This article is from The Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation 

Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,

Pax Christi!

In the ongoing struggle between the God-honoring pro-life movement and the forces of the anti-culture of death, terminology has proven to be a critical factor.  The success of the mass media in conditioning the public to accept the term “pro-choice” rather than “pro-abortion” and the term “anti-abortion” rather than “pro-life” has done great harm to the pro-life cause.  Similarly, in the ongoing debate over the true Catholic doctrine regarding the origins of man and the universe, the term “young-earth creationist” has been used to give the impression that the chronology of the world revealed by God and upheld by every Apostle, Father and Doctor of the Church is an anomaly, relative to the scientific consensus on the age of the universe.

In reality, the true age of the earth is not “young” by any objective standard.  It just is what it is—the true age of the earth, as revealed by the Creator of the universe. Indeed, six to eight thousand years is a very long time by any human standard of time measurement, so we who defend the true age of the world as revealed by God should refuse to accept the false and misleading “young earth creationist” label.  Instead, we should insist on an accurate moniker.  Instead of “YEC,” we should insist on “DRAC”—not “young earth creationist” but “Divinely-Revealed-Age-Catholic”!

The Church Fathers vs. Long Age Evolutionary Mythology

Many of the pagan intellectuals of the patristic era believed in some form of evolution over long ages and heaped scorn on the Church Fathers for placing their trust in a book produced by Hebrew barbarians who lacked the culture of the philosophers of Greece or Rome.  But the Church Fathers held fast to God’s Revelation that He had created all things by fiat at the beginning of time much less than ten thousand years ago.  For every Father and Doctor of the Church, without exception, this was an indisputable fact contained in Divine Revelation and one that had to be maintained in the face of the scorn of the Graeco-Roman intellectual elite.

Indeed, the Church Fathers had to contend regularly with the ideas of pagan philosophers like Lucretius who believed in molecules-to-man evolution through natural selection over long ages of time. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius writes of the wonders that natural selection can accomplish in “a vast time”:

Struck with blows and carried along by their own weight from infinite time until the present, [atoms] have been accustomed to move and meet in all manner of ways, and to try all combinations, whatsoever they could produce by coming together, for this reason it comes to pass that being spread abroad through a vast time, by attempting every sort of combination and motion, at length those come together which . . . become the beginnings of great things, of earth and sea and sky and the generation of living creatures.

Far from making peace with these long ages of “vast time,” the Fathers of the Church rejected these long-age evolutionary phantasies as illogical, absurd, and totally contradictory to God’s revelation to Moses in the sacred history of Genesis. Of these early advocates of long ages of evolution, St. Basil wrote that:

Some had recourse to material principles and attributed the origin of the Universe to the elements of the world. Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules and ducts, form, by their union, the nature of the visible world. Atoms reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths and the most durable bodies only owe their consistency to the strength of their mutual adhesion: a true spider’s web woven by these writers who give to heaven, to earth, and to sea so weak an origin and so little consistency! It is because they knew not how to say “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that was all was given up to chance.

St. Basil added elsewhere that so complete is the information contained in the sacred history of Genesis that those who rightly interpret the Sacred Scriptures can even know “the day on which the universe was made,” a conviction grounded in the certainty that the chronological information in the Sacred history of Genesis was inspired, inerrant, and sufficient to establish a chronology from creation to the later periods of human history. This stands in direct contrast to the theistic evolutionist claim that Genesis was not meant to be a “recounting of historical events.” Indeed, the belief in long ages so dominated the pagan world that the Church Fathers repeatedly rejected this erroneous belief and firmly upheld the literal historical truth of the sacred history of Genesis and of the chronology of the world derived from the genealogies contained in the Pentateuch. Hence, we read in the City of God of St. Augustine:

They [pagans] are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents that profess to give the history of [man as] many thousands of years, though reckoning by the sacred writings we find that not 6,000 years have yet passed.

Julius Africanus observes that not only the Greek and Roman pagan intellectuals embraced these mythical long ages but also the Egyptians before them:

The Egyptians, indeed, with their boastful notions of their own antiquity, have put forth a sort of account of it by the hand of their astrologers in cycles and myriads of years …” [myriad = 10,000].

St. Theophilus of Antioch, occupying the see founded by St. Peter, and reckoning from the chronological data in the Septuagint, at the end of the second century expounded upon:

the number of years from the foundation of the world . . . to condemn the empty labour and trifling of these [pagan] authors, because there have neither been twenty thousand times ten thousand years from the flood to the present time, as Plato said . . . affirming that there had been so many years; nor yet 15 times 10,375 years, as we have already mentioned Apollonius the Egyptian gave out; nor is the world uncreated, nor is there a spontaneous production of all things . . . but, being indeed created, it is also governed by the providence of God, who made all things; and the whole course of time and the years are made plain to those who wish to obey the truth . . . All the years from the creation of the world amount to a total of 5698 years, and the odd months and days…. For if even a chronological error has been committed by us, of, e.g., 50 or 100, or even 200 years, yet not of thousands and tens of thousands, as Plato and Apollonius and other mendacious authors have hitherto written.

In his capacity as tutor of the imperial household after the conversion of Constantine, the Church Father Lactantius lent his voice to the chorus of patristic witnesses to the truth of the Biblical chronology of the world:

Plato and many others of the philosophers, since they were ignorant of the origin of all things, and of that primal period at which the world was made, said that many thousands of ages had passed since this beautiful arrangement of the world was completed.

The Age of the World: No Minor Matter

It is important to realize that the conviction that Genesis was history and that a chronology of the world could be derived from the genealogies and other historical information in Genesis remained strong throughout the patristic era.  An incident in the life of one of the greatest scholars of the patristic age and one of the last of the Church Fathers, Venerable Bede (672-735), illustrates how seriously the Fathers took the historical information in Genesis 1-11.  According to one of the leading modern authorities on Bede’s life and work:

…[Bede divided the history of the world] into six ages, with a seventh running concurrently and an eighth still to come. The days of the week of Easter lay behind this in the early Church, which in turn relied on the idea of six days of creation in Genesis, ending in the seventh day of rest of the Creator. In the Christian dispensation these were completed by an ‘eighth day’ which was also the first and only day of the New Creation . . .

The dominant chronology of the world in Bede’s day was the one derived from the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which gave about 5200 years from Creation to the Nativity of Christ. By a rigorous examination of all of the manuscripts available to him, Venerable Bede concluded that the chronology derived from the Hebrew manuscripts that St. Jerome used for the Vulgate was more reliable than the chronology derived from the Septuagint genealogies, even though this chronology had been accepted by most of the theologians of his time.  In his work De Temporibus Bede set the beginning of the sixth age of the world at 3,952 years from Creation instead of 5,199.  Thus, his biographer writes that:

In 708, when he was thirty-five and an established writer, he was told that he had been cited as an heretic on this subject before the aged bishop Wilfrid of York. In De Temporum Ratione he had challenged the calculation of the last age of the world by the recalculation of the years belonging to each age, while saying, as did St. Augustine, that the end of the last age and the coming of Christ was known only to God: ‘it is not for you to know the times and the seasons’, he quoted, ‘ that the Father has put in his own power’ (Acts 1:8). The charge of heresy distressed Bede profoundly; he wrote to a friend:

How could I, denying Christ, be a priest of the church of Christ and with what logic could I, believing in the gospels and the epistles, disbelieve that he had become incarnate in the sixth age?

As she concludes her account of this excruciating episode in Bede’s life, Sister Benedicta adds that “Bede was sure he was innocent, never altered his opinion,” and never suffered any kind of penalty for arguing against the majority view, but the fact that he was cited as a heretic for daring – after years of the most meticulous research – to differ from the accepted chronology by a mere 1200 years explodes the myth that our Fathers in the Faith cared little about the date of creation and that late-nineteenth century protestant fundamentalists were the first self-identified followers of Christ to get worked up about the age of the universe.

Thanks in part to the work of Venerable Bede, the Magisterium of the Catholic Church eventually embraced his reasoning, and in the post-Tridentine era the greatest Doctors of the Roman Church, like St. Alphonsus Liguori, upheld the chronology derived from the genealogical data contained in the Vulgate, which is why all of the Douay-Rheims Bibles in the United States published at the beginning of the twentieth century had an appendix citing a chronology of four thousand years from Creation to the Nativity of Christ, almost identical to Venerable Bede’s!

In light of the evidence we have presented here, which is but a brief sample of the unanimous teaching of the Church Fathers on the recent creation of the world, and before leaving this topic, I would like to ask the theistic evolutionists of our day to please show us a single statement from a Church Father who taught that God used long periods of time in the creation of the material universe or that it does not matter if one believes in these mythical long ages, as did most of the pagan philosophers of the patristic era. When the testimony of the Church Fathers and Doctors is taken seriously, it becomes apparent that the fiat creation of all things at the beginning of time is absolutely integral to the true Catholic doctrine of creation and that the insertion of long ages of time into the creation period involves a denial of the goodness of God and of the goodness of the first created world before the Original Sin and calls into question the inerrancy of the chronological information contained in the sacred history of Genesis, and, by extension, the inerrancy of Holy Scripture.

“Unbridled Speculation Can Drive One Headlong Over the Precipice”

May we never cease giving thanks to Our Heavenly Father for the gift of supernatural faith which makes it possible for us to believe all that He has revealed, solely on His authority.  I could literally weep from morning till night over the apparent inability of so many brilliant Catholic intellectuals to take God at His Word in the sacred history of Genesis, especially in regard to our orientation in time and space.  It makes perfect sense to me now that the ONLY time in the four Holy Gospels when we are told that Our Lord Jesus Christ actually “rejoiced” was when He thanked God for the simple faith of His little ones.

In that same hour, He rejoiced in the Holy Ghost, and said: I confess to Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones. Yea, Father, for so it hath seemed good in Thy sight (Luke 10:21).

The great Father and Doctor of the Church, St. Maximus the Confessor, seems to have been given a profound insight into the spiritual harm that results when Christians allow themselves to be deceived into thinking that the age of the universe can be determined by extrapolation from the order of nature—the Cartesian-Darwinian deception that has become an article of faith for secular and for most of Catholic academia.  Please meditate on these words from St. Maximus from his Fourth Century of Love, on why attempting to know the age of the world by human reasoning does not come within the compass of the human intellect, and may “drive one headlong over the precipice”:

How can the intellect not marvel when it contemplates that immense and more than astonishing sea of goodness [which is creation]? Or how is it not astounded when it reflects on how and from what source there have come into being both nature endowed with intelligence and intellect, and the four elements which compose physical bodies…? What kind of potentiality was it which, once actualized, brought these things into being? …God is the Creator from all eternity…. When the Creator willed, He gave being to and manifested that knowledge of created things which already existed in Him from all eternity….Try to learn why God created; for that is true knowledge. But do not try to learn how He created or why He did so comparatively recently; for that does not come within the compass of your intellect. Of divine realities some may be apprehended by men and others may not. Unbridled speculation, as one of the saints has said, can drive one headlong over the precipice (emphasis added) (Philokalia, Vol. II, Fourth Century on Love, Nrs. 2-5, Faber & Faber, London, pg. 100-101).

Through the prayers of the Mother of God and of all the Holy Angels and Saints, may the Holy Ghost deliver us from all evil and error and guide us into all the Truth!

In Domino,

Hugh Owen

P.S. The 2025 Kolbe leadership retreat will take place at the Catholic Conference Center in Hickory, North Carolina, from July 31 to August 6. The retreat will equip attendees to defend and promote the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation in their spheres of influence as the foundation of our Faith and as the only firm foundation for a culture of life. For more information and to register for the retreat, please contact Hugh Owen at [email protected].

 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Immaculata South Africa