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Cardinal ratzinger’s idea of creation

Paula Haigh

In 1990 Our Sunday Visitor published a book by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger entitled In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of Creation and the Fall. The book is based on a series of four Lenten homilies originally delivered in 1981 and published in German in 1986. The English translation is done by Boniface Ramsey, O.P. and the book as published by OSV carries no Imprimatur. We do not then have here, in any sense of the term, an official document of the Church’s Magisterium. We have only the Cardinal’s personal views, even though these are shared by many (perhaps even a majority) of Catholics today.

In any case, what matters is the truth. So it is imperative to point out that the Cardinal’s position rests upon two major errors of the merely natural order: literary form, and an error concerning modern science. Both of these can be discussed without recourse to any truth of faith.

The first error is to institute a separation between form and content (otherwise designated as structure and meaning, expression and thought) in the text of Genesis. Such a separation is not warranted by the reality of any speech construct or literary form. The structure or arrangement of words within the speech construct cannot be separated from the ideas in the mind to which they refer on the one hand, and to the things in the external world which they may signify on the other hand. Obviously, as has just been done, these entities can and must be distinguished for serious epistemological reasons. But to separate them, as the Cardinal does, is to do violence to the literary reality. The Cardinal says:

...only the reality (i.e., content] that shines through these images (i.e., forms] would be what was intended and what was truly enduring. Thus Scripture would not wish to inform us about how the different species of plant life gradually appeared or how the sun and the moon and the stars were established. Its purpose ultimately would be to say one thing: God created the world. (p14]

Here the theme or main idea of the first chapter of Genesis has been abstracted from the text. That is alright. Genesis I is saying God created the world. But is it fair, is it honest, is it just, is it even realistic to insist (as the Cardinal and so many others do today] that this one idea is all that the author of Genesis intended to tell us?

Let us make an analogy. Here is a paragraph by John Howard Bryant [1808-1902]:

The groves were God’s first temples. Ere, man learned to hew the shaft, and lay the architrave, and spread the roof above them – ere he framed the lofty vault, to gather and roll back the sound of anthems; in the darkling wood, amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down and offered to the Mightiest, solemn thanks and supplication.[1]

The form or structure of this paragraph is a string of little narratives illustrating and elaborating upon the main idea (i.e., the content) which is contained in the topic sentence: “The groves were God’s first temples.”

The form or structure of this paragraph is not unlike that of Genesis I, which also opens with its topic sentence, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and then proceeds to illustrate and elaborate upon this theme.

Now suppose it were insisted that the only thing Mr. Bryant really intended to tell us was that men worshipped God in the woods before they learned how to build churches. We don’t need to know what it is to “hew” a “shaft”, and much less should we be curious as to what an “architrave” might be. Furthermore, all that about gathering and rolling back the sound is sheer nonsense signifying nothing. Would this not be to deny any importance at all to the form, even to discount its very existence?

Could such an attitude be in any way justified? Could such a response possibly have been the author’s intention when he composed this paragraph? And could such an assessment possibly do justice to Mr. Bryant’s skillfully crafted prose? Of course not. And yet, this is exactly how the Cardinal treats the literary form of Genesis 1.

The inescapably sad fact is that modern exegetes have done unwarranted violence to the literary reality of Holy Scripture (not to mention its Divine character) by divorcing the content or idea from the form or structure in which the idea is embodied – incarnated, if you will.

An axiom of sound linguistic and literary theory is this: It’s the structure (i.e., Form) that means. This formula perfectly expresses both the distinction between form and content and the unity that they constitute in any speech construct, human or Divine. But if the idea or content is abstracted from its literary form, then the latter – which in the case of Genesis 1-3 is historical narrative – is made irrelevant, and exegetes thus free themselves to “reconcile” the facts of Scripture with the current theories of scientists. We are told all we need to believe is that God created the world and that it is for science to tell us how He did it.

One incontrovertible fact remains: no honest or competent student of literature could sanction such treatment of literary form.[2]

Having abstracted the idea of a Creator-God from Genesis 1, the Cardinal proceeds in his second homily to a discussion of “The Reasonableness of Faith in Creation” as seen in opposition to the atheism of Jacques Monod, whose book, Chance and Necessity (1970) provoked a great deal of controversy in Europe.

When all is said and done, the Cardinal has accomplished nothing more than to give a certain naturalistic proof for the existence of a God of supreme intelligence who “shines through the reasonableness of His creation.” (p37) Well, Plato, Aristotle, and many other ancient philosophers have perceived this same “reasonableness”of creation. But the question is: Does Holy Scripture (i.e., Divine Revelation) add anything to what human intelligence is able to find out for itself? The Cardinal answers:

The reasonableness of the universe provides us with access to God’s Reason, and the Bible is and continues to be the true “enlightenment,” which has given the world over to human reason and not to exploitation by human reason, because it opened reason to God’s truth and love. Therefore we must not in our own day conceal our faith in creation. (p28)

There is much of reason here and little, if anything, of the truths of Faith, of Divine Revelation, that transcend reason. The Cardinal indulges mainly in the task of Theodicy, of Natural Theology of

“the Preambles of Faith.”

There is nothing wrong in such an exercise, but one is hard put to see just what is specifically Catholic about that understanding of Creation.

Later in the first homily the Cardinal brings in “Christology as a Criterion.” (p25) Now the discourse develops into a kind of gnostic gospel of freedom.

But what is most distressing to the Catholic mind is the Cardinal’s failure here and in the book as a whole to give even the slightest token reference to the Woman of Genesis 3 or to that eternal war God there declared between Her Seed and Her and the seed of the serpent (Satan). Such an omission seems inexcusable in any kind of discussion of Genesis 1-3. The Cardinal, however, is apparently not willing to renounce his separation of “form” and “content”, not even to give the Mother of God her due place in “salvation history.”

The Cardinal’s discourse in the second homily on “The Enduring Significance of the Symbolic Elements in the Text” puts forth some token respect for the fact that the phrase “God said” occurs ten times, thus anticipating the Ten Commandments, and that the number seven “permeates the whole in a manner that cannot be overlooked.” (p39) But what does the Cardinal make of this fact? Anything relating to the origin of the weekly Sabbath observance? No. Rather, we get into a discourse on the cosmic rhythm of worship and God’s freedom that is thoroughly obfuscatory.

So let us proceed to the second error, a major assumption underlying all four homilies. Very early in the first homily, soon after quoting Genesis 1:1-19, the Cardinal says:

…these words [of Scripture] give rise to a certain conflict. They are beautiful and familiar, but are they true? Everything seems to speak against it, for science has long since disposed of the concepts that we have just now heard – the idea of a world that is completely comprehensible in terms of space and time, and the idea that creation was built up piece by piece over the course of seven days. Instead of this we now face measurements that transcend all comprehension. Today we hear of the Big Bang, which happened billions of years ago and with which the universe began its expansion that continues to occur without interruption. And it was not in neat succession that the stars were hung and the green of the fields created; it was rather in complex ways and over vast periods of time that the earth and the universe were constructed as we now know them. (p12)

The mistake the Cardinal makes here and throughout the entire book is to assume that modern scientists are correct when they speak about the:

1.The Big Bang theory and the expansion of the universe.

2.The age of the universe and of the earth.

3.The origin, age, and direction of mankind’s historical Sojourn by way of biological and cultural evolution.

Has science proven, or can it prove, that the universe is and has been expanding since the “Big Bang” explosion that allegedly started everything? Or can science prove that such a “creative” explosion ever took place?

Absolutely not. Such is simply not within reach of empirical science.

The only basis for each of the successive cosmogonies put forth in modern times has been a kind of inferential guess at best but most of the time purely speculative fantasy.

The Steady-State or Continuous Creation Theory which preceded the Big Bang was invented by Sir Fred Hoyle. There never was any real evidence for it, and he has since repudiated it.

The Big Bang theory is based on “background” or assumed “left over” radiation in space. It is supposed, but without evidence, that this radiation in space is left over from a primeval explosion, the Big Bang.

But more and more objections are being raised by scientists themselves against this theory. For example, the background radiation in space should be homogeneous if produced by a Big Bang. But it is not. Morris lists five serious flaws in the theory.[3]

The idea of the expanding universe comes out of the Big Bang theory. Most cosmogonists, like Isaac Asimov, speculate that before the Big Bang, the universe contracted into a super dense atom which then exploded and sent everything into a centrifugal or expanding movement. This is all purely imaginative. Asimov is a prolific writer of science fiction.

Great credence has been given the expanding universe idea by the “red shift” and the Doppler interpretation of it...

A source of light which is moving toward us will emit light waves with a shorter wavelength than will a light source moving away from us. In the first case, this would make the light bluer, in the second, redder, than the light spectrum from a stationary source. Actually this shows up as a shift in the spectral lines of the elements toward the blue end of the spectrum in the one case and toward the red end in the other.[4]

Such is the “Doppler Effect” or Doppler interpretation of the red shift on the spectrum caused by light waves. But is it infallibly certain that the red shift is caused by objects speeding away from earth? There is no such certainty.

There are problems with the expanding universe idea...the recession velocities of some of the quasars (stars of exceptionally high energies) are so high as to make the whole Doppler interpretation of the red shifts very questionable. There are many other examples of discordant red shifts besides those of the quasars. There are, for example, galaxies so closely associated with each other that they are actually “connected” by luminous filaments of gas. Yet their red shifts are vastly different. There are also binary stars whose two members show different red shifts.

Some have suggested that the red shifts are due to light losing some of its energy as it crosses the vast reaches of space. In any case, the expanding universe concept (and therefore the Big Bang Theory which depends on it) must be considered improbable at best.

And such improbabilities are no substitute for Divine Revelation.

We come now to what is certainly the most securely entrenched idea of all – that the cosmos is billions of years old, specifically 4.5 billion years old, although some say as much as 20 billion.

How have scientists arrived at such figures? There are several methods, all of them based on assumptions and indirect observations of the distance of celestial bodies from the earth.

The greatest distance that can be measured directly by methods of [mathematical] triangulation, using the two extremes of the earth’s orbit as end points on a base line, is about three hundred light years.

Morris is a heliocentrist and so, we must hasten to point out that even this “direct” observation is based on the unproven and unprovable assumption the earth is in orbit around the sun.

The most popular reason for the billions of years is based on the calculated distance of celestial bodies from earth times the speed of light (which is said to be 180,000 miles per second). If some stars are billions of light years away, then by definition, that light must have been traveling over space for billions of years. Therefore the universe is billions of years old. So the theory goes.

This reasoning seems airtight, especially to the nonscientists. But some objections have been put forward by the professional scientists themselves. Some believe that the velocity of light has been decreasing over time. Others believe that space is curved, in which case the light from a virtually infinite distance would arrive on earth in as little time as sixteen years.

Finally, let us assume for a moment, reasoning as the Cardinal does, on a purely natural level, that the universe came into being all of a sudden and fully formed. After all, are not the billions of years based on the opposite assumption that it took billions of years for all things to evolve?

But if things did not evolve – and there is no proof that they did – then a fully formed, full-grown universe from the beginning would be one functioning just as Holy Scripture describes it, and Adam and Eve would have seen all the visible stars on their first night on earth, even though the stars had been created only some forty-eight hours previously, or, if you prefer one of St. Augustine’s theories, instantaneously with themselves.[6]

What we see most clearly by thinking along these lines is that creation as described in Genesis is really the only alternative to evolution, and vice versa. Furthermore, contrary to what the Cardinal claims to be their “complementarity” (p65 ff) creation and evolution are mutually exclusive. You simply cannot have both.

Darwin became ill whenever he thought about the human eye. He knew it could not have evolved. You either have a fully formed and functional (i.e., seeing) eye or you do not. We are talking about evolution, not devolution. Try to imagine, if you can, all the creatures with eyes today surviving for millions of years (even thousands or hundreds) with only half or three-quarter formed eyes. With yet evolving eyes, creatures would be completely dysfunctional. The same goes for an only partially formed or evolving universe. It would never have made it.

Worst of all, it is an insult to God to claim that He created all things in such an imperfect and inefficient manner. Even Plato and Aristotle knew better than that, for the eternal world of the ancients hung fully formed in a great “chain of being” from all eternity from the eternal One, Good, and Prime Mover.

The natural reason of the ancient Greeks is thus seen to be closer to the truth of Divine Revelation than the perverted reason of modern man with his evolutionary absurdity.

For the age of the earth, scientists again have led an all too gullible public to believe that radiometric dating methods yield infallibly accurate ages for this earth and its rocks. But such is very far from being the case.

...it is essential to stress the arbitrary assumptions that must be made before any such process (as radioactive decay] will actually yield an apparent age for the earth... These assumptions are as follows:

1. The process must always have operated at the same rate at which it functions today.

2. The system in which the process operates must always have functioned as a closed system throughout its history. [This means that other extraneous factors could not have interfered with or disrupted the process].