The Pope and the Scientist

The statement came unexpectedly, but not unsurprisingly. For decades Catholic schools have taught evolution. Now, as the Detroit News put it, "Pope John Paul II has given his blessing to the theory of evolution..." (10/25/96, p. 5A)

Update (11/6/96): If you are interested, here is the text of the Pope's statement. Also from the same site is a commentary entitled "Media Twists Papal Statement on Evolution."

According to media reports (to the extent they can be trusted), the Pope now accepts the naturalistic theory of evolution as "more than a theory," with the exception that at some point some primitive humans were divinely chosen to receive souls, thus becoming the Adam and Eve of Genesis.

Thus, he declared, there is no conflict between "science" and "religion." Of course, this is true, but not in how he meant it. Creationists have long demonstrated that Genesis is the only reasonable model of origins that harmonizes with the full range of the facts of science.

That is not to say this truth is accepted. Genesis is compatible only with the historical Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religions. Every other major religion on the face of this planet, including Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, the New Age cults, Mormonism, Atheism, Communism, Humanism, Satanism, and Animism and so on needs evolution as a vital religious doctrine. Creation science completely destroys them. They cannot accept an earth only thousands of years old created in a fully functional state in a few days by a perfect omnipotent God. Therefore it is foolish to expect backers of these religions to be unbiased toward creation science.

So the Pope thinks evolution is "more than just a theory." Is that so? The Pope is a theologian, not a scientist. To find whether evolution is a story with evidence to support it, let us look to someone whose background is as similar to the Pope as possible, but is competent to judge the evidence for evolution.

Like the Pope, Maceirj Geirtych was born and raised in Poland, and lived long there under Communist rule. Like the Pope, Geirtych is Catholic. Like the Pope, Dr. Geirtych is well educated. Unlike the Pope however, Geirtych's education and experience are in the thick of the natural sciences dealing with evolution. Dr. Geirtych has earned not one but two doctorates in science; the first in plant physiology from the University of Toronto, and the second in genetics from the University of Poznan. His undergraduate work was at Oxford University. He is currently the Head of the Genetics Department of the Polish Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Dendrology.

Dr. Giertych is on the editorial board of two international science journals; Silvae Genetics and Annales ses Sciences Forestieres. He is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences Committee on Forest Sciences and the Forestry Council in the Ministry of Environmental Protection, Natural Resources and Forestry. He has authored about 150 scientific papers.

Only the most deranged evolutionist would accuse people like Dr. Geirtych of being ignorant of the facts of science (which isn't to say there aren't a surfeit of such folks out there). In the Foreword to Catholic author Gerald J. Keane's book introducing creation science to the Catholic world, Creation Rediscovered, he wrote the following: (1991, pp. 1-4)

"Sometime in 1955, when I was taking Honour Moderations in Science (Botany, Chemistry and Geology) at Oxford University, the O.U. Biology Club announced a lecture against the theory of evolution. The largest auditorium in the Biology Labs was filled to capacity. When the speaker was introduced.... it turned out he was an octogenarian with a Ph.D. in biology from Cambridge obtained in the 19th century. He spoke fervently against the theory of evolution, defending what was for us an obviously indefensible position. He did not convince anybody with his antique arguments, he did not understand the questions that were fired at him, he rejected science as we knew it. We all had a good laugh hearing this dinosaur.... Today his views are being vindicated by new evidence from natural sciences. May his soul rest in peace."

"In 1955, like all in my generation, I was fully convinced evolution was an established biological fact."

"In my studies I went on to a BA and MA in forestry, a PhD in plant physiology and finally a DSc in genetics. For a long time I was not bothered by geology, evolution or any suspicious thoughts. I had my own field of research in population genetics of forest trees, with no immediate relevance to the controversy over evolution."

"Gradually as my children got to the stage of learning biology in school and discussing their problems with dad, I realized that the evidence for evolution shifted from paleontology and embryology to population genetics. But population genetics is my subject! I knew it was used to explain how evolution progressed but was not aware it is used to prove it. Without my noticing it my special field became the supplier of the most pertinent evidence supporting the theory. If evolution was proven in some field I was not familiar with, I understood the need to accomodate my field to this fact, to suggest explanations how it occured in terms of genetics. But to claim that these attempted explanations are the primary evidence for the theory was quite unacceptable to me. I started reading up the current literature on the topic of evolution. Until then I was not aware how shaky the evidence for evolution was, how much of what was "evidence" had to be discarded, how little new evidence was accumulated over the years and how very much ideas dominate facts. These ideas have become dogma, yet they have no footing in natural sciences. They stem from materialistic philosophies."

"My primary objection as a geneticist was to the claim that the formation of races, or microevolution as it is often referred to, is a small scale example of macroevolution - the origin of species. Race formation is of course very well documented. All it requires is isolation of a part of a population. After a few generations due to natural selection and genetic drift the isolated population will irreversibly lose some genes, and thus, as long as the isolation continues, in some features it will be different from the population it arose from. In fact we do this ourselves all the time when breeding, substituting natural with artificial selection and creating artificial barriers to generative mixing outside the domesticated conditions. The important thing to remember here is that a race is genetically impoverished relative to the whole population. It has fewer alleles (forms of genes). Some of them are arranged into special, interesting, rare combinations. This is particularly achieved by guided recombination of selected forms in breeding work. But these selected forms are less variable (less polymorphic). Thus what is referred to as microevolution represented natural or artificial reduction of the gene pool. You will not get evolution that way. Evolution means construction of new genes. It means increase in the amount of genetic information and not reduction of it."

"The evolutionary value of new races or selected forms should be demonstrable by natural selection. However if allowed to mix with the general breeding population new races will disappear. The select genes they have will disperse again, the domesticated forms will go wild. Thus there is no evidence for evolution here."

"Mutations figure prominently in the evolution story. When in the early sixties I was starting breeding work on forest trees everyone was very excited about the potential of artificial mutations. In many places around the world special "cobalt bomb" centres were established to stimulates rates of mutations. What wonderful things we were expecting from increased variability by induced mutations. All of this work has long since been abandoned. All we got were deformed freaks, absolutely useless in forestry. Maybe occasionally some oddity could be of ornamental value, but never able to live on its own in natural conditions. A glance through the literature on mutations outside forestry quickly convinced me that the pattern is similar everywhere. Mutations are either neutral or detrimental. Positive ones if they do occur are too rare to be noticable. Stability in nature is the rule. We have no proofs for evolution from mutation research."

"Within the genome of a species, that is in the molecular structure of its DNA we find many recurrent specific nucleotide sequences, known as "repeats." Different ones occur in different species. If this variation (neutral as far as we know) arose from random mutations it should be random. How then did the "repeats" come to be? If mutations are the answer they could not have been random. In this context "genetic drive" is postulated, as distinct from "genetic drift". But Who or what does the driving? The empirical science of genetics knows only random mutations."

"Currently there are new suggestions that molecular genetics provides evidence for evolution. Analyses of DNA sequences in various species should show similarities between related ones and big differences between systematically far removed species. They do exactly that. Molecular genetics generally confirms the accuracy of taxonomy. But at the same time it does not confirm postulated evolutionary sequences. There are no progressive changes say from fishes to amphibians to reptiles to mammals. Molecular genetics confirms systematics not phylogeny."

"No. Genetics has no proofs for evolution. It has trouble explaining it. The closer one looks at the evidence for evolution the less one finds of substance. In fact the theory keeps on postulating evidence, and failing to find it, moves on to other postulates (fossil missing-links, natural selection of improved forms, positive mutations, molecular phylogenetic sequences, etc.). This is not science."

"A whole age of scientific endeavour was wasted searching for a phantom. It is time we stopped and looked at the facts. Natural sciences failed to supply any evidence for evolution. Christian philosophy tried to accomodate this unproven postulate of materialist philosophies. Much time and intellectual effort went in vain leading only to negative moral consequences. It is time those working in the humanities were told the truth."

More recently, Dr. Giertych wrote the following. (Giertych, Maceirj, "Professor of Genetics Says 'No!' to Evolution," Creation Ex Nihilo 17(3)(1995):46-48)

"I know of no biological data relevant to tree genetics that would require evolutionary explanations. I could easily pursue my career without ever mentioning evolution."

"However, being also an academic teacher in population genetics, I found it necessary to play down the evolutionary explanations given in textbooks, for the simple reason that I find no evidence to support them."

"I had been taught that palaeontology gives the bulk of evidence for evolution. To my surprise, I found that evidence is lacking not only in palaeontology, as well as in sedimentology, in dating techniques, and in fact in all sciences."

"A useful mutation (e.g. an orange without seeds) is not the equivalent of a positive mutation. I felt uneasy lecturing about positive mutations when I could not give an example. There are very many examples of negative and neutral mutations, but none that I know of which I could present as a documented example of a positive one."

"What do we see in the short time interval available to our cognition? An increase in the number of useful alleles or a decrease? An increase in the number of species or a decrease? An increase in information in nature or loss of it? Is nature moving from chaos to ever-increasing organization, or from an organized state towards ever-increasing chaos? Evolution is not a conclusion drawn from observations. It is an ideology to which observations are applied when convenient and ignored when not."

"Having entered the battle against evolution I found myself confronted not so much by scientists as by philosophers.... Strangely enough, Marxist and Catholic philosophers joined forces to combat my activity. In fact, Catholic clergymen, even some bishops, are most prominent in defending evolution.... The confrontation with the philosophers is the difficult part. My forestry training did not prepare me for this. Now I battle both in scientific circles and within the Church.... The teachers of evolution are beginning to speak in less convincing words. The offensive in support of evolution is so intensive and so well financed that it appears evolutionists are very worried."

"They should be."

Maybe somebody ought to let the Pope know the facts of science.

"At the present stage of geological research, we have to admit that there is nothing in the geological records that runs contrary to the view of conservative creationists, that God created each species [actually baramin, not species] separately, presumably from the dust of the earth."
(Honest evolutionist) Edmund Ambrose, The Nature and Origin of the Biological World (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982), p. 164.

(11/4/96) Note: For another critical commentary by a Catholic scientist who finds the theologians more pro-evolutionary than the scientists, see Dr. Michael Behe's article "Darwin Under the Microscope," in the New York Times, October 29, Section A, p. 25.

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