Slumming with the Creationists

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A display at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky

This week I wrote two posts where I bashed what I called the modern synthesis between the theory of evolution - including its accompanying claims about the 4.5 billion year age of the earth - and orthodox Catholicism.

However, nowhere in the posts did I call myself a "creationist," endorse "creationism" or, for that matter, even use the terms.

For the record, I wouldn't currently call myself a creationist. I'd call myself a Catholic who is also a skeptic. And, yes, that means, among other things, that I'm quite skeptical of the creationist view that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, that dinosaurs probably lived alongside men and all the rest. To believe that, you would have to discard or at least radically reinterpret much of what the overwhelming majority of scientists believe about geology, astronomy and chemistry. Specifically, certain core assumptions underlying radiometric and radiocarbon dating as well as the consistency of the speed of light would have to be thrown out.

On the other hand, I think the standard theory of evolution is preposterous - from a scientific standpoint more than anything else - while the modified Catholic version of it - some type of theistic evolution or "intelligent design" ends up being very difficult to square with Catholic doctrine. Specifically, I do not see how animal suffering and ancient mass extinctions can be comfortably accommodated with a pre-Fall creation that was "very good" or how common descent from pre-human ancestors can be made consistent with a literal Adam and Eve. For the latter point, I stand by my claim that no Catholic or theistic proponent of intelligent design has ever even tried to outline precisely what it would mean for Adam to have been what I called a "near ape man." Indeed, Catholic and Christian quasi-evolution or design proponents are very uncomfortable even talking about the subject. That tells you something in and of itself.

So we're back to having a certain sympathy, albeit for mostly negative reasons, for creationism - a theory almost exclusively associated with 20th century American Protestant evangelicals, although its current chief proponent is an Australian transplant.

You might call my current position slumming with the creationists.

So what do I believe? If you could take a video camera back in time 6,000 years (the approximate point many creationists believe God created the world) or 4.5 billion years (if there was such a time) what would it record? I don't know. I'd very much like to know, but I don't. Quite honestly, I think all the alternatives are problematic for a believing Catholic.

That's not a magisterial opinion, obviously. It's my opinion.

And in this - the problematic nature of all the alternatives - I think intelligent and honest atheists such as Richard Dawkins have a sort of advantage.

How do you combat that? From a sociological point of view, you can't, or at least you can't very easily or quickly. Atheism or secularism are now the dominant intellectual and cultural paradigms, and there's no reason to believe this will change in the near future, whatever brilliant empirical or logical considerations any particular Christian can come up with in any particular intellectual battleground.

But here's what you don't do: You don't sweep the problems under the rug or ignore them because they might be difficult or embarrassing or whatever in favor of "I (as a Catholic) believe what I believe and that makes me feel very spiritual inside, etc., etc." Cue violins.

Or at least that's never been how I viewed my own Catholic faith.

Personally, I think much of the hostility to creationism among contemporary Catholics, even conservative or traditionalist Catholics, is because of its current association with evangelical Protestants. They're Protestants, after all. Plus, they're sort of lower class, have bad taste in clothes and often speak with a twang.

That the identification of creationism with Protestanism is almost entirely a 20th and 21st century phenomenon, that some version of "creationism," though it didn't go by that name, was the view of virtually all Catholics, including the Church Fathers and Doctors, and all the saints and popes up until the late 19th or early 20th centuries is something that many contemporary Catholics seem to be unaware of.

That doesn't make it true, of course. But at the least it should give faithful contemporary Catholic pause. The intellectual and theological wreck of Modernism with its first culmination in Vatican II created a sort of vacuum that evangelical Protestants in some part filled. That they filled it with their energy at evangelization is a certainty. They also filled it with their intellectual drive, which is ironic since so many would sneer at their "anti-intellectualism."

In some ways I feel more comfortable in a Moody Bible bookstore than in the basement annex of St. Peters in the Loop with its America magazine displays and row upon row of hippy-priest Paulist Press paperbacks.

If you have a problem with the fact that in recent times Christian evangelicals have done much of the work that Catholics should have been doing, don't blame them.

Protestant evangelical or Vatican II Catholic? Of course it's best to be neither.

But I'm not above slumming.