Catholicism and the Zombies of Evolution

Zombies — an undead fictional being created through the reanimation of a human corpse — are all the rage today in popular culture. Many have heard of the top-rated TV show The Walking Dead (the second most-popular TV show in the world) described as “in the years following a zombie apocalypse, survivors seek refuge in a world overrun by the dead.” It has been running for nine seasons. There are other similar movies, programs, games, and activities that are quite popular as well. As we see the rise in the popularity of the fictional undead, it is interesting to note that there is a dramatic decline in the belief in God. Is this simply a coincidence, or does it show us something deeply flawed in today’s culture?

According to Pew Research, nearly half of U.S. adults under 30 do not believe in Christianity’s God and the degree of even a remote affiliation with any Christian religion varies by age group. A Barna Research study released in January 2018 reported that, “More than any other generation before them, Gen Z does not assert a religious identity . . . just three in five 13- to 18-year-olds say they are some kind of Christian (59%).” Would it be too much to suggest that within the 13- to 18-years-old group, perhaps more of them believe in zombies than in God? G.K. Chesterton wrote that “When men cease to believe in God, they do not then believe in nothing, they believe in anything.”

What do Catholic youth believe in? Dr. Christian Smith, the preeminent social researcher on the religious knowledge and attitudes of American youths today, refers to the predominant belief system as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Smith asserts that out of all the religious denominations in the U.S., it is young Catholics who are contributing most to the growth of the “nones” — people who never were or are no longer affiliated with a religion. He says that it is because of “faux science” that poorly-educated Catholics are easily peeled away from the Truth.

Other social researchers have found the same weakness and susceptibility to faux science in Catholic youth. In 2016, Our Sunday Visitor Weekly published an article titled, “Young people are leaving the faith. Here’s why: Many youths and young adults who have left the Church point to their belief that there is a disconnect between science and religion.” According to the article, which was based on two national studies done by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), the youth are leaving because of “science.” The “disconnect between science and religion” means that the materialism/naturalism explanation of origins taught in school destroys belief in the Bible and the supernaturalism upon which Catholicism depends. Children realize that both explanations of how the world and we humans came to be can’t both be true.

At this point you may be wondering what all of this has to do with zombies.

There is a strong connection between zombies and loss of Faith. The “zombies” to which I refer are the scientifically dead materialistic hypotheses of human origins that are still walking around and being taught to children as proven facts by the schools and the culture. They are the “carriers” of the faux science that Christian Smith and others have identified as peeling away the faith of youth. The Catholic Church has the truth about the supernatural origin of the world and its inhabitants but it has yielded the education of its youth on those matters to the civil culture. According to paragraph 282 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Catechesis on creation is of major importance. It concerns the very foundations of human and Christian life: for it makes explicit the response of the Christian faith to the basic question that men of all times have asked themselves: “Where do we come from?” “Where are we going?” “What is our origin?” “What is our end?” “Where does everything that exists come from and where is it going?” The two questions, the first about the origin and the second about the end, are inseparable. They are decisive for the meaning and orientation of our life and actions.

Too, Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, published in 1995 a book called In the Beginning. In that book’s preface the cardinal wrote: “the creation account is noticeably and completely absent from catechesis, preaching, and even theology. The creation narratives go unmentioned; it is asking too much to expect anyone to speak of them.”

What Benedict’s statement of fact also reveals is that clergy are not educated and prepared in the seminary to teach the creation doctrines, at least not with rationality and conviction. Arguably, the majority of clergy actually believe the creation myth of cosmic and biological evolution they learned in school, and the “scientific method” of biblical exegesis taught in many seminaries helps them to interpret the Bible in accordance with the secular creation myth. By so “interpreting,” they can believe in evolution while still affirming the dogma that the Bible is inerrant, and that even if cosmic and biological evolution are true, “God did it.”

The following example is from a lecture given in recent years at the Institute of Catholic Culture that was summarized by an attendee and published on the internet. I believe the lecturer is a very holy priest, who has an MA in Sacred Theology, was once an adjunct professor of theology at a nominally Catholic university, had been Dean of a Catholic graduate school that grants MA degrees in Theological Studies and Certificates in Catechetics, and in 2018 was appointed Vicar of Faith Formation for his diocese. According to the summary, Father began his lecture as follows:

The story of Genesis is the unfolding of creation: a movement from the formless wasteland to an ordered and designed creation that is good. Each day a new part of creation was ordered and created until finally on the sixth day, God created Man in His own image. The creation story spans over seven days. But, Fr. ******** rhetorically asked, where the Bible says that a day was a 24-hour period as most Protestants believe. Referring to the Psalms and other parts of the scriptures, a day to the Lord is like a thousand years (Ps 90:4; 2 Pet 3:8).

With his rhetorical question Father appeared to be teaching his belief in the “Day-Age Theory.” That theory asserts that the days of the Genesis account not only were longer than 24 hours but also that they could have been eons (indefinitely long time periods). Eons, that is, millions and millions of years are necessary to the evolution creation myth. Any well-informed Protestant would know that Father was quoting 2 Peter 3:8 selectively because after it says “a day to the Lord is like a thousand years” it says “and a thousand years as one day.” Peter wrote it as a rebuke to those scoffers doubting the promise of the Lord’s Second Coming as is plain from verse 3. Father’s quote of 2 Peter 3:8 was an inadequate means of supporting the rest of his lecture based on the theory that each of the days of Genesis were not what his audience understood a day to be.

The more sophisticated argument in support of the Day-Age Theory is that the Hebrew word for day, yôm, need not always mean a literal 24-hour period. That’s true, but context matters. Father’s seminary professors completely ignored the issue of context and followed in the footsteps of evolution-believing Bible scholars by committing the fallacy of an unwarranted adoption of an expanded semantic range. Just because a word can mean something in some other context does not mean it does in the particular context of Genesis 1. Other Bible scholars point out that the Hebrew word for “day” which is yôm, when modified by a cardinal number (for example, one, two, three) or an ordinal number (for example, first, second, third), as used 359 times in the Old Testament outside of Genesis 1, always means a literal day of about 24 hours, or the light portion of the day-night cycle. This is true in Old Testament narrative, legal writings, prophecy, wisdom literature, and even poetry. So, there must be extraordinary reasons to justify an extraordinary exception; if Genesis 1 is indeed an exception what is the reason other than to conform it to the unproven and unprovable claims of materialistic science that has us humans at the end of a multi-billion-year process? That is just as much a non-theistic faith statement as our supernatural faith in a Creator. When God performed by an act of His will the miracles described in the New Testament, His results were instant whether He was changing water into wine, raising the son of the widow of Naim or any of the others.

For context, the Genesis account of creation in six days provides a cardinal or ordinal number after each yôm. Not only that, after each day it adds the phrase “and there was evening and there was morning.” Chapter 1, verse 5 states: “God called the light Day and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day,” while chapter 1, verse 8 says: “And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.” That formula is repeated for each of days three (verse 13), four (verse 19), five (verse 23), and six (verse 31).

In context, it looks like the Author of Scripture willed His human writer to tell what kind of day He wanted to reveal to us. Church Fathers and Doctors such as Augustine and Aquinas may have had slightly different opinions about the meaning of “six days,” but they all agreed that it was instant according to His Will, and not something dragged out over untold ages. I’ll return to Father’s lecture after a necessary digression to explain about the “scientific method” of interpreting the Bible and what other Catholics of note have said about the impact of evolution.

Origination of the “scientific method” of interpreting the Bible is credited to German Protestant Rudolf Bultmann, born in 1884. He became a university professor in 1921, when evolution and non-theistic philosophy were already the rule in German universities. In a lecture delivered January 27, 1988, at St. Peter’s Church in New York by Cardinal Ratzinger, then-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, explained how Bultmann used the assumption that evolution was a naturalistic fact to “demystify” the Bible. The title of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s lecture was “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today.”

In the first place, one can note that in the history-of-religions school, the model of evolution was applied to the analysis of biblical texts. This was an effort to bring the methods and models of the natural sciences to bear on the study of history. Bultmann laid hold of this notion in a more general way and thus attributed to the so-called scientific worldview a kind of dogmatic character. Thus, for example, for him the non-historicity of the miracle stories [in the Bible] was no question whatever anymore. The only thing one needed to do yet was to explain how these miracle stories came about. On one hand the introduction of the scientific worldview was indeterminate and not well thought out. On the other hand, it offered an absolute rule for distinguishing between what could have been and what had to be explained only by development. To this latter category belonged everything which is not met with in common daily experience. There could only have been what now is. For everything else, therefore, historical processes are invented, whose reconstruction became the particular challenge of exegesis. . . . To that extent there lies in modern exegesis a reduction of history into philosophy, a revision of history by means of philosophy.

In a May 1989 address to the Presidents of the European Doctrinal Commissions, speaking then as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger’s talk was on the “Difficulties Confronting the Faith in Europe Today.” He traced through the litany of issues pertaining to sexual morality and the Church’s sacramental order and said they are linked together by the same false vision of humanity. He went on to say that:

We can give a proper answer to the conflict in detail only if we keep all of the relationships in view. It is their disappearance which has robbed the Faith of its reasonableness. In this context, I would like to list three areas within the worldview of the Faith which have witnessed a certain kind of reduction in the last centuries, a reduction which has been gradually preparing the way for another “paradigm”.

In the first place, we have to point out the almost complete disappearance of the doctrine on creation from theology. [Emphasis added.] As typical instances, we may cite two compendia of modern theology in which the doctrine on creation is eliminated as part of the content of the faith and is replaced by vague considerations from existential philosophy, [he then named two published in Europe]. In a time when we are experiencing the agonizing of creation against man’s work and when the question of the limits and standards of creation upon our activity has become the central problem of our ethical responsibility, this fact must appear quite strange. Notwithstanding all this, it remains always a disagreeable fact that ‘nature’ should be viewed as a moral issue. . . . That nature has a mathematically intelligibility is to state the obvious, the assertion that it also contains in itself a moral intelligibility, however is rejected as a metaphysical fantasy. The demise of metaphysics goes hand in hand with the displacement of the teaching on creation.

The “another paradigm” of which he spoke was ushered in by the methods of Bultmann he had criticized the year before in New York. It would be wrong to think that a German Protestant was the only scholar who had latched on to Darwin’s theory published in 1859 and held it as a matter of faith to which the Bible’s text had to be reinterpreted. In 1907, Pope St. Pius X wrote the encyclical “On the Doctrine of the Modernists” to address that heresy. Note how he connected belief in evolution with Modernism which he described as “the synthesis of all heresies.”

First of all [the Modernists] lay down the general principle that in a living religion everything is subject to change, and must in fact be changed. In this way they pass to what is practically their principal doctrine, namely, evolution. To the laws of evolution everything is subject.

Returning to the analysis of Father’s lecture, Father’s belief in the Day-Age Theory enabled him to then explain what he had called “the unfolding of creation” as the billion-year evolutionary process that materialists promote. The summary of the lecture continued:

Turning our attention to evolution, Fr. ******** simplified the evolutionary process into big bang, formless matter, primordial slime, simple animals, complex animals, and then finally Man. The key points of evolution are mutation, chaos, chance, natural selection, and selection of the fittest. Each of these points is essential to the evolutionary process.

Father then went on to explain how evolution, which he said involves “mutation, chaos, chance, natural selection and selection of the fittest,” was actually guided and controlled by God to turn out an amazingly ordered design. In other words, evolution was a directed undirected process!

But as Fr. ******** pointed out, evolution requires a certain amount of specificity for it to work. The planets have to be just right so that each spins around the sun. The earth has to be tilted on its axis perfectly, otherwise it would be too hot or too cold to support life. There has to be the right amount of oxygen and plants and animals, or Man would not survive. Nature has to be precise or it would not amount to life as we know it. It has to be ordered and directed by God.

In other words, some matter and energy that He made out of nothing and used to initiate the “big bang” chaos has by random chance collisions, mutations, natural selection, and selection of the fittest turned out so well because for billions of years God tinkered with and corrected the results so that they only appear to the materialists as an infinitely lucky series of random chances which then through “natural selection,” produced an incredibly ordered design. World-famous “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins is representative of the evolutionists who admit the universe looks designed but it just happened that way by pure chance. In fact, he wrote a best-selling book to “prove” it. In his The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe, he explained: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”

Father’s combination of the evolutionary process facilitated by God’s oversight and patient tinkering for billions of years to arrive at an amazing outcome is ridiculed by the materialists that educate the children. The materialists would call his explanation the “god-of-the-gaps.” The argument against the god-of-the-gaps is that it is invalid to introduce God as an explanation for a scientific phenomenon that science cannot currently explain by naturalistic causes. If they knew that “God did it,” they wouldn’t be materialists.

There is no question that the priest who gave that lecture believes in God and all that the Catholic Church authoritatively teaches (at least to the degree that he knows what that authoritative teaching is.) But the point is that explanations such as his are not “scientific,” for no scientist would hold his theory, and they are not biblical, because they discount the truth of the inerrancy of Scripture. In short, what is very commonly being taught, and believed, by most Catholics is not anything the Church has ever held to be true. In his book, Aquinas and Evolution, Dominican priest Michael Chaberek explained why priests and lay intellectuals fall into this error. He wrote that theologians and philosophers don’t know natural science well enough to be able to distinguish scientific facts from the materialistic interpretations and dread being called “anti-scientific.” He asserted that because their exaggerated esteem or even fear of the “scientific community” makes them unable to question the so-called “scientific consensus” they have adopted the naturalistic paradigm.

The naturalistic paradigm is what Cardinal Ratzinger meant in his 1989 address to the Presidents of the European Doctrinal Commissions when he said, “in the last centuries, a reduction which has been gradually preparing the way for another ‘paradigm’.” In his lecture, while deflecting from a literal reading of Genesis to a god-of-the-gaps evolutionary reading of Genesis, Father claimed to be able to pick out truths hidden in the text:

What truths then are conveyed by the book of Genesis? First and foremost, the truth expressed by the creation story is the truth that Man is created from nothing by an all-powerful and loving God and that we are created in His image. This simple yet profound truth leads to other deeper and more profound insights. Fr ******** pointed out six basic truths of Genesis: 1) the dignity of the human person 2) life is sacred from conception to natural death 3) marriage is sacred 4) a child has a right to a mom and dad and to be raised into a family 5) all people have a right to basic things that will help improve themselves 6) that we care for the suffering and dying.

While those six are certainly things in which we believe, other Catholics might not see them all in Genesis 1. But without quibbling with Father’s list, the main problem is that his audience was expected to accept, on his authority, “truths” that were gleaned from a biblical narrative in which the ordinary meaning of the words in the text are not actually true. If the popular understanding of evolution is true as the scientific consensus and the education system teaches, the Genesis account is what? A myth? A metaphor? An allegory? What authoritative teaching of the Church held Genesis to be such?

By overlaying God’s supernatural role on the naturalist consensus of evolution some Catholics can arrive at what is, for them, both scientific and religious truth. But is it actually true? Defenders of the literal truth of the Bible agree with the New Atheists on one thing: Truth claims need to be taken seriously — which means they must be evaluated as true or false, not merely interpreted as metaphors and symbols. Catholic evolutionists are squeezed between these two opposing adherents of the “put up or shut up” school of interpretation. Catholic evolutionists think both extremes are simplistic; “it’s complicated,” they say. The New Atheists have shrugged off this dodge, accusing the Catholic apologists of creating a pseudo-intellectual smokescreen. And the exit in droves from the Church by Catholic youths indicates that the New Atheists are winning the debate.

Was it always “mainstream” within Catholic intellectual circles to interpret our origins as an eons-long progressive creation micromanaged by God? When naturalism, fueled by the appearance of Darwin’s books, Origin of Species and The Decent of Man got into high gear toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was strongly refuted by the Church’s Magisterium. In 1884, Pope Leo XIII wrote the encyclical Humanum Genus (On Freemasonry and Naturalism), in which he explained how Naturalists and Freemasons would use the schools to integrate evolution into philosophy to the detriment of morality and culture. That the schools have been and continue to be used for that purpose and with that result is a key thesis of this article.

Jesuits George Tyrrell (1861–1909) and Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) were among the early Catholic scholars who, like Bultmann, subjected Scripture to the “science” of naturalism. Both Tyrrell and Loisy ran afoul of the Vatican before leaving the priesthood and the Church. In more recent times, some Catholics who combine the theory of evolution with God intervening when He wishes, cling to their belief by asserting that they are in harmony with Thomas Aquinas. They call themselves Thomistic evolutionists. In the aforementioned book by Fr. Michael Chaberek, Aquinas and Evolution, he begins by asking a question about the cause of the alternative “paradigm.” He had earlier pointed out that neither the teaching of Aquinas nor the theory of evolution had changed since Darwin articulated it:

As we noted, it is not the understanding of Aquinas or evolution that has changed over the last century or so. It is rather the change in paradigms — from roughly speaking ‘Biblical’ or ‘creationist’ to ‘naturalistic’ or ‘evolutionary’. This change of paradigms explains why a great number of today’s Thomists greatly differ from those of a century ago. In our opinion, the ‘evolutionary’ as opposed to the ‘Biblical’ is not the proper context in which the problem of origins should be addressed. For this reason, we believe that not today’s, but the previous Thomists were closer to the truth regarding both — the interpretation of Aquinas’s metaphysics and the assessment of the evolutionary theory of origins. . . . In what follows we will show that the teachings of Thomas Aquinas — and indeed any sound philosophy . . . are not just incompatible with the Darwinian theory but exclude it in principle. By showing this, we want to achieve another objective, namely, to help contemporary Thomists to realize some of the difficulties, inaccuracies, or even flat-out errors in their interpretation of Aquinas when it comes to the origin of species and man.

The Bible, as the Church teaches, is inerrant. But when Genesis is interpreted to conform to the faux science of evolution theory, section 282 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is not being taken seriously and implemented. School children want to know where we come from and where are we going, so the explanation from parents and Catholic educators has to be more than the dumbed-down intellectual level found in CCD programs. Telling them God actually guided the billion-year random process they learned in science class is not working, either. The vacuum created by the failure to teach reason-based Catholic creationism has been filled by the secular Humanists with their “creation myth” of cosmic and biological evolution that renders God unnecessary. And that is why so many are leaving the Catholic Church today.

Recall that a zombie is something dead that is still walking around. The popular teaching of cosmic and biological evolution that kids get in school and from the popular culture is filled with so many scientifically dead and implausible “proofs” of “evolution” that it has provoked many books to be written about those “zombies.” To the extent that Catholic children are taught to believe in these “zombies,” we must bury them with the modern natural science that will fasten their faith to their soul.

Teaching our children modern natural science, along with our creation doctrines based on reading Genesis as the historical narrative, would be more effective in saving their faith than trying to “baptize” the materialistic evolution creation myth with the assertion that it is true but “God did it.” When we teach modern natural science, we will simultaneously bury the scientific zombies that our kids believe in.

The difference between what is taught in school as a fact and that which is only speculation argued over by academic scientists was discussed by Dr. Stephen Meyer in his 2013 New York Times best-seller, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosion of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Meyer explored every theory of biological evolution by an extensive review of the books and papers published by evolutionary biologists. Meyer quotes them and shows why their theories can’t explain the source of the information contained in living things. New discoveries by experimental scientists, not only in genetics but in other areas as well, have brought into question the evolutionary dogma. There is enormous disparity between popular representations of the status of the theory and its actual status as indicated in peer-reviewed technical journals.

The reason why zombie-filled cosmic and biological evolution instruction is aggressively pressed on school children is because they are the foundational dogmas of the non-theistic religion that dominates our post-Christian culture: secular Humanism. The formal founding of that religion was in 1933 with the publication of the Humanist Manifesto that was signed by many educational leaders. The Humanists described themselves as a new religion, that is, a religious movement meant to transcend and replace deity-based religions:

While this age does owe a vast debt to the traditional religions, it is none the less obvious that any religion that can hope to be a synthesizing and dynamic force for today must be shaped for the needs of this age. To establish such a religion is a major necessity of the present. It is a responsibility which rests upon this generation. We therefore affirm the following:

First: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

Second: Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as the result of a continuous process.

Third: Holding an organic view of life, humanists find that the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.

In other words, the universe, including all of the matter and energy always existed, life “emerged” on its own, humans then evolved, and the mind is material just as the body is. No room here for spiritual souls. Those are just the first three of fourteen “affirmations of faith” in that creed-like document.

The evidence that children are leaving in droves because instruction at school in evolution creates a perceived conflict with religion has been “stacked and cataloged.” Priests and religious educators can’t just continue doing the same old thing that has failed for the last 50 years. Catholic apologetics needs to implement section 282 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The creation doctrines that the spokesmen for the Church seem to have forgotten or misplaced must be taught again — and taught with reason based on the twenty-first-century natural science that refutes those bogus nineteenth-century theories. The Humanist worldview, and the confidence Humanists exude as they steamroll Christians, is based on two affirmations of their faith, evolutionary cosmology and biology, that they have taught the majority of Catholics to accept, at least implicitly.

We need to break free to save our children and our Christian culture because, if the non-believers comprised of Humanists, atheists, and “nones” become the majority in this country, the social and political consequences will be frightening. Catholic intellectuals can help save our children and save our nation’s culture by using their time and talent for the task of burying the zombies.