The general attitude towards reality both in the world at large as well as among the overwhelming majority of those who self-identify as Catholics is rooted in Evolutionism.
Evolutionism is the belief — based on pseudo-science and inadequate data — that our world is very old, on the order of four billion years, and that the abundance and variety of life upon it is the result of an initial, distant-past spontaneous self-assembly of organic molecules into primitive cells — also known as the Big Bang — and that from there, through the combination of genetic mutations, natural selection of the fittest, and abundant available time, the plethora of creatures we see today emerged.
In this scenario, many creatures emerged while others went extinct.
Implicit in this argument is the assumption that there is no ultimate purpose to things: they just randomly happened. No Designer, no God.
Appended to this way of thinking is the “Cosmology of the Big Bang” that serves to account for the great variety of stellar, galactic, and other phenomena that are seen in the skies.
This Cosmology purports to explain the random formation of the Solar System and the Earth and the rotation and orbiting it experiences. This acts as the background of and stage upon which the Evolutionist succession of organisms occurred.
In totality, this scenario can be called Evolutionist Cosmology.
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The Dispatch
Evolutionist Cosmology has, to varying degrees, been indoctrinated into to people’s minds through education and mass media of various forms over multiple generations, resulting in a mass-scale acceptance.
As a result, many people understand human events and natural phenomena as implicitly purposeless. If a fish can, over many, many generations, evolve into an air-breathing dinosaur — a totally different kind of animal — then right and wrong can also evolve. Similarly, morality can also change over time because that’s what dinosaurs did when they became birds.
According to this way of thinking, just as how animals developed over time from primitive cells to vastly complex humans, human history has undergone a similar evolution from past generations being far more primitive and far less intelligent than we are today.
God has no place in this worldview, given the random nature of things. Sacred Scripture — especially Genesis — is ancient and therefore reflects the backward, unsophisticated, and simple-minded people of the times in which it was written. At best, it is regarded as a mythological account suitable only for savages.
Relevance to the Church
It is precisely this Evolutionist mentality that has enabled the heresy of Modernism to arise.
Modernism is essentially theology wedded to Evolutionism. Unlike true development of doctrine, wherein doctrine is more deeply understood and explained with time in the same original sense, in Modernism doctrine evolves, that is, changes meaning over time. Its errors have led to the vast plague of growing ills affecting the Church roughly for the past two centuries — ills spiritual, doctrinal, ecclesiastical, and philosophical that are thoroughly addressed on this website and elsewhere.
The intention with this article is to enter the fight for truth from the angle of the Natural Sciences. In an upcoming series of articles, we will be addressing, among other topics, the abundant geological evidence for the historical reality of the Great Flood.
Before embarking on this journey, in the next essay we will look at principles of thinking, needed concepts, and pitfalls in thought that can lead one astray from right reasoning.
