A long time ago, when scientists first began to understand nature, they classified all living things into two basic kingdoms: plant and animal. I don’t know what they were thinking: humans have always presumed that there are spiritual beings in existence, what they thought were gods as well as evil spirits. God’s revelation confirms the existence of spiritual beings, but whether He revealed this or not, it is evident that all human cultures were always aware of spiritual beings. Many cultures presumed the sun and planets were gods.
The Proper Study of Mankind is Man
What I call Darwin’s “fatal flaw” in his Origin of the Species theory is that he did not take into consideration every form of life. Darwin considered man solely from man’s physical nature, ignoring the spiritual side of man. God revealed that He created man in His own image and likeness, giving each human being a spiritual soul. Ignoring the spiritual side of man has led to gross errors in understanding the very nature God has bestowed upon human beings. The Theory of Evolution cannot explain the presence of spiritual beings or why man has always searched for God.
It’s not just primitive cultures that searched for God; very sophisticated cultures also searched for God. Some went to extremes in trying to connect with God. Egyptian pharaohs had their subjects work for years building gigantic tombs for the king’s safe journey into the next life. The Greeks and Romans developed a detailed culture worshiping planets as gods and built massive temples in which to worship the gods. So did the Chinese, as well as the Aztecs and Mayans whose massive pyramids are found all over Central America. Even the ancestors of the English built Stonehenge.
Why does a theory claiming to explain the “origin” of man ignore this? This flawed theory can never fully explain man because it doesn’t take into account all forms of life in the world. Evolutionists recognize only two forms of biological life, but there are actually four distinct forms that inhabit or act on planet earth: pure spirits like angels and devils, plants, animals, and a separate life form that is both physical and spiritual: man. Nor should we overlook God who is purely spiritual. Man can be understood only within the kingdom of physical/spiritual life.
The Vast Difference between Men and Animals
Plants and animals have different capacities. Plants are alive, they respond to stimuli, but they have little capacity to move themselves from one place to another (exclusively through incremental growth). Animals, on the other hand, can move their position through their own power.
Humans not only have the ability to move themselves from one place to another, they are able to build machines that can fly them 238,900 miles into space so they can walk on the moon. Humans have developed beautiful music, profound literature and a detailed understanding of science. No animal has ever come close to doing anything like that. There is something vastly different in the makeup of human beings, and the difference is that humans have spiritual souls.
God’s revelation explains that He wants humans to believe His revelation, to love Him and especially to obey Him. God does not expect that of any animal. Scientists would be on much firmer ground if they paid attention to God’s revelation when they spin their theories.
We should also notice that there is a lot more chaos and disorder in human conduct than there is in animal conduct. That is because humans have free will. They are sovereign persons. That gives them the dignity of knowing that they freely choose to love and obey God when it is perfectly obvious that they could have chosen against God. Their willingness to obey God makes them resemble God. No animal has the ability to do that. Animals have no choice but to follow their instincts. But if humans refuse to obey God, they are fully capable of introducing grave disorder into God’s world.
The Proper Life for Humans
God wants humans to participate in His life. He is God. He knows everything and is fully capable of organizing everything to work out best for every human, every plant, animal and inanimate thing in His physical universe. He wants us to get to know Him intimately. One way He did that was to give them some role in the management of His universe. He loves everything He created, but He loves humans more because He gives them – that means each one of us – the ability to freely love Him in return. Animals, plants and the inanimate world cannot do that.
If there were no human beings, I believe God’s physical universe would be very boring to Him. It would be like a giant set of building blocks, nothing more than a toy. You are the crowning glory in God’s physical universe because you can appreciate who He is and love Him in return. Without you in His physical universe displaying your love for Him, He probably would not have bothered to create the physical universe.
Spiritual Natures vs. Darwin
Physical nature is composed of matter: atoms, chemicals, flesh and bones. Spiritual nature is not composed of matter. There are no atoms or chemicals comprising spiritual beings, no bones that become fossilized for human examination, nothing of that sort. Spiritual beings are immaterial. They were created all at the same instant before the physical universe was created.
If one wants to completely understand human nature, one must approach human nature through all avenues of study. There are fields of human study devoted entirely to acquire knowledge of spiritual beings. Their development was started by the Greeks: philosophy, metaphysics and ethics. Theology and the Magisterium of the Church teach us about angels.
The problem with evolution is the way our culture presents this theory to the general public. Some of those who control our culture try to use evolution to destroy the spiritual backbone of man by destroying faith in God’s revelation through Scripture. If they succeed in destroying man’s faith in Scripture, particularly its explanation of the origins of man in Genesis, mankind will quickly become a mere shell of what it once was. Human beings who consider themselves as purely animal and conduct themselves as highly evolved animals, endanger their eternal souls.
No matter how one looks at it, there is a war going on between those who do not want to consider the possibility that God exists and those who are certain that God does exist. Science does not want to debate the question because that matter concerns religion not science. But whether God exists or not, the world is what it is, and humans have always shown interest in connecting with God. Scientific theories should take that into account when evaluating the totality of man.
Science should expound the truth, but science is still in the process of discovering the truth. God, on the other hand, knows and is the truth. That’s why I favor God’s revelation over the theories of science. The physical world displays what is true, but it is hard to recognize it. It is also true that man displays a very strong interest in what is spiritual, but science has yet to recognize it and understand it.
Humans Are Improperly Categorized
Humans should be classified in a separate kingdom. No matter what pre-existing material they came from, the Creator took special steps in creating both Adam and Eve. Scripture writes that God took clay and built it into Adam’s body and built Eve’s body from one of Adam’s ribs. Scientists argue that God didn’t use clay; He must have used pre-existing primates, allowing those primates to evolve into Adam and Eve.
They can pursue their scientific theories, but they should understand that, no matter how He did it, God revealed that He created the original pair of human beings special and that He endows each human descendant conceived through that original pair with a spiritual soul similar to the spiritual nature of an angel.
God has the power to create anything from nothing. He merely has to think, “Let it be so!” And there it is! God doesn’t need hands like we do. If He tried to explain how He created something, the limited human intelligence would not be able to comprehend it. For that reason He resorted to mythical explanations in revealing His creation of the world and the masterpiece of all creation: man.
Our Culture’s Attitude toward Creation
Career scientists try to be matter-of-fact in what they do and the ways in which they describe their work. I have no problem with that. The problem is in the way our culture twists their work and uses it to discredit creationism and even the existence of God. It’s our culture, rather than scientific papers, that has the attention of the minds and hearts of the American people. Our culture floods them with misconceptions about what scientists have learned.
Scientists are on the front lines of revealing the world’s secrets. The real truth is buried within those secrets. Sometimes the process of discovering those truths is very dangerous. The most obvious example of this is Madame Marie Curie and her husband Pierre who together discovered the radioactive nature of the element radium. They spent most of their lives extracting radium from minerals and testing the properties of radium. Unknown to them, the element’s radioactivity causes severe health issues. Both of them fell victim to it.
Madame Curie fell victim to aplastic anemia in an asylum at age 66 due to her long-term exposure to radiation. She died in 1934, but her body, when exhumed for reburial in 1995, was still radioactive and will remain radioactive for another 1500 years.
I feel compassion for Madame Curie. It’s a shame that someone who worked so hard to discover the truth should suffer and die this way. If non-believers are correct that there is no God and no afterlife, her suffering and death is tragic indeed. But God revealed that suffering and death is part of every human life, a sad reality that is due to our first parents who defied God’s command and disgraced our common flesh through their sin.
The Real Mission in Human Life
The woman’s seed, Jesus, has reversed Adam and Eve’s curse through our same nature and flesh. He made recompense to the Father through His willingness to die rather than disobey God, thereby conquering the power of Original Sin in human flesh. He will redeem each one of us and restore the immortality of our bodies and souls like God wanted for us in the beginning. And those humans who love Him and obey Him will join Him in heaven possessing absolutely pure and pristine bodies and souls.
So, keep the faith and expect an incredibly better life in the next world.
8 thoughts on “Darwinism’s Fatal Flaw”
Hello Donald,
I don’t agree with “endless arguments of which early hominoids had souls and which ones did not has little meaning and even less usefulness.” This is not the idea that any scientist has. Nobody spends their entire life studying science presuming that their findings little meaning and less usefulness.
They expect to discover the truth about what everybody can observe in the world. That truth is not dependent on human affirmation. It is dependent on what is factual, what is true in the mind of the creator, if one believes in God. And for those who don’t believe in God. It has to conform to the reality of the world. It is never dependent on human affirmation. It is always something factual that is observed to be operating in the world.
If this were not so, very little of the science previous scientists worked so hard to organize and expound to others would not work. Space voyages would always miss their targets, computers would never work, medicine would be quackery, etc. etc. You are very wrong in your philosophical understanding of science.
Science is the study of the real world, an attempt to understand how the world works and to find ways of harnessing the power of the world to serve humanity. Men who have succeeded in this are rightly honored for their accomplishments, and I applaud them as well.
But the working of science is difficult to grasp. Humans work very hard sometimes for centuries before they finally recognize that what is so obvious to the eyes is not as the things really are. We can all see that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. It took hundreds of years before science convinced people that the sun does not move, it is the Earth that rotates. And even though we do not feel the Earth moving, the ground we stand on moves at a speed of several hundred miles to one thousand miles per hour depending on where we are standing on the surface.
When man finally realized what is really happening in the world, theories are updated so as to conform to the truth. I think the same is going to happen with the scientific understanding of man. Carl Linnaeus classified man as Homo sapiens in 1758. Sapiens was the only species placed within the genus Homo. Charles Darwin considered man as a highly evolved animal. He could not observe, or he ignored, the spiritual nature of man. When apes with similar bone structures and similar DNA were discovered in Darwin’s time, he chose to classify them within the same genra thereby setting the precedent for classifying many apes as “human.”
I think it is high time that anthropologists reconsider their appraisal of humans as highly evolved apes, since the nature of humans is so obviously elevated above any ape or any animal. Humans have a spiritual side which should be obvious to everybody. Evolutionists think they are eventually going to find the missing link. I think is much more likely that future anthropologists will reject Darwinism and formulate a better theory that will explain all the observed behavior of humans.
And I think the situation about Cro-Magnon man is already settled. Scientists recognize Cro-Magnon man as fully human, but they teach that Cro-Magnon man lived 48,000 to 15,000 years ago and seem to be extinct now. My only concern is, if Cro-Magnon men are descendant from Adam and Eve, they should have developed culture to a much more “human” level than the fossil record shows.
I hope this clarifies my thinking. Thank you for reading my article and commenting on it.
Hello John,
I didn’t expect you to have further arguments after my article “Darwinism’s Fatal Flaw”, but here we go again. This time I want to assure you that I did offer a valid rebuttal against Darwin.
We argued about many claims of Darwinism, but my first objection was against Dr. Robert’s book claiming that we humans have a very long line of ape ancestors going back thousands of years through various species within the genus Homo and other genra of proto humans and apes. That was my basic objection.
I cited Genesis to refute that lineage because Genesis clearly revealed that God created man special by breathing His breath into the nostrils of Adam and creating Eve out of a rib of Adam.
I was surprise to have so many readers actually chastise me for believing Genesis. I was also accused of arguing against the Magisterium of the Catholic Church
So I wrote a second article making the same complaints against Darwinism, but this time I offered proof that I did not contradict the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. I got comments on my second article still critical of me being a biblical literalist, but some of my critics of my first article offer confirmation that the Magisterium does insists that God formed human beings through monogenesis and not through polygenesis and that all human beings were descendants of Adam and Eve.
I want to reiterate that everything I surmised from reading Genesis is in fact supported by the Magisterium. In my third article I argued that Darwinism considers man solely through his physical make up, his bones and DNA found in fossilized bones, but man has a spiritual nature also, which is more important than his physical nature. Ignoring his spiritual nature leads to gross misunderstanding what human beings truly are.
I don’t know how you understand Scripture, but I am convinced that Scripture is the revealed word of God explaining who he is and what he has done. It is not wise to contradict God. Your comment today still cites evidence that interbreeding with other organisms has only multiplied since Darwin drew his conclusions. This is contrary to the Magisterium’s position of monogenesis. Sure, prehistoric species of apes interbred, but humans did not interbreed.
Myshkyn and Josephine both made a comment to this article. Myshkyn cited Fr. Nicanor Austriaco of http://www.thomisticevolution.com. I didn’t know that a Catholic priest was also an anthropologist. You should read his arguments. They are very refreshing compared to the atheist arguments we hear from some very prominent anthropologists.
Fr. Austriaco also mentioned humans appearing out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago and migrating into Europe. That was a red flag popping up in my mind again. Human beings are what God created special. They did not originate in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. They originate in Palestine several thousand years ago.
So I decided to investigate where science got the idea that humans originated in Africa. First I had to establish that “humans” are the species that God created the species that Carl Linnaeus named Homo sapiens in 1758. They were the only species Linnaeus placed in the genus Homo. That made Homo sapiens the scientific name for human beings.
It wasn’t until the latter half of the nineteenth century that other species were also grouped within the genus Homo. Charles Darwin himself made a defining position on whether H. sapiens should share the genus Homo with other primates. Here it is:
Whether primeval man, when he possessed very few arts of the rudest kind, and when his power of language was extremely imperfect, would have deserved to be called man, must depend on the definition which we employ. In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists it would be impossible to fix on any definite point when the term ‘man’ ought to be used.—Charles Darwin [2, p. 235]The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex, published 1871.
So, it appears that Charles Darwin, on his own authority, made the decision to consider humans simply as highly evolved apes in 1871 when anthropology was still in its infancy. I think it is high time that modern research begin to question Darwin’s old fashioned ideas before modern science finally stumbles on the truth about the world we all live in.
After all, the world is not a fantasy conjured up by scientists. The world is absolutely real and scientific opinions about it must conform to the reality of what it really is, or scientific opinion itself will fail as it has happened so many times in the past when old theories were replaced by new and more accurate theories.
It is challenging discussing these issues with you. It helps me get my own mind in order. You are probably a young man. I think you will live long enough to see science finally wake up to the fact that God created man special. Actually the whole of religion is based on the fact that man is not an animal. Man is special, and God wants a special relationship with man that animals are unable to comply with.
My advice to you and all who read my articles is this: you cannot go wrong if you believe Genesis, after all it is the inspired word of God. And you have the Magisterium of the Church to back Genesis up if you have doubts.
This might be an instance of applying an amalgam Of Oakum’s razor and Sherlock Holmes theory of probability. Endless arguments of which early hominids had souls accomplish very little even if the answer were known. It is simply another matter for theologians and anthropologists to argue about without ever coming to conclusion that would have little meaning and even less usefulness. It is pretty well settle that cro-magnan man, the earliest of homo sapiens had the requisite characteristics that would indicate possession of a soul. Whether earlier beings also were ensouled might be interesting but hardly of relevance today. As for the atheists, they appear to all believe in an eternal creation with no cause which reders their opinions even more useless.
Darwin didn’t attempt to study the metaphysical world because he was observing the physical world. You can order the metaphysical any way you want, but from a scientific perspective, evidence of our physical origins and interbreeding with other hominids has only multiplied since Darwin drew his conclusions. He was remarkably accurate and prophetic of the evidence that followed him. However anyone wants to organize the metaphysical around the physical, that in no way invalidates the reality of our physical existence, where it came from and how it evolved. There is no “fatal flaw” in Darwin’s work.
Hello Josephine,
Thank you for your comment on my article. Sorry for the delay in responding. I was researching my response to a similar comment on this same article. Now that I have done my research, I think I can respond to both comments.
I was confused myself when I first heard that humans evolved in Africa two hundred thousand years ago and migrated into Europe and interbred with Neanderthal man, etc. etc. I always thought humans were us, a unique species created by God. A quick answer is that anthropologists who don’t believe in God controlled the classification of animals. They are convinced that everything about animals is physical. There is nothing spiritual in animals or in man. Some of them don’t even believe in God. I think they are wrong.
The confusion began in earnest when anthropologists began discovering bones and DNA of primates that seemed very similar to human bones and DNA. They did not believe in God, or that God is the creator, so they classified these new discoveries within the genus Homo implying that they are human. Anthropologists are still discussing this, but classifications depends on how big a brain can fit within the skull or other physical characteristic of the fossils because there is no residue of the spiritual nature of anything left behind that can be examined by scientists. Here is a link to an article discussing why was erectus moved from the genus Australopithecus to Homo: “From Australopithecus to Homo: the translation that wasn’t” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.0248
I think you are correct when you point out that many animals use primitive tools, but that does not indicate they are rational with free will. Animals are guided by their God-given instincts. Their instincts make good sense because God is sensible. But the animal is not the rational thought behind the instinct. God is.
Monkeys make tools, sea otters use stones against which to smash clam shells. Spiders make intricately woven webs, birds dance seductive dances during mating season, bees construct hexagonal honeycombed chambers to store honey in. How do bees know that if they provide enough air to evaporate the water, they will get honey? How do they know which plants to collect nectar from?
How are termites able to construct huge nests that have internal ductwork that provides air conditioning within the nest? How do carrier pigeons, after circling the sky a few times, know the exact direction of home? Or salmon, after spending four or five years in the ocean, find their way back to the very stream they were hatched in? This list goes on and on.
Almost all animals emit instinctive sounds that every member of its species understands? Only humans have developed spoken language that is understood by the sounds uttered. One tribe’s language cannot be understood by another tribe unless the second tribe studies it. In contrast to language, there are instinctive sounds and gestures that all humans instinctively use, which can be understood by all humans whether they speak the same language or not. Animals communicate by instinctive sounds and motions, but only humans communicate by language.
Birds instinctively build nests that are the unique for each species. One can recognize which species built the nest by the design of the nest. Birds fly in an instinctive way so that a distant observer can identify the species by the flight pattern.
The problem with human beings for scientists is that humans have both a spiritual nature (similar to angels and devils) and animals do not have that kind of spiritual nature. God’s revelation revealed that God breathed a spirit into Adam and the Church teaches that God creates a spiritual soul that contains that spirit for every human being conceived within its mother’s womb. That spirit makes each human a sovereign person, having free will and made in the image of God.
Science is used to study the physical world because on can see the physical objects and experiment with them and learn about them through experience. I don’t know of a science that studies and experiments with spiritual objects. Those objects are studied through philosophy, metaphysics, theology and revealed religion.
But the world is what it is, and if one wants to know the absolute truth, one must study objects from more than one perspective. I hate to appear to leave you in a lurch like this, but if science only wants to look at humans from their physical aspect, it will never arrive at a true understanding of man.
If you are convinced that God did create man, then I would advise you to pay attention to what God revealed. God revealed that he made humans special. You are special. I would advise you to learn to love God and obey him, like he commands all us humans to do. When God returns to claim his own, you wouldn’t want to be left behind.
Hope this helps.
Hello Myshkyn,
Thank you for your comment. I never heard of Fr. Austriaco. I spent a several days reading the website http://www.thomisticevolution.com, especially their papers on Disputed Questions. I am very impressed! I didn’t realize that a qualified microbiologist who is also a Catholic priest wrote extensively on a Catholic understanding of evolution. It is so refreshing to hear a Catholic explanation of the discoveries undertaken by anthropologists and not encounter the bias of the secular press trying to undermine faith in Genesis. Thank you for bringing him to my attention. Being aware of him makes a big difference to me.
In surfing The Internet I saw that Fr. Michael Chabercko O.P. criticized Fr. Austriaco’s
opinions on what constitutes a substantial change verses accidental change. So, I surfed The Internet again to pick up information about Fr. Chabercko and Catholic thinking on whether Adam was created immortal to begin with.
Even though I am very happy that you pointed out a Catholic website open to the findings of biologists, I saw some troubling statements Fr. Austriaco made in his papers. It concerns his statement in The Historicity of Adam and Eve / Part III: Scientific Data, which states:
“Today there is robust evidence from both the fossil record and genetic data that anatomically modern humans—creatures that looked like us—evolved in Africa between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago, and they migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago.”
I personally understand “human” to be the name of the human race God created special. Describing non-human ancestors as “anatomically modern humans that evolved in Africa between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago” certainly confuses the issue. Those individuals that humans arose from are not human in the same way Adam and Eve are. In the first place Adam and Eve have a spiritual nature as well as a physical nature. They are bonded to God in a special way. They have free will. They are appointed to have dominion over all creatures that move on the Earth. And if they had chosen correctly they would have been granted immortality and would still be alive today.
I think none of these special blessings came through evolution: they are all gifts bestowed by God for a faithful compliance with his will. Adam and Eve disobeyed God when they ate the forbidden fruit, and God posted an angel to prevent access to the tree of life lest Adam and Eve eat that fruit and became immortal. That’s why they and all us descendants did not gain what God offered them. This doesn’t sound like chance evolution to me.
There is something very special about Adam and Eve. God created them special. Our culture should consider them special. Carl Linnaeus certainly did when he classified them within a special genus and species: Homo sapiens (wise man).
Certainly they are substantially different than the hominoids they arose from. So, I agree with Fr. Chabercko on that point. In addition, I think they, at the very least, should be classified as a new species. Linnaeus, in 1758, classified them as Homo sapiens. That was sufficient to distinguish them from all other animals known to man.
Homo sapiens is a definite species that does not interbreed with other species. I know from searching The Internet that there has been no known interbreeding of Homo sapiens with other species. This unique name Homo sapiens is sufficient to not misunderstand human’s unique difference from other animals. But scientists have classified other apes that resemble humans into the same genus starting in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
But where is the corresponding term in English? All I know of is “human’ or human being.” The scientific community using the word “human” to describe the creatures Adam and Eve evolved from is a big cause for the confusion we all have in understanding the work of anthropologists.
Actually, I think humans should be placed in a separate kingdom of life and studied from that perspective. That kingdom should address their spiritual nature combined with their physical nature. It is no secret that many scientists are atheistic. They don’t believe in God or in the existence of any spiritual beings. So, no wonder that they did not do this.
Just considering the occurrence of advanced civilizations: the first civilization appears to be Egyptian about seven thousand years ago followed quickly by Sumerian, Babylonian, Greek, Persian, Indus Valley. Civilizations popped up all over the world, including very isolated places like China, Japan, Mexico, Peru, even Easter Island. Most of them developed writing, astronomical learning, engineering of massive buildings. This certainly looks the works of Homo sapiens as they multiplied and spread all over the world. So, if I were to specify at time when God created the first two humans it would be several thousand years ago, not 200,000 years ago.
I am aware of the works of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Jerry Coyne, Carl Sagan and other scientists arguing against the existence of God and using the findings of evolution to defend their positions. That is a big problem when our culture picks up on it and tries to convince the American people that Genesis is unreliable.
Thanks again for bringing Fr. Austriaco’s to my attention. My best advice to you and all who read my articles is to believe God’s revelation. Try to love God and obey him like he commands all of us to do and expect a wonderful life in the next world where everything God promised to those who love will suddenly be upon us.
Creation is ongoing in that God is existence. In every instant he keeps my essence and all essences in existence. we evolved over time to the point where this material part of us was capable of receiving a spiritual soul, but evolution does not mean that our primordial ancestors weren’t also held in existence by God. And that should not be mistaken for the deism of the intelligent design argument.
Fr Nicanor Austriaco does offer a compelling theory as to when we became human. Consider looking at his work at Thomistic Evolution
Finally. Most of us have Neanderthal DNA. Look it up
We can believe science that there were hominoids living all over the globe, then they evolved into homo habilis, homo erectus, homo sapiens, including species such as homo heidelbergensis or the Neanderthal man that were actually cousins of homo sapiens that came from Africa. The Neanderthal people used primitive stone tools, but does that indicate that they were already rational, with a free will? Apes use sometimes tools to get at food. Does burying their dead indicate that a particular homo erectus tribe believed in an afterlife? No believing scientist has ever explained in a satisfactory manner how and at what point in the human evolutionary chain did the sudden break occur when homo erectus received an immortal soul and a free will. Atheists claim that even rational thinking (cogito, ergo sum), a sense of morality, or free will, was an evolutionary process. How can one have only 60% free will? Or a 75% sense of morality? They of course deny that man has an immortal soul.