Evolutionism is a theory that badly needs refuting, but you’re not going to do it by telling me that the creation of man and the creation of the fruit fly were equally miraculous events …

OK, I promise not to do that.

… nor by asserting vague reservations about the speed of light and the properties of matter.

These aren’t vague reservations, and this isn’t a peripheral issue. The laws of nature were not always what we observe today. That’s not speculation, that’s the truth. The creation events, as you would certainly acknowledge, were supernatural (or pre-natural) processes, in which earthly matter came into existance ex nihilo. If a team of scientists looked upon the world just one year from the date of creation, set up their laboratory, and attempted to date the rocks (or whatever you imagine was there) based on the assumptions they use today, what do you think the results would have been? The results would be inaccurate because their assumptions would not be valid. Similarly, if the universe is expanding, is it not probable that the rate of expansion was different at the creation than it is today, and that the stars began their life much closer to earth than they are today, and that the light we see today has not come from the stars in their present location, and that the stars cannot tell us their true age because they cannot tell us their true distances? Nevermind that the speed of light depends upon the medium in which it travels, and that medium was obviously different when the stars were created than it is today. All of this is only to say that estimating the age of the earth, or of the universe, is something entirely different from dating an oak tree or a horse femur. We can’t use the same assumptions about natural processes when we are dating something that reaches back to creation itself. I don’t see anything the least bit controversial about that.

You need to say when these things were not what they are, based on some evidentiary necessity and not on your sense that the evidence doesn’t sit well with Revelation.

The Creation, the period of incorrupt nature before the Fall, and the Deluge. These are the three historical times when it is certain that “nature” did not behave in the way we would expect from modern observations. Catholics have to keep this in mind when dating anything that may have been affected by them. Obviously, the age of the earth falls into this category. The evidentiary necessity is revelation itself. We know these things happened and that the laws of nature were impacted. Any scientific method that ignores them is suspect.

Do you really want a God who creates all things in maturity (which levels our sense of the miraculous), or who tinkers here and there frequently and unpredictably, thus rendering impossible our ability to distinguish the miraculous from the natural?

I don’t understand how this levels the sense of the miraculous. Anyway, belief in a young earth does not require a God who perpetually and arbitrarily tinkers with nature so that nothing is predictable. This is required by theistic evolution, but not special creation.

If you want to defeat evolution, defeat it on its own terms, not on terms dictated by the possibilities of spiritual truths.

That seems to be the approach of the Intelligent Design movement, which is well and good if it succeeds. But that’s not my approach. The terms of evolution are ultimately flawed, so why should Catholics accede to them at all? I agree that the “possibilities of spiritual truths” should not dictate the terms of the debate. Rather, evolution can and should be defeated by all the material and historical truths that are available to us, no matter their source. The problem with the ID crowd is that they generally want to exclude the facts of Christian revelation.

I believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old. This is not in itself an article of faith, and I might be wrong about it, but the burden of proof is on the old-earth promoters. The scientists, who have no tool but naturalistic extrapolation, have certainly not proven their case. Scientists calculate the age of the earth by extrapolating from natural processes they are capable of observing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. Now, these extrapolations usually work, because natural processes are usually a pretty reliable indicator of natural history. But this is not always the case, as Mark Twain humorously illustrates:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. This is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolithic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

In the ten minutes I have remaining, let me summarize the reasons why I believe in a young earth:

1. I believe that Genesis was written as history and that the biblical genealogies are reliable. They are not precise, they can be confusing, there are inexplicable gaps, and reasonable scholars can disagree about a few hundred years. But they are not off by 4.6 billion years. Even old-earth evolutionists admit that human civilization is not more than 25,000 years old.

2. An old earth would therefore require me to believe that the earth was around for billions of years before the creation of man. But our Catholic Faith tells us that the earth was made for man. How do we explain God’s purpose for the earth for so long without man?

3. Sin brought corruption into the world: not only human death, but the corruption of all creation. That is the biblical teaching and the patristic consensus. In an old earth scenario the cycle of natural conflict, death, and decay is established long before sin entered the world through Adam’s transgression.

4. Which brings us to Adam and Eve, who, according to Catholic doctrine, are the first-created man and woman. How does their creation fit into an old-earth scenario? Most old-earthers believe in an old earth because it is the only thing that makes the biological evolution of mankind seem remotely possible, and they desperately want to be believe in some form of theistic evolution. Yet the biological evolution of mankind cannot be reconciled with Catholic revelation, which holds not only that Adam and Eve were the first created man and woman, but that they also were the first and only parents of the human race.

Let us assume, for a moment, that a biological mechanism for human speciation has been discovered and it is now possible to imagine that man could have evolved from primordial seaweed. If man truly evolved from some lesser form of life, via natural selection, how likely is it that the first man and the first woman happened to have emerged, after billions of years, at the same time and in the same place via the same natural process? (I anticipate: “Because God intervened and overrode the natural process!” To which I reply: That is precisely what I believe happened at the creation of man and the world, events which natural processes cannot explain.)

5. Scripture and Tradition clearly allow for the creation of man and the world in a state of maturity. If you are a theist and believe in creation ex nihilo, then you must at least believe in this possibility. Although the possibility of maturity at the moment of creation doesn’t say anything one way or the other about the age of the earth, it does say something about modern techniques used to date the earth: things may have an appearance of age. The closer we get to origins, the less we are able to assume that apparent maturity is the product of age.

6. There was a time when nature was not. The creation itself was a supernatural event and cannot be explained by nature. What are the implications of this basic truth? It means that the speed of light was not always what it is today, the properties of matter were not always what they are today, the laws of physics were not always what they are today, etc. Nature and science are insufficient: old-earth theory assumes that they are sufficient.

“An age of billions of years for the Universe has serious theological and scientific arguments against it. Since naturalistic evolution is rejected, it becomes necessary to resort to countless divine interventions to account for how life-forms kept coming into being. In contrast, Tradition holds that the Creation events reached finality soon after the events of Creation. The interdependence within diverse bio-systems necessarily requires fairly rapid creation. Fruit trees created on Day 3 need birds and bees to arrive on Day 5, not millions of years later. Why the quest to supplant direct creation with direct intervention, and which Scripture passages can be cited in support? ‘A day is as 1,000 years’ (2 Peter 3:8) refers to timeless eternity rather than to the Creation events. We know that God instantly created space, time and matter, and instantly turned water into wine and instantly brought the dead back to life. In keeping with Scripture passages, why not allow Him to instantly stretch out the heavens (i.e., the Universe) and lightwaves on Day 4, less than 10,000 years ago?

… The global Flood of Noah is usually denied by advocates of Progressive Creation in favour of local floods. But this means that God’s ‘rainbow’ promise, to no more destroy mankind through a flood, has been broken many times. (eg The Bangladesh tidal wave flood of 1971 killed 300,000 people.) … If a global Flood were to be conceded, the next question waiting to be addressed is this: did it occur before or after the sin of Adam? Genesis reveals that it occurred after Adam’s sin, thus it must have occurred less than 10,000 years ago. The strata and fossils thus cannot be any older than 10,000 years.

Those who favour eons of time have to address Leo XIII’s benchmark teaching in Providentissimus Deus (1893). He taught that there are various senses used in Scripture but insisted that the literal, obvious sense must hold ground until shown to be disproven. Since a meaning of 24 hours natural days was held by most of the Fathers and was permitted by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1909 as the proper sense and thus is unlikely to be overturned, the onus of responsibility of proof lies entirely with those who prefer eons of years. It may not be possible to prove a young Universe scientifically but I contend that, ultimately, the long ages view is contradictory of Catholic Tradition.

Where is the proof beyond doubt that the Universe is billions of years old? Where is the indication in Genesis that a meaning other than natural days was intended to be conveyed and understood by the reader? The sacred writer could easily have informed us that the Creation took place over millions of years. Did the Fathers and Rabbis get it wrong, in holding that Genesis is primarily historical revelation, until the revisionist theological impact of the Darwinist era suggested otherwise? Where is the consistency of reasoning in arguing that the Days of creation were much longer, but the hundreds of years ages of patriarchs were much shorter than that?”

As I have said elsewhere, belief in a young earth may not be something on the level of doctrine, but it is an inference from established doctrine. To summarize:

1. The Bible is inerrant and Genesis is history;
2. Corollary A: There was a real worldwide Flood, and it occured after the Fall;
3. Corollary B: The biblical genealogies refer to real people and real events;
4. Adam and Eve are the first created man and woman;
5. Adam and Eve are the first and only parents of the entire human race;
6. Eve was created from the side of Adam;
7. Adam and Eve would not have died had they never sinned;
8. There was no enmity between Man and Nature before the Fall;
9. The world was created ex nihilo;
10. The world was created for Man.

The weight of these truths lend themselves to a young earth scenario, quite apart from scientific investigation. Which leads us to the subject of “neutrality” in science: any science worthy of the name should be about discovering the truth, and should therefore incorporate all relevent truths into its method. Some people do not think that this approach is “neutral” enough, and so they ignore any truths that happen to have a religious source. Science then becomes an entirely self-referential and tautological system that is purposely blind to significant truths about material reality.