists have been deceived by the appearances of great age in
the fossil evidence, and in the astrophysical evidence.
However, such arguments
are subject to serious doubt. For example, when Adam and Eve were created,
God’s original plan for them did not include death. It was only if they chose
to disobey Him that death would enter the picture (“in that day, you shall
die”). Before sin was committed, God’s plan was for Adam and Eve to live in the
Garden for a time, and then go to be with God in heaven. In such a situation,
the absence of death would have meant that the processes of bodily decay
associated with aging would not have occurred while they lived in the Garden.
Therefore, the questions “What age is this man? What age is this woman?” would
have had very different meanings in the Garden from those that we ascribe to
them in our day. Before the fall, the aging process (whatever it was) must have
been very different from the process with which all of us are familiar in
everyday life. Adam and Eve might have lived in the Garden for a hundred years
and still not have “aged” (according to our standards). However, once original
sin occurred, death entered into the lives of Adam and Eve. From that point on,
they were driven from the Garden into the world that we live in now. And in our
world, an aging process began in earnest for Adam and Eve in preparation for
the final separation of body and soul in death.
Moreover, why would God
trick us by setting up an elaborate system of multiple physical clues which
point consistently to a Universe that has an age between 10 and 20 billion
years? What would God achieve by deceiving us on such a massive scale? Such
activity seems entirely out of character for Someone who (according to the
standard theological definition) can neither deceive nor be deceived. It also seems
entirely out of character for Christ, who proclaimed Himself to be “the Truth”,
to engage in world-wide trickery with scientists who are honestly and earnestly
seeking the truth about the world.
15. THE CLAIM FOR A
YOUNG EARTH: WHAT IS A CATHOLIC TO BELIEVE?
What am I to tell my
home-schooled children about the claim the Earth is young? How should they
regard such a claim? Should they interpret Genesis in a literal sense?
It seems to me that I
have an obligation to teach my children that literalism is not the way the
Church approaches the interpretation of Genesis. In this regard, Catholics are
guided by the encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XII. Catholics
certainly need to “hold the truth of scripture without wavering” (as Aquinas
said). The difficult part is to determine what exactly is the “truth of
scripture”.
This point was already
apparent in the earliest days of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC). In
the early 1900’s, the PBC was asked if it is permissible to interpret the
Hebrew word “yom” (“day”) in the first chapter of Genesis in two distinct ways:
either in its strict sense (as the natural day), or in a less strict sense as
signifying a certain space of time. The PBC answered on
Moreover, in 1993, on
the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo’s encyclical, the PBC issued a
document entitled "Biblical Interpretation in the Church". This
document included a long introduction by Pope John Paul II, who praised the
encyclicals of Pope Leo (1893) and of Pope Pius XII (1943) on the Catholic
approach to Bible study. The 1993 PBC document pointed out that a
fundamentalist approach to the Bible is NOT adequate as far as the Catholic
Church is concerned.
Why is a fundamentalist
approach inadequate? Pope John Paul spells out the reason in his Introduction.
He points out that although God certainly uses human language inerrantly (as
Pope Pius XII reiterated in no uncertain terms in his 1943 encyclical), God
also uses the language in ways that are flexible.
God is not locked in to using human language in one and only one way. Because
of this flexibility, the words of scripture are sometimes hard to understand.
This is not a new teaching by the current Pope: in fact, the very first Pope
made the identical point in one of his inspired writings (2 Pet. 3, 16). In
order to find the “truth of scripture”, the words of scripture need to be
interpreted properly. In most cases, the interpretation is obvious. But there
are certain cases where the interpretation is in dispute. In such cases, it is
the task of the Magisterium to provide the correct interpretation. An
individual’s interpretation, even if supported by the Fathers of the Church,
may be in error.
In particular, the
interpretation of genealogies in Genesis in such a way as to arrive at an age
of only a few thousand years for the Earth, is NOT part of magisterial teaching
at the present time.
Therefore, when I teach
my children that the Earth is between 4 and 5 billion years old, I am not
contradicting any currently defined doctrine of the Catholic Church. Nor am I
giving credence to Darwinian evolution. On the contrary, I am teaching my
children to respect what Pope Leo said in 1893: scientists really do have
access to truths about the world that
God created.