John is in Washington, Kansas. Hi John, welcome to Catholic Answers Live. Thank
you, how are you? Doing well, John, and yourself? I'm fantastic. I'm a recent
convert to the Catholic Church. Pentecost Sunday, my entire family was brought
into the Church. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you.
My question for you, Mr. Akin, is this: I come from the Baptist background,
there's some very adamant stern belief within the Baptist Church, and I've
heard a lot of arguments regarding the age of the earth and the age of
humanity. Okay. I'm a firm believer that the earth is in the billions,
just from fossil record and staring into the cosmos. Uh-huh, sure. But my stance on the
evolution of man is pretty anti; I don't believe in the fact that man evolved. I
believe we may continually change, but not evolve from another species. Right,
you're opposed to the idea of speciation with regard to mankind?
Correct, correct. What's your thought on the age of man as a created being?
Okay, well, the...obviously, so man is a created being, and that means there was
some finite point in the past beyond which humans did not exist, so there were
the first human beings. And when that occurred, when human beings first came
into the world, when they were first created, is something that is--that the
Church would hold as a matter of science, rather than a matter of faith. The Church
has looked at the various texts, such as the genealogies in
Genesis; but it hasn't decided that those are to be used for purposes of
calculating dates, the way that, for example, the Anglican Archbishop James
Ussher did when he calculated that the earth
was, you know, only four thousand years old and that
that's when Adam and Eve lived and and so forth.
The Church has instead recognized the value of the various scientific
studies that bear on the origin of the cosmos and the appearance of man; that's
something the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes. It doesn't make those
scientific theories, and those scientific studies and their results, matters of
faith. So if you view the evidence differently than what the contemporary
science would suggest, you're not being a bad Catholic as a result. However, the
Church tends to acknowledge the value of those studies--without signing off on
them and saying they're definitely correct. Because science is always
provisional, and there's a saying that if you marry the science of one age,
you're gonna be a widow in the next; because science is constantly changing,
and even though we think we have a better understanding of these matters
today than we did, say, two or three hundred years ago, you know, we'll have to
see what science indicates two or three hundred years from now. As far as what I
personally would think about how long ago the first humans appeared, I would
think that it's longer than ten thousand years ago, but probably less than a
hundred thousand years ago. If you look at what archaeology has suggested
regarding the development of early humans, there's an event sometimes called
"The Great Leap Forward," that seems to occur thirty to fifty thousand years ago,
where you have humans starting to display what's called "behavioral
modernity." Behavioral modernity means things like: they made tools, they
made art, we have evidence that they believed in an afterlife, so that
suggests that they were practicing religion; and they began to do a lot of
things that we don't have evidence for prior
hominids doing. All of a sudden there's this great leap forward, where you have
humans doing these things, about thirty to fifty thousand years ago. And
so that would be my guess; since there's kind of a notable development, it would
make sense to me to say "Okay, that's when the first true humans, in our sense,
existed, and that's why we see the sudden appearance of behavioral modernity." There
may have been, you know, relatives of our species that weren't quite modern
humans, that, you know, were part of God's plan; but, you know, when He endowed the
first humans with actual souls, that's when you had the kind of cognitive leap
forward that produced behavioral modernity, and thus the human race and
our sense of it. So that would be my personal guess. It's only a guess, I can
see other possibilities, but that's the one that that seems most intriguing
to me at the moment based on the evidence I've encountered. What do you
think, John? Brilliant, thank you. What I would like to also add, if I could just for a moment
is, the one thing, the statement that I have valued the most listening to you
and Tim Staples and Mr. Sri and everybody else at Catholic Answers and
your guests is the phrase "Welcome home." Yeah. That is a beautiful statement and
I just, I love hearing it, guys, because I--when I came into the Church with my family, I--
we came home, that's the feeling we got, so thank you for your answer and I
appreciate your time. Someone said it to me when I became Catholic, and it meant a
lot to me as well, so welcome home to you and your family. Yeah, thank you.