Creation vs. Evolution: Ineptitude of Introibo on Anthropology · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: What Are False Visions?
What Pope Pius XII actually taught:
[citation of §§ 36—37 of Humani Generis]
The pope did not rule out the creation of the body through evolution and he upheld the necessity of the belief in the immediate creation of the soul by God, as well as the necessary rejection of polygenism.
Introibo Ad Altare Dei: Human Origin
Posted by Introibo Ad Altare Dei at 4:26 AM Monday, January 29, 2024
https://introiboadaltaredei2.blogspot.com/2024/01/human-origin.html
Introibo seems to not have an inkling that the actual postulate (rejection of polygenism) is at variance with the temporary licence (non-ruling out of creation of Adam's body through Evolution).
There are also other actual postulates of theology, not mentioned here by Pius XII, which are also at variance with an evolutionary origin of Adam's body.
If Adam's body was born of two bodies similar to his own, without the human mind, it stands to reason, they had no human language.
Already a major paradox of having a human body built for a human language, without having the human language, but it would be an even greater one to have a human language without having a human mind created in the likeness of God. If I can say "I had coffee and a jumble for breakfast this morning, coffee only yesterday morning, and may have yoghurt tomorrow morning" the fact that I can speak of foods that I do not have before my eyes and also do not crave to immediately eat, clearly means, I am created in the image of God. I am not limited to hic et nunc.
This being so, if "Adam's progenitors" had human bodies but no human souls, they had no possibility of teaching Adam any human language, and Adam would have been a feral child, before he had sinned, hence this would deny the goodness of God.
But back to rejection of polygenism. The Protestant William Lane Craig will accept Evolutionary "science" and he will reject polygenism. As a result he will put Adam 750 000 years back in time, before Homo sapiens and Neanderthals converged. The rejection of polygenism is fine, the acceptance that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens both descend from Adam is fine, but the 750 000 years are atrocious on two accounts.
- They make Genesis 3 inaccessible by historic transmission from Adam to Moses, who clearly didn't live even 10 000 years ago or even 5000 years ago, just 3500 years ago. This cannot be palliated by making it instead a prophetic certitude, since the supposed prophecy would have been inaccurate in Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies, and also since no tradition claims Moses got more than the six days account by prophecy.
- We are obliged to accept that God not just promised the Saviour to Adam and Eve, but also kept up mankind, up to a narrowing down to the Hebrew nation, in the knowledge of himself and in the hope of the Saviour. However, as modern "science" sees the conditions of the supposed 750 000 years, they lacked writing, the living conditions induced frequent despair about keeping offspring alive, hence vile practises of "family planning" not even barring at setting out of children.
So, some have tried to palliate the former objection by pretending that genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11 are not meant as even tolerably accurate genealogies anyway. An Anglican heretic named Archibald Sayce had come to this conviction as an Orientalist and was cited by Fr. Rudolph Bandas, who came to accept Vatican II.
Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Archibald Sayce was no Church Father, Reverend Bandas was not Pope
https://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2023/09/archibald-sayce-was-no-church-father.html
So, yes, the genealogies would still be highly inaccurate, at variance with even minimal concepts of Biblical inerrancy, if Adam lived 750 000 years ago. But no one can dispute that a tradition going via oral transmission for 750 000 years (in non-civilised conditions which involve frequent orphaning and relocation of people) is the equivalent of a telephone game. Very far from how Fr. George Leo Haydock conceived how Moses knew Genesis 3:
Concerning the transactions of these early times, parents would no doubt be careful to instruct their children, by word of mouth, before any of the Scriptures were written; and Moses might derive much information from the same source, as a very few persons formed the chain of tradition, when they lived so many hundred years. Adam would converse with Mathusalem, who knew Sem, as the latter lived in the days of Abram. Isaac, Joseph, and Amram, the father of Moses, were contemporaries: so that seven persons might keep up the memory of things which had happened 2500 years before. But to entitle these accounts to absolute authority, the inspiration of God intervenes; and thus we are convinced, that no word of sacred writers can be questioned. H.
If in order to palliate this deficiency, you wish to take Adam into the times that archaeologists these days pretend were "7000 years ago", like the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, you have exchanged the preservation of faith problem and the preservation of hope problem for polygenism, which you claim you wanted to avoid. Jimmy Akin and Gavin Ortlund, a Vatican II-adherent and a Protestant, don't claim to an absolute will to avoid it. On Jimmy's view, Pius XII used regulatory language, therefore the regulation could be changed by subsequent magisterium. And Gavin obviously has no will to adher to Pius XII in the first place.
But Introibo cites two pre-Conciliar theologians.
Adolphe Tanquerey's book came in English only in 1959. After Pius XII was dead, under a man Introibo regards as a certain and I as at least a probable antipope. The French original came in 1924, in Paris, at a time when also Pierre Theilhard de Chardin was active there, and after 1920 in which the Jesuit Mangenot had invented the framework theory, as opposed to the more literal views of Genesis 1's creation days, namely literal days, day age, gap theory. He also offered a cogent reason to reject gap theory, while holding to deep time, and day age, as it had previously been understood (by the Sulpician Father Vigouroux, when he proposed it in the Paris region in 1880's and when he was appointed Papal judge in 1909).
Sylvester Joseph Hunter was the son of the Unitarian (i e Arian!) Minister Joseph Hunter. This deserves to be taken into account, since Introibo fallaciously pretends that the Kolbe Center and Robert Sungenis are reading the Bible in a Protestant way:
I have noticed a trend among Traditionalists (especially Gen Z) to take positions that seem traditional and Catholic, but are actually Protestant. ... Many Traditionalist Catholics (and "conservative" Vatican II sect members) read the Bible literally in every verse, like a Fundamentalist Protestant.
So, Fundamentalist Protestants became worse theologians than Teilhard de Chardin or than Arians ... exactly when?
Protestant became a synonym of error when? Oh, Trent? Or Vatican Council of 1869 to 1870? Well, none of these condemned a Fundamentalist reading of Genesis 1 through 11. None. When a Catholic used to say "we must beware of Protestant error" it used to mean:
- specific errors condemned in the documents of the Church, I'm going through the 130 anathemas of Trent;
- errors about the origin of the Catholic Church (like those of Hislop);
- pretending the papacy is the Antichrist;
- moral errors, like denying the difference of venial and mortal;
- or tipsy and drunk, pilfering and stealing.
In other words, there used to be a clear and solid and long standing Catholic truth that the Protestant error was erring against. But everything that Introibo has appealed to (in my skimming through at least) as against the supposed "Protestantism" is vague, recent, ambiguous. It makes allowance for a science that does not exist, and blocks an evolutionary science that does exist, if deep time is accepted.
He appeals to preconciliar approvals of Noort, Gerardus Cornelis van, 1861-1946, from the Netherlands, one of the countries that made a power grab at the beginning og Vatican II, and of Tanqueray, from France, another of them. Both of which are infamous for modernism, way beyond US or Swedish or Polish Novus Ordos, after the Council. For Dalmau and Sagues he gives a more Catholic country, Spain, but from the year when Pius XII died:
Sacrae theologiae summa. Iiuxta constitutionem apostolicam "Deus scientiarum Dominus" II: De Deo uno et trino. De Deo creante et elevante. De peccatis.
Iosepho M. Dalmau und Iosepho F. Sagues. Madrid, 1958
https://www.abebooks.fr/Sacrae-theologiae-summa-Iiuxta-constitutionem-apostolicam/31663395732/bd
If there was a previous edition from 1955, this was anyway subservient in a bad way to Humani Generis. Pius XII did, verbatim, not require to regard this as an open question. The only way Biblicists could weigh in on the question from an anti-Evolutionary perspective, as foreseen by his actual wording in paragraphs 36 and 37, would be to state there are Biblical reasons why an Evolutionary origin of Adam's body is illicit. It was wrong to first shoehorn his very unusual wording "the magisterium does not forbid" and "given the current state of knowledge" into first a "definition" that the question was from all sides (rather than from a simple disciplinary side) open, and then later, under Wojtyla, that it was a kind of "definition" that the Evolutionary origin was licit. However, this was so highly unusual, like as if Pius XII was in bad faith, knowing the duplicity of his position, or unaware that this could create a harmful polemic that the Pope had shown some concern to avoid, that they went before his actual wording and declared as a first principle, what is simply a lie, that the question was open.
Every one of these theologians he cites wants to make room for science. None of them was a scientific anything beyond mediocrity.
- Sylvester Joseph Hunter wanted to adapt Stonyhurst to the scientific requirements in London at the time.
- Adolphe Tanquerey was a moralist, canon lawyer, spirituality writer.
- Gerardus van Noort is credited with being a precursor of getting human sciences away from St. Thomas Aquinas. He was also active in Catholic scientific clubs of Amsterdam in 1929.
- Joseph Dalmau was a Christologist.
- Joseph F. Sagüés wrote on theology of creation, but I could not find books on actual scientific subjects.
Like Pius XII, each of them wanted to make room for science, none of them studied it. The one great theologian who was also a great scientist and pretty certainly believed that Adam's body was the result of Evolution was a famous heterodox, a byname of post-conciliar heterodoxy, Fr. Teilhard de Chardin.
The questions back in 1909 were put on a basis of strawmanning the anti-evolutionist position, as if making the Bible a science manual. Creationists of today will say, "no, the Bible is not a manual of science, but it is, in historic books, and that includes Genesis 1 through 11, accurate history."
The Kolbe Center would have us believe that the approved theologians taught open heresy in their theological manuals, written under the careful watch of the Magisterium, and they were never censured or corrected in any way.
Given the amount of theological output, the diversity of pre-conciliar orthodoxy in different episcopacies, the known outcome in what seems to many the prophecied Great Apostasy, obviously some theological manuals were writing some type of heterodox, and obviously the Magisterium in the 1950's was on some topic asleep. Perhaps the disorders did not come from liturgy, where Pius XII had been watchful, but rather from ths question, where Introibo shows him as lax.
From the comments section, I'll cite how Introibo and one of his readers basically dogmatise the harmony of faith and science, despite Introibo assuring that one is "certainly" allowed to believe Geocentrism and Young Earth Creationism. What he means is, somewhat Russian style, you are allowed to believe it on a devotional basis, but you are not allowed to argue it rationally. But here is what he dogmatises:
- Simon
- January 29, 2024 at 5:50 AM
- Thanks for clearing things up ! It should be an automatic reflex to ask what the Church teaches on a specific question, because she is our Mother and Teacher. By separating themselves from the Church, Protestants make the mistake of thinking they can understand Revelation on their own, and we see that some Catholics make the same mistake. And we can also better respond to those who oppose science to faith, because we see that the two are not opposed.
- Introibo Ad Altare Dei
- January 29, 2024 at 7:28 PM
- Simon,
Absolutely! The One True Church has nothing to fear from science, because both science and theology are sources of knowledge that come to us from the One True God.
God Bless,
---Introibo
So, Evolutionary origin of man, Heliocentrism, Deep Time, all of this is science, and the true Church has nothing to fear fom it, because it comes from the one true God.
But direct creation of Adam, Geocentrism, Biblical chronology, all of this is something one may believe if one choses, but must not dogmatise, hence, must not argue.
Unless one's of equal or superior authority to the theologians he has cited, his orientation reminds me of a line from "Sweet about me" ....
0:40 ♪ Tell ya something that I've found ♪
0:43 ♪ That the world's a better place ♪
0:45 ♪ When it's upside down, boy ♪
The remark may be more apt about the "world" for which Jesus did not pray, than about the world of theology, where Introibo and Simon are applying their upside down ... and their attitude to actual concrete persons who actually do chose direct creation of Adam, Geocentrism, Biblical chronology, is not the kind of sadism depicted by Gabriella Cilmi, but the kind of things that make people describe police as sadistic. Which is a worse thing. Since obviously, the guys who dispute the advisedness or ultimate licitness of Evolutionary origin of Adam (as well as the other questions) are not the Pope. Unless, of course Michael I was and Michael II is precisely that.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Catherine of Siena
30.IV.2024
Sanctae Catharinae Senensis Virginis, ex tertio Ordine sancti Dominici, quae ad caelestem Sponsum transivit pridie hujus diei.
PS, just in case you didn't get it, I do count Pius XII as one of the scientifically inept theologians, often canonists, who wanted to make room for a "science" that they did not understand the implications of. Nor the provedness of. If he kept the faith, if he did not lose papacy, it is because he did not know what he was saying./HGL
