In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In many colleges and universities, atheistic or agnostic professors are convinced that
science and faith are enemies and they teach this to their students.
They say that science has long surpassed religious ideas,
based on creations of the mind to give
human explanations to incomprehensible phenomena, which science has now been able to solve,
leaving those ideas out of date.
But is that true?
Why then are there great scientists who are believers?
Why have many great sages been atheists and then, through science, have found God?
There is no opposition between science and faith.
Because the same God has created both.
But for many it is still like a relentless struggle between the mind and the heart.
Many materialists believe that advances in science make religion obsolete and claim that
we would be better off without God and without religion.
Other believers, faced with these ideas, see advances in science as dangerous, especially
when they go directly against morality such as research with human embryos and cloning.
Will we turn our backs on science because it is sometimes opposed to morality?
Will we turn our backs on faith, considering some non-Christian attitudes of believers
or believing that it is not necessary?
Both options are dangerous.
Both deny the truth of the creator God.
Therefore, we must accept that the God of the Bible, the God who came to earth as one
of us and always remains by our side in the Eucharist, is the same God of the human genome
and the creator of the laws of the universe which scientists try to find out.
The important thing is to know that God wants science and faith.
God loves scientists and He loves believers, because they are all His children.
And He wants everyone, as brothers and sisters, to shake hands with Him and believe in Him
and love Him, discovering with admiration the wonders that He has left in creation.
God is love and He loves each of us.
For this reason, faith and science are two wings to fly towards the only God who awaits
us beyond the stars.
Something that cannot be accepted is the so-called scientism, that is, that science has the last
word in everything.
For many the word scientist is a magic word.
To say that something is scientifically proven is to say that it is something that has already
been definitively clarified and that no one can contradict it.
Scientific is for many people synonymous with true.
But is it true?
Harold Brown says: Scientific knowledge in any age is what scientists believe as such
at that time, but scientific knowledge of one age may be rejected as wrong in the next.
This has happened hundreds of times.
For centuries it was believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the
sun circled the earth.
This was regarded as indisputable scientific truth.
Copernicus began to consider that it was the earth that revolved around the sun as if it
were the center of the universe.
But now we know that the solar system is at one end of our galaxy, which is one of the
millions and millions that exist, and that in no way can we speak of being at the center
of the universe.
For a long time, the shortest distance between two points was said to be the straight line.
But that will be true in short distances; because at astronomical distances, the curved
line is the shortest, because gravitational fields prevent going in a straight line.
It is as if we were to say that the shortest distance to Tokyo is a straight line.
How can it be straight, if the earth is round?
Even concepts as normal as time and space have been questioned with Einstein's theories
of relativity.
Because at great distances and at speeds of light, things change, it seems that time stands
still and space is not as uniform as we see every day.
The time when it was thought that science would answer and solve all human problems
is long gone.
The optimism of science is long gone.
The more man knows, the more he realizes what remains to be discovered.
Nature is like an open book, full of mysteries, so unattainable that man remains small in
the face of the simple consideration of the magnitude of the universe or the infinitesimal
smallness of the elements of the atom.
The downside is to present ideas as scientific by the fact that a scientist says them and
they have not been confirmed by others.
Some scientists, with the prestige of their titles, want us to believe that science has
cornered faith and eliminated spiritual realities, because it has never found them.
Some say that if science has not discovered God, it is because He does not exist.
But science cannot discover God, because it only deals with what can be observed, that
is, the material world.
Instead, God is spiritual, supernatural, and religion deals with spiritual things, which
cannot be proven or rejected by science, because they are of a different order.
The theory of evolution is very old.
Already in the Middle Ages, Saint Thomas Aquinas and other great theologians spoke that God
had put special qualities in matter so that it could give rise to living beings.
Some were supporters of the theory of spontaneous generation.
But these theories did not take hold until Charles Darwin arrived.
In 1859, he published his book The Origin of Species in which he proposed that all living
species descend from a small group of common ancestors, perhaps just one.
He argued that the variation of species was due to natural selection, a kind of life force
that caused nature to eliminate by itself the weakest individuals, causing only the
strongest species and individuals to survive.
At the same time, he suggested that this process of natural selection could apply to man as well.
For Darwin, man is only a biological being, like any other animal, and the theory of natural
selection also governs for him in his evolutionary process that is always underway.
Some will say that we are going towards the super human.
The problem is that these theories for many scientists are strictly true, and therefore,
man is only the result of a natural process without any intervention from God.
Hence, using these evolutionary theories, many attack Christianity as something old-fashioned
and superstitious, since they consider that it is scientifically proven that man comes
from his anthropoid ancestors in a totally natural way and in progressive evolution just
like animals.
Many people are convinced that Darwin showed that man came from the ape.
And he considers that not believing in this theory of evolution is a sign of obscurantism
and superstition.
But, in reality, obscurantists are those who pretend, giving the rank of scientific truth
to a theory deprived of the most elementary mathematical structure and without the slightest
experimental basis.
Unrepeatable experiments are not part of science.
We must distrust all those who elaborate theories, forgetting the reproducible experimental tests.
A phenomenon, observed only once and never again, is not valid for science, but for fables.
One thing is for sure, man has remained exactly the same for at least 10,000 years to date,
as if time had stood still.
There has been no biological evolution, but there has been cultural evolution.
Why hasn't evolution continued?
If evolution had serious scientific bases, it should be in a position to predict the
exact value of the times that characterized human evolution.
But these evolutionary theories do not have any mathematical basis, because they cannot
be reproduced to verify what happened in the past only once and that cannot be experienced again.
Therefore, it is a presumption to speak of human evolution as a scientific theory that
must be confirmed by reproducible experimental verifications.
Certainly there is evidence of the biological evolution of many forms of living matter,
but the biological evolution of the human species goes a different way.
This is for a simple reason.
Among all the forms of living matter, we are the only one endowed with the extraordinary
privilege of knowing how to decipher the logic with which the world has been made.
This privilege distinguishes us from any other form of living matter.
Therefore, the same biological evolutionary principle that is valid for other living forms
cannot be taken for granted.
We know with certainty that the biological evolution of the human species has stopped
about ten thousand years ago.
But the cultural evolution has been very great.
A clear fact is that of New Guinea.
Those human beings were for thousands of years left out of cultural evolution, and in a short
time, they recovered the lost centuries, and after a few years, they are now in perfect
equality with us.
They were culturally backward, but they had the same biological capacity.
Cultural evolution does not distinguish between races.
It is valid for everyone.
Therefore, promoting the theory of the biological evolution of the human species to the rank
of scientific theory corroborated by experimental evidence in order to deny the existence of
God, is one of the most serious acts of cultural mystification that have been committed since
science was born.
100,000 years ago appears the Neanderthal homo sapiens, with a brain superior to ours,
the evolutionary theory says that 40,000 years ago the Neanderthal homo sapiens inexplicably
became extinct.
And in a totally inexplicable way, 20,000 years ago, appears the homo sapiens sapiens,
that is, us.
But a theory with missing links and unforeseen disappearances is neither science nor scientific theory.
In 1912, scientists celebrated the encounter of what they were looking for: the missing
link between the orangutan and homo sapiens.
In a stone quarry in the county of Sussex, in England, near the town of Piltdown, the
upper part of a skull was found with a brain capacity greater than that of a monkey, but
less than that of a modern man.
All the scientists of the world, beginning with the paleontologists of the British Museum
of London celebrated the find.
The discoverers were given the title of English Crown Barons and a monument was erected in
the town of Piltdown at the site of the find.
In the end, it turned out that it had all been a gross forgery, but this was discovered
in 1953.
For 40 years, all scientists had believed in a "scientific" truth, which was false.
And that supposed ape-man being had been given the name of Eoanthropus.
When the lie was discovered, they presented the Neanderthal man as the missing link, despite
it being discovered that he is not our ancestor, as scientists had believed for a century and
a half.
He was just one specimen of an extinct species of anthropomorphic monkey.
Currently, Darwinian theories are questioned by many serious scientists.
As Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was Nobel Prize Winner for literature in 1978, would say:
There are many thinkers who have attributed many more miracles to the blind mechanism
of evolution than all those attributed to God by all the theologians in the world.
Pope Saint John Paul II in 1986 said: From the point of view of the doctrine of faith,
there are no difficulties in explaining the origin of man in terms of the body through
the hypothesis of evolutionism.
However, it must be added that the hypothesis proposes only a probability, not a scientific certainty.
Instead, the doctrine of faith invariably affirms that man's spiritual soul is created directly by God.
That is, it is possible, according to the mentioned hypothesis, that the human body,
following the Creator's imprinted order in the energies of life, has been gradually prepared
in the forms of antecedent living beings.
But the human soul, on which the humanity of man ultimately depends, being spiritual,
cannot have emerged from matter.
The same Pope Saint John Paul II in a message to the members of the Pontifical Academy of
Sciences, on October 22nd, 1966, told them: Theories of evolution that consider that the
spirit arises from the forces of living matter or that it is a matter of simple epiphenomenon
of this matter, they are incompatible with the truth about man.
These theories are incapable of founding the dignity of the human person.
Upon reaching man, we find a difference of an ontological order, faced with an ontological
leap we could say: The moment of transition to the spiritual is not an object of observation.
It is up to theology to deduce the meaning of man according to the designs of the Creator.
In conclusion, we can say that evolution can be perfectly reconcilable with religion.
We only have to recognize that God our creator was the one who put that vital force in matter
so that it could develop until giving rise to the most primitive life, and later, little
by little, to more developed living beings until reaching an anthropoid, which God could
use to give him a rational soul and thus turn him into a human being; not only because of
his intelligence, but especially because of his eternal destiny, since God raised him
to the supernatural order and made him His son, created in His image and likeness.
The Catholic faith can accept evolution as long as it accepts a special intervention
from God in the creation of the human soul.
In any case, science can never scientifically or experimentally prove the passage from animal to human.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.