"Does Vatican I Deny Theistic Evolution?
" Dear Robert,
I am writing to dispute the relevance of several Council statements to the evoltution debate. Note, I do not support evolution; I am trying to strengthen the creationist stance by correcting what I view as a mistake in their argumentation. This is a statement from Vatican I, which I got from your site:
Code:
"If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing or shall have said that God created not by a volition free of all necessity, but as necessarily as He necessarily loves Himself, or, shall have denied that the world was created to the glory of God: let him be anathema."
Now, a theistic evolutionist would confess that the world and all the things that are in it have been produced ex nihilo. He would, however, state that intermediate forms passed between the first life forms and the current ones. Therefore, the only "sticking point" in this passage would seem to be "as regards their whole substance." However, this line does not really address the issue of evolution. You see, "all things ... material, as regards their whole substance . . . from nothing" does not rule out intermediate forms. As I understand it, the inference that creationists draw from this passage is that all animals and plants have been created in their entire nature/substance from nothing. Hence, no current species could have been created from a pre-existing species. However, God created man from mud. Hence, man, as regards his whole substance (taken in this sense), was NOT created from nothing. The "whole substance" reference simply does not rule out the creation of one material thing from another so long as the first material thing in the chain was created ex nihilo. Ergo, it does not rule out creation from any specific type of thing, including living ones.
It seems that this passage is concerned with making God the Lord of creation. The rest of the passage deals with His free will in creating the world to His own glory, not with the issue of evolution. I take this a rejection of the idea that matter exists eternally and independently of God. By saying "all things . . . as regards their whole substance," the Council Fathers ruled out the idea that there is any element in the universe (prime matter, Platonic ideas, etc.) that exists eternally and independently of God. Whether God can take one material substance that He has already created ex nihilo (e.g. a living body) and turn it into another substance is not in question; in any case, the second substance would still rely on God's creative power for its entire existence.
Therefore, creationists shoot themselves in the foot when they try to make this passage in Vatican I support their specific anti-evolution stance. The same argument applies to the Council of Florence quotation that you cited in your answer to question 63.
Again, to clarify the issue, I am not addressing any other argument from Councils or Popes, nor am asserting that evolution is true. All that I am saying is that the Vatican I and Florence texts do not really address the evolution of species per se, and are therefore irrelevant to the discussion.
Sincerely,
Tobias T
R. Sungenis: Tobias, I understand what you are saying. Believe me, we have gone round-and-round about this issue at the Kolbe center. We have come to the resolution that: Properly interpreted, Laterna IV and Vatican I both rule out theistic evolution, but, in order to make this clear it will require another magisterial statement saying so.
On the technical side of the issue, the “mud” that God took in the process of creating Adam does not necessarily mean that the constituent parts or even the basal elements of the mud were altered or even used in order to form Adam. Mud, in itself, doesn’t contain all or even some of what would be required to create Adam, and thus God had to create most, if not all, of Adam from nothing. The same would be true of the animals created from on the Sixth day (“Let the earth bring forth living creatures…”). The only way for a theistic evolutionist to counter this would be to prove that the mud was an integral and necessary substance in the creation of Adam. God may be using mud for merely for spiritual/pedagogical reasons (e.g. Jesus’ use of mud in the curing of the blind man. The mud itself has no medicinal qualities).
Second, the context of Vatican I statement, although you are certainly correct in stressing its desire to separate itself from pantheism, is more pervasive. For example, it says that the spiritual was also created ex nihilo, which I assume refers to angels. Since it is common knowledge (at least no one I know disputes it) that angels did not evolve, the context of Vatican I’s statement “whole substance” is assuming a non-evolutionary creation. The angels were created in their whole substance. Moreover, by the principle of syntactical congruence, the parameters applied to the angels must also be applied to man, otherwise we have two different working definitions of “whole substance,” which cannot be the case.
When we combine this reasoning with the statement from the Council of Cologne given around the same time that outrightly condemned evolution, and considering that Vatican I’s statement added the phrase “in their whole substance” that was not in Lateran IV (even though Vatican I is quoting Lateran IV) just 11 years after Darwin published his Origin of Species which denied that creatures were created in their whole substance, at once, I think you can see why I lean to this viewpoint.
God be with you."
AGAIN PLEASE COMMENT ON CONTENT ONLY AND NOT THE PEOPLE SAYING THE CONTENT–THANKS!!
