Darwinism’s Fatal Flaw

It is the fatal flaw of all 'scientisms', as E.F. Schumacher explains in detail in A Guide for the Perplexed, a book of which he said just days before he died, "this is what my life has been leading to".

From Catholic Stand

By Maurice Williams

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.