Audio only:
In this episode Trent interviews fellow Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin about his debate with Catholic young earth creationist Gideon Lazar and then talk about the concerns they have regarding this view of human origins.
Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers’ apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Today we’re going to be doing a little bit of a debate debrief, but not one involving me actually, I mean to debriefing someone else. We’ll talk a little bit about that, but more, I want to talk about kind of a larger topic that’s been brought up and it’s one I’ve really wrestled with talking about here on the podcast, and that is the question of evolution, because I know that there are a lot of people who listen to this podcast or watch this channel, at least a decent number of them who don’t accept the theory of evolution, or maybe believe in a young earth, a universe that’s only a few thousand years old, for example, and many of you know from my recent rebuttal I did on the attack on the [inaudible 00:01:01] with the science, I don’t dispute Big Bang cosmology, you all have heard me mention evolution before.
Trent Horn:
And people have said, “Trent, why don’t you do a whole episode? Why don’t you defend the theory of evolution?” And I’m really excited for our guest today to talk about this, because this is something that I’ve always saw for a long time. If people want to believe in this, that’s great. I engage in this with atheists and others, but I also have concerns about, even if people have Liberty to believe, to deny the theory of evolution, I would say, or believe the earth is very young, that there are costs incurred with that. And I just think it’s very important that we understand the cost of one’s beliefs so that we can think about them rationally and deliberate over whether we should hold these beliefs. So we’re going to talk to Jimmy Akin, senior apologist to Catholic Answers, and he actually just got done today, as we’ve recorded this, debating another Catholic on Young-Earth Creationism, Gideon…
Jimmy Akin:
Lazar.
Trent Horn:
Lazar. Yeah, Gideon Lazar is his name. So Jimmy, welcome back to the podcast.
Jimmy Akin:
Hey, my pleasure to be here.
Trent Horn:
All right. So tell me a little bit, how did this debate come about and what in particular were you and Gideon debating?
Jimmy Akin:
Well, it came about because Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas was interviewing Gideon, who is a convert from Eastern Orthodox, and he was doing an interview with him about his conversion. And during the course of that interview, it emerged that Gideon was a Young-Earth Creationist. And so afterwards, Matt thought that it might be interesting to have a debate on that subject, so he contacted me and he contacted Gideon and he set up a debate, which we had today on Pints with Aquinas. And so, the formal resolution for the debate was that the universe is only a few thousand years old, but we went into other subjects as well, including evolution.
Trent Horn:
Sure. Okay. So I guess there’s two different issues that are at play here. And once again, I want to be very respectful, especially of those who listen and support this channel, who hold the other view, who hold a view that Gideon would hold, that the earth is only a few thousand years old or the universe is only a few thousand years old, the mainstream scientific account of evolution is false and why they would hold that view. I do want our listeners to know that I disagree strongly with that view. And I’m concerned that in adopting that view, it could make it very hard for people to consider Catholicism to be reasonable. When I’ve engaged atheists, many of them have said that one thing that they appreciate about Catholicism is they don’t think they have to check their intellect at the door by doing things like denying evolution or things like that.
Trent Horn:
It’s easier for them to accept it. And some have been able to cross the gap and come to faith because they felt like they didn’t have to believe in the things that are unreasonable. So I guess, yeah Jimmy, I’m just processing all here with you. But I do, I don’t want to, but I wanted to, and I appreciate this with you, Jimmy, that to take another person’s [inaudible 00:04:10], I’m not going to say, “You guys are just dumb.” It’s like, well the church fathers did believe, many of them or all of them believe the earth is very young. What does that count for? How do we reconcile Adam and Eve? So maybe you see where I’m coming from here that the wanting to weigh, treating people’s beliefs respectfully, but also understanding the costs that can be imposed with certain kinds of beliefs. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Jimmy Akin:
Oh, no. I regularly point out whenever I touch on this topic, that whether or not the earth is young and whether or not evolution happened are matters that the church has ruled to be not matters of faith, but matters of science. And so properly speaking, the church doesn’t have a teaching on those questions and it leaves it up to people using the reason perspective to try to figure out just how old is the universe, just how did various life forms get here. And if someone comes to the conclusion that they think the earth is young, or that they think evolution didn’t happen, then they are not violating church teaching. And so, I go out of my way to make room for Young-Earth Creationists and to support the liberty that they have to hold their opinion. I don’t happen to hold that opinion. And there are costs that as you put it, that one has to bear in adopting that opinion, but it’s not something that makes you a bad Catholic or a bad Christian. And so I don’t look down on people from that perspective. I try to support them.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So we’ll talk a little bit about the debate and then maybe we can talk about the costs that are involved. So, what’s interesting is you guys were not debating the question, can a Catholic believe in evolution? Or can they believe in Young-Earth Creationism? It seems like you were debating more of a factual question, is the universe several thousand years old? One part of the debate, I think this is about halfway through, I thought was really interesting with Gideon was that you asked him, “Do you agree that the magisterium strongly supports an old earth and the theory of evolution.” And that the position he’s taking would be in contradiction to the magisterium, because I mean, as Catholics following what the church officially teaches, the magisterium is a really big deal here. So it seemed like your position is that you can be a good Catholic and a Young-Earth Creationist. Do you think Gideon’s position is also, “You can be a good Catholic and believe in evolution.” I mean, it seemed like you kind of pulled that out of them.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. We both agree on that the church doesn’t have a definitive teaching in this area and that Catholics have liberty to have a range of views. What I was trying to do at that point in the debate, that was during our cross examination section, and so, Gideon’s strategy in his opening statement was essentially to say the church permits different views here, but I think based on these following scripture passages and on various things said by the church fathers including the widespread view among them that the earth is only a few thousand years old, that tells us, even though the magisterium doesn’t tell us, but that the sources of faith, scripture and tradition tell us that the earth is only a few thousand years old. And in my opening statement, my approach was to say, “Well, the magisterium is the authentic interpreter of scripture and tradition.
Jimmy Akin:
And the magisterium has issued a series of rulings over the last a hundred years that have said that the sources of faith, scripture and tradition do not require a young earth anti-evolution position. And the magisterium has gone on to praise contemporary scientific studies regarding those questions. So for example, Pius the 12th, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1951 asserted that the earth is like 5 billion years old and the earth is even older. So he was a strong supporter of an old earth. And similarly you have other statements, both from Pius the 12th and from later popes and church bodies supporting the findings of mainstream science. And so, what I was seeking to do at that point in my cross examination was to say to Gideon, “Well look, do you acknowledge that the magisterium has ruled on these questions and said they are not, that the sources of faith do not require your position?”
Jimmy Akin:
And he acknowledged basically yes, he kind of went over that admission very quickly, which you would expect, but he acknowledged that yeah, the magisterium has said this, at least that’s what I understood him to acknowledge.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And even more so than that, I think you were able to get him to say, because it would be one thing if the magisterium had absolutely no position on these questions and just said, Catholics are free to agree and disagree. And then there you might say, well, this guy’s interpretation sounds good or that guy’s interpretation seems really good. But I think the scale gets tipped a little bit more when it comes to the plausibility of an older earth and evolution. When you cite all of these… And we say magisterium was talking about the teachings of bishops or of the Pope or the bishops [inaudible 00:10:01] with each other.
Jimmy Akin:
And [inaudible 00:10:02] with the Pope.
Trent Horn:
And the Pope, correct. So these encyclical, these addresses that it’s not as if the church just completely as its hands up, at least in the past 100 years or the past 70 years on this question. So that it tips the scale more towards the direction that if you’re given a choice to believe in a young earth or an old earth or evolution, or anti-evolution, the scale gets tipped towards evolution and an older earth, at least in the point of the magisterium supporting it, not just being to totally agnostic. Would I be summarizing that correctly?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. A related question that I asked Gideon in cross examination was, does he acknowledge that for an ordinary Catholic who doesn’t have eight PhDs in biblical and theological disciplines that you need to have a really comprehensive view of the data, would he acknowledge that for an ordinary Catholic that it’s reasonable for them to say, “Well, I’m going to go with the magisterium on saying that the sources of faith don’t require a young earth view and to then trust the science that the magisterium has been recommending.” And once again, he seemed to acknowledge that very briefly, but then he of course wanted to move on to reemphasize his case.
Trent Horn:
Right? And I think another point, this was brought up well when he posed an argument and I think it can be a very powerful one for people to say, “Well, the council of Trent says you can’t hold a view.” And this is a course me grossly oversimplifying it, which I think is the case when it’s presented to people, you’ll often hear, I put like this, the council of Trent said you can’t disagree with the fathers on a matter of faith and morals, and they all believe the earth is young. So we can’t agree with them, and I thought you had a very cogent response to that.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. My response is basically twofold. The first part is people are misreading and misapplying what Trent said because Trent issued both doctrinal and disciplinary decree and the passage where Trent says that one cannot disagree with the unanimous consent of the fathers is actually a disciplinary statement, it is not a doctrinal statement. If you read it in context, it’s very clear that what they’re doing is regulating public discourse. And it says Catholics do not have the Liberty to advance interpretations of scripture contrary to those of the church or contrary to the unanimous consent of the fathers in their writings or their debates, even if their writings were not meant to be published. And so, this is clearly a disciplinary statement. They are not saying the fathers constitute a fourth manifestation of the charism of infallibility in addition to the Pope and an ecumenical council and the ordinary and universal magisterium.
Jimmy Akin:
That Trend is not teaching that the fathers, many of whom were not even bishops, can exercise the charism of infallibility in that way. The other part of my answer was to point out that there’s a question of, is this a matter of faith or morals because that’s what the fathers are competent to teach on. They’re not competent to teach on like atomic science or something. And in fact, as far as I’m aware, none of the fathers believed in atoms. At the existence or non-existence of atoms is not a matter of faith or morals, so what about this? Well, that’s where the magisterium rulings come in because the magisterium has looked at this question and said, “It’s not a matter of faith and morals, how old the earth is or whether evolution happened.” And so, even if you were to appeal to the church fathers on this, you’re appealing to something that the magisterium has ruled is not within their competence to tell us because it’s not a matter of faith and morals.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I think it’s interesting here. Some people will try to get around that to say, “Oh yes, the fathers held antiquated or outdated scientific views.” But that didn’t have anything to do with faith or morals like the age of the earth. But I think that’s begging the question at this point, because that’s precisely what we’re debating. If anything though, I think the common example would be like geocentrism that… I’d say probably all of them believe the earth was at the center of the universe, which was an aristotelian idea, they came from… That was common among the ancient Greeks. It was not just a strictly GeoChristian idea. And people say, “Oh well, that’s not, that was just science, not to do with faith.” Well, but when you get to the time of Galileo, what are people arguing about? I think it’s in Joshua chapter 10, the sun stood still. Well, interpreting what this passage means will fall a lot from how you understand the heavens to be orchestrated.
Trent Horn:
So, I think you’re right to understand, “Hey, is this a matter of faith and morals? The magisterium has spoken on this.” Another point, maybe you get your thought on, would be that I don’t know if it’s really that fair or helpful to say, “Well, here’s what the fathers thought on the age of the earth.” When we’re taking from their writings, something that was an assumption of the time that’s not debated. It’s one thing if it was like, “Oh, well Augustine told these people the earth is not…” I mean maybe the eternity of the world that the Greeks would’ve held, “Although it’s eternal we say, oh, it’s created.” But it’s not like there was a debate between 15 billion years versus 6,000 years or evolution versus another form of life coming about until quite recently. So it seems like the magisterial statements in light of the recent controversy, that should have more weight than the assumptions in the past when it wasn’t even a controversy. Does that make sense?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, because the question of… I mean, as you mentioned, the question of, is the earth eternal or was it created is a recent question, but it was not being debated in the age of the fathers. Is it 13.8 billion years old? And if not, how do you explain this astronomical and astrophysical evidence?
Trent Horn:
Sorry to correct what you misspeak. It was an old question, is it eternal or created? But the precise date of how old it is or how life changed over time, that’s a very recent discussion we’re having.
Jimmy Akin:
Correct. Yeah. So the fathers weren’t debating that and that means that you have to be cautious in what you infer from them. One of the things the Second Vatican Council taught about scripture is that the elements of scripture that are guaranteed to be true by the holy spirit are what the sacred author is asserting. But there’s a difference between what the sacred author is asserting and what the sacred author is assuming, for example, in [ Exonians 1:4 00:17:18], St. Paul asserts that when Jesus returns that the dead will be raised and all of Jesus’s followers will be caught up to be with him. But what he assumes is he’s going to still be alive at that time because he says, “we.” So he’s putting themself in this group. We, who are alive and remain will also be caught up.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, he’s assuming he’s going to be one of them. Now he later learns that’s not true because by second Timothy, he knows he’s about to die, but this illustrates for us the need to disentangle what an author is assuming from what an author is, from the theological, the point of faith or morals that the author is asserting. And if that applies even to inspired authors like St. Paul, you’re going to need to even more cautious in disentangling what is this post biblical author simply assuming to be true versus what is he saying that’s actually authoritative.
Trent Horn:
Well, that will go back to also like in the book of Genesis, it seems very clear. The author of Genesis is assuming an ancient Jewish cosmology that is not literally true today. He talks about the firmament in the heavens, which some people might want to try to say is just the sky, but to an ancient Jew, it would’ve been a much more solid type of structure, much different than we understand it today.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. People today associate the word firmament with the sky. If they know the word at all, they just think, oh, that means the sky. But no, it means more than that in the ancient world. As you can hear from the word firmament, it comes from Latin roots, that refer to something that’s firm and the Hebrew equivalent of the term refers to a surface that’s been hammered out. In Job, for example, it’s compared to a cast mirror. And when you look up at the sky, gee, it’s blue and it also seems to be a big dome. And as Gideon pointed out in the debate, it does look like there’s an ocean of water up there, but something is keeping it from crashing down on us. And so, when you look at the cosmological vision of the author of Genesis 1, he has God dividing the waters above from the waters below.
Jimmy Akin:
So that would be an ocean above us from an ocean below us. And how does he do that? He does it by putting a firmament in place to keep the waters above from crashing down on us. So he’s envisioning and assuming a flat earth with a dome over it with an ocean of water above that. He’s assuming that, but that’s not what’s actually the case. And so, what he’s asserting is God made all this, God structured the universe, God populated the universe. That’s the theological message. As I point out in the debate, he even telegraphs the fact. He’s not asserting all of this is literalisticly the case by having this day night cycle created on the first day and the sun not created till the fourth day. And the ancients knew the sun causes it to be day just like we do. In fact, they talk about this a bunch in their commentaries on Genesis. And so, that telegraphs to the audience, I’m giving a topical account of what God did. I’m not being precise about the details of how he did it.
Trent Horn:
Okay. Well, I think that was helpful to talk about the debate and if anyone hasn’t watched it, I encouraged them to go and check it out. It’s very cordial. And I think Jimmy and Gideon covering a lot of great ground. I want to talk a little bit more about just the question-
Jimmy Akin:
I would say though, there were things I would’ve loved to follow up on, but there just wasn’t time as always.
Trent Horn:
And that is what’s hard with this particular subject because it covers a lot of different ground, but I think you did a good job of bringing it back to a lot of main points. One being, talking about the position of the magisterium and now the magisterium supporting popes and others, this view, not just being simply agnostic about it, which gives us more of an impetus to say, “Okay, well what does the science say?” Because faith and reason do not contradict one another. The church is very firm on that, that faith and reason, they will not contradict. You may not be able to understand everything in the faith by reason alone, but they’re not going to ever contradict each other. But the problem here is that if you affirm the teaching of the faith is that the main stream theory of evolution didn’t happen or that. We’ll stick with the age of the earth, I guess, and I’ll return to evolution a little later.
Trent Horn:
Just that the universe is less than 10,000 years old. And so, this is for our listeners, I have a concern. While people have the liberty to hold a young earth view you and we, Jimmy and I both agree with that, I am concerned about the cost with this view, because I am convinced that it is false and I think we should believe true things, not false things. And I am very open to believing a young earth view even if it is ridicule. If the evidence points in that way, there’s people who will sometimes say to me, “Oh, you just don’t want to be embarrassed in front of scientists and others.” Well look, I hold views many people in the modern world find embarrassing.
Trent Horn:
I think that there is no such thing as same sex marriage. I have a lot of views, I believe the Eucharist is truly Jesus. I have no problem holding embarrassing views, but my concern, and Jimmy you could go with this. I do not see… My concern is essentially this view is false. The evidence not only does not point towards a young earth, it points away from it. And that those who advocate for a billion year old universe just seem to be simply presenting the evidence. And I saw this a lot in the debate with Gideon, but those who hold a young earth have to constantly seem like they’re explaining away evidence. And I don’t think that bodes well for one’s position.
Jimmy Akin:
No, this is a pattern in the discussion, not just this debate, but in the broader discussion of this out in the literature and elsewhere, you do find that people who are advocating the mainstream scientific positions are able to just say, “Well, here’s evidence that points in this direction.” And people who support a Young-Earth Creationist view have to spend a lot of time trying to dismiss that evidence and say, “Well, it doesn’t really mean what you think.” And they’ll end up proposing speculatively models that frequently they’ll admit, I don’t have proof of this model, but just here’s a way that you could make the evidence say something else. And while every position has pieces of evidence that are inconsistent, and so you can always point to those, the fact is that there is a lot more evidence that Young-Earth Creationists have to explain away than mainstream scientists do.
Trent Horn:
Right. And so that’s what concerns me. If this were true, you would think, okay, if the earth is really 10,000 years old, then… Well, here’s what I have noticed and I was in reading young earth literature, they’ll say, “Oh, well this evidence that purports to show the earth is 4 billion years old.” When you look at the evidence in a certain way, it only shows that it’s 500 million years old or the rocks are only a hundred million, not 4 billion or whatever and the give these things, to which I’ll hear this and say, “But you still don’t get 10,000. You still don’t get 6,000 years.” So maybe there’s discrepancies. Maybe there’s discrepancies here, but you haven’t said, “Here is a test you can use.” That anyone who has never heard of the Bible and just says, okay, I’m just going to… I just start with the presupposition that I can trust my eyes and ears and I can do math.
Trent Horn:
And they just do that. There’s no test or method that could be done to arrive at that window of six to 10,000 years of age. Everything just ends up being kind of trying to explain away things. But also, there was a point that was brought up. I’m really glad that the chunks that I saw, I saw this one part where you brought up the distant Starlight problem. I thought that’s one that’s really compelled me that the stars are, in many cases, more than 10,000 light years away, some cases billions of light years away, we see them exploding. But well, what do you do if you’re only 10,000 years old, either you have God making the light in transit or the speed changes. You have all these things to try to explain it away. But I thought it was…
Trent Horn:
And you press Gideon on this, and his response was, well scientists have all this money to make their models and prove they are right and we poor Young-Earth Creationists don’t have any research money to prove our models are true. And my two thoughts on that are, number one, if you had a model that could revolutionize science, even non-believers would say, I’ll test that. And if I turn over the whole thing, I want my Nobel prize, so they would if the model would work. And number two, that’s just not true. Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis has the creation museum. I’ve been there, it’s like young earth Disneyland. It’s pretty well done. And he built a full scale replica of Noah’s arc. It cost a $100 million and they built it in Kentucky. So I don’t-
Jimmy Akin:
I think they have to use metal bracings to keep it from cracking apart, which Noah didn’t have available to him because it’s not structurally able to sustain itself without metal bracing.
Trent Horn:
Right. Yes. Don’t have enough to go for it or whatnot. Yeah, you need that, otherwise it doesn’t work, but you… I feel like it’s a very large movement and they do have funds to do that, yet they haven’t produced the data. It’s just trying to explain away other people’s data. What do you think?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, so I didn’t think that that was Gideon’s strongest point. There’s a reason that some projects don’t get funding and if you’re doing bad science… I mean, there is… Funding does have an effect, but fundamentally, there are reasons why some projects don’t get funded. And if you’re doing bad science, that can be one of them. Also, it’s simply false to say you need extensive funding to measure the speed of light. The speed of light was originally measured in the, it was either the 16 hundreds or the 17 hundreds. And it wasn’t a result of some big government program because they didn’t have government programs for this at the time. And you know, it was measured using the moons of Jupiter. And so you can measure the speed of light, the round trip travel time actually fairly easily using fairly primitive equipment.
Trent Horn:
Well, let’s talk then about the costs a bit, because that does normally for me, I mean there are other views that Catholics have that I might disagree with. For example, I’m very committed to the view that the brothers and sisters of the Lord are Jesus’s stepbrothers from Joseph’s previous marriage. Some people really don’t like hearing that, but it’s a view [inaudible 00:28:59] and others held in the Eastern church a very long time. I think it has great explanatory power. It’s very helpful to get over the brother’s objection when I’m talking to Protestants. But I recognize in the Western church, the more mainstream view is that they are cousins and I have absolutely no problem with people holding that view because I don’t see any cost to that view. I think, hey, great if it works for you when talking to people or for your faith, go right at it.
Jimmy Akin:
Actually I see costs to that view in that it makes you have some very implausible readings of certain scripture passages.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I guess I shouldn’t have been hyperbolic, of course, because I’m committed to one view over the other, I believe it has less cost than the other view. But I don’t believe that they are… The costs are so high it makes me worry, not in the sense of the costs that are associated with denying the theory of evolution which is as well grounded among scientists as the theory of electromagnetism, the theory of gravity. And the theory of gravity is not just stuff goes down, there’s a lot more to it than that. To prove the theory of gravity, very strange things like time dilation and things like that. But it’s well substantiated. So my concern is that in holding this view, my biggest concern would be this, I want people to get to heaven. I want them to love Jesus.
Trent Horn:
I want them to get to. I want them to stay away from things that could keep them away from heaven and Jesus. But my concern is, in thinking that, well to be what makes the most sense if my faith hinges on denying evolution and the earth is very young, and then if I come to believe this other view, because if I ended up coming to believe that the earth was very young, I wouldn’t lose my faith, my faith would just change. But other people, if they came to believe evolution is true, they might lose their faith. And so, that super concerns me either they might, or I get really concerned that even if they don’t, if they teach this to their children and their children go to college and study biology or become scientists or even just take general science courses, they will lose their faith, and that is what really worries me. What do you think?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, I think there are a number of costs of different types that are associated with holding a Young-Earth Creationist position, kind of the root and ultimately the most important one is the evidence doesn’t support it. So one of the costs is based on the evidence, you’re very, very, very, very likely wrong. So there’s what you might call a [inaudible 00:31:35] cost to it. There’s also a social cost, which is you’re going to be subject to ridicule and your reputation is going to take a hit and things like that. But I consider that not one that’s really worth worrying about, like you as a Catholic, I have many opinions that are considered ridiculous by people in secular society. So I don’t weigh that one particularly highly, what I weigh more highly as a Catholic is, you are disagreeing with the magisterium if you’re saying that the sources of faith really do require a young-earth anti-evolution view when the magisterium says they don’t.
Jimmy Akin:
And that’s one of the things… That’s one of the costs that I try to bring awareness to in discussing this, is that if you want to take this position, “Okay, but be prepared to bite this bullet and acknowledge you are disagreeing with the magisterium.” In addition to that, there is a cost that frequently crops up where people are not being honest in their presentation of the scientific evidence because they will make it sound like, “Oh, there’s all this great creationist evidence.” And they’re slanting it. And they’re really not proposing arguments and testable predictions.
Trent Horn:
Well, I notice this-
Jimmy Akin:
They’re just explaining away stuff and speculating.
Trent Horn:
Right. It’s like when Gideon said in the debate that, “Oh, well there are these creationist scientists and they’ve got great research. And some of them are published in journals, like nature, which are not creationists.” And I would say that is true, but what those creationist scientists publish there is just regular run-of-the-mill science, not the findings of creationism. And that helps their bonafides to be scientists, but they’ve compartmentalized and share their creationist views in safe harbors and then publish only run-of-the-mill or mundane scientific findings among nature and non-creationist journals, but if they did have the scientific support, they would publish there. And it’s not like that they’re blacklisted. There have been people who have put forward mechanisms and put forward models, but they have been scrutinized and found lacking.
Jimmy Akin:
The last cost that I’d mentioned is one that you already mentioned, which is the potential for loss of faith. One of the things I try to do with mysterious world… Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World is my podcast for people who may not know.
Trent Horn:
Check it out.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Is we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason. And so, I always try to model how faith and reason fit together. And in some of the mysteries we’ve looked at, I mean, we’ve looked at the young earth mystery before, that’s episodes 119, 120 and 121 of mysterious world. We’ve looked at the great flood, that’s episodes 175 and 176 if I recall, and after doing those where I try to show how faith and reason can work together on these subjects, I’ve had lots of people contact me and say, “Thank you so much for doing these, for showing how these two perspectives can fit together and have an integrated Christian view of things. It helps my kids. That’s going to help protect their faith as they grow up.”
Jimmy Akin:
And I’ve had other people say, “I was raised in a young earth household and I almost lost my faith because of it once I started encountering the evidence for the mainstream scientific perspective, so thank you very much for showing how we can integrate these things and that they don’t have to be enemies.” Because if people have to make a choice between faith and reason, they may not choose faith, and under the pressure of reason. And so it’s important to have an integrative approach to those two.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And I think that this is motivating me to maybe do some full episodes on these questions because what ends up happening is, you’ll have in the mainstream [inaudible 00:35:57], people say, “Oh well, the story of the flood and geology contradict.” And it’s like, “Okay, you can either go with the Bible and get rid of science or get rid of the Bible and just go with science.” I think what we’re trying to do with that and for other things is to say, “Oh. No, there’s a different way that we can have reason.” And then also a way of understanding faith that doesn’t spiritualize away truths, but doesn’t treat them literalisticly. So I think that can be helpful too. Well, I… Sorry, I don’t mean to be spinning off here a little bit but [crosstalk 00:36:37].
Jimmy Akin:
Oh, it’s okay, spin away. Spin off away.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I mean, when it comes to trying to understand what the faith teaches, maybe this is another cost I would be worried about going down this path is saying, “I trust my understanding of the Bible and the fathers better than the popes from after vatican two. And I think that is an attitude that can kind of creep in, even though this is held, as you said, by Pope Pius the 12th, which is before vatican two of this-
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. And that also leads to another thing. I mentioned how adopting a young earth perspective can lead people to distort the scientific evidence. It will also lead them to distort magisterial teaching. So they will downplay things that the magisterium has said or misrepresent things the magisterium has said in order to bolster their position.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. And I worry, we’ll go down the path of, I understand that the Bible and the fathers better than these so-called modernist popes, and that sends us down kind of a dark path of not being obedient to the church. We’d rather not go down. I have one… Well, go ahead. Yeah.
Jimmy Akin:
In regard to that, so there are on non-infallible subjects, there are situations and the church has acknowledged this. This is in Donum Vitae, I’m sorry, Donum Veritatis, which was a 1990 decree by the congregation for the [inaudible 00:38:05] and the faith. There are situations in which members of the magisterium haven’t taken everything into account and haven’t phrased things in the best way and may even be mistaken on a non definitive issue, and as a result, there are situations where one can rationally say, “I just don’t think I agree on this one.” But those are the exceptions because the truth is that the holy spirit guides the magisterium in the overall exercise of its ministry, and as a result, if you’re going to disagree with the magisterium on something that really needs to be an exception and if you find yourself dismissing oh, these modernist popes or something like that, you already have one foot out the door towards seat of a [inaudible 00:38:57] or Protestantism or something else.
Trent Horn:
And to help you not fall into that trap, I would recommend Jimmy’s book, Teaching with Authority, to help you understand how to nuance, where agreement and disagreement and to understand that. My last question would be this, I think-
Jimmy Akin:
[crosstalk 00:39:14].
Trent Horn:
Yeah. I think a lot of people though, to be sympathetic their side would gravitate towards a position like Gideon’s, because I think in our modern culture, those who would defend the theory of evolution or an old universe, like the scientists, people often turn to with a few exceptions, tend to be either indifferent or very hostile towards religion. You think of the popularizers who have talked a lot about evolution, like Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and others we could put out there, they can make it seem like evolution disproves Christianity and can kind of cast a [inaudible 00:39:54] over it. So it’s over evolution, older that the well isn’t poisoned by these people. Maybe you can point people in a direction of where they can go to see, I guess, friendlier voices that don’t see a problem here.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, I try to be very respectful of everybody’s position. And I would also point out that in addition to some of the loud, nasty voices like Dawkins, there are loads of people who are not Christians who believe in evolution but are not hostile to the Christian faith. And there are a lot of Christians who believe in evolution, including scientists who are Christian who obviously are not hostile to the Christian faith because they are Christians. And conversely, there are young earth supporters who are total jerks towards people who don’t believe in their position, so just like Dawkins is a total jerk toward creationist. Creationists are total jerks sometimes, some creationists towards people who disagree with them. So nobody has a monopoly on jerkdom.
Jimmy Akin:
I would point out Gideon is an example of someone on the younger earth creationist side who doesn’t fall into that trap. And I, as someone on an older perspective, I also seek not to fall into that trap. I try not to be dismissive of anybody’s position, but to treat it respectfully. In terms of places they might go, well, so famously then Cardinal Ratzinger did a book called In The Beginning, which is a collection of [inaudible 00:41:44] he gave that deal with this. People might want to check that out. It’s published by Ignatius press. There have been a variety of books published by people. Frankly, I would, even though it’s a self plug, I would recommend that people check out the episodes of mysterious world that deal with both the young earth question and the flood question, because I really try to be respectful and look at the evidence from both sides. In fact, Gideon and I had a nice conversation after the debate, and he complimented how in my episodes, which he had listened to, I was actually interacting with creationist arguments instead of just dismissing it all.
Trent Horn:
Right. Yeah. And so I would reckon [inaudible 00:42:34] there’s a lot of great resources out there. One is thomisticevolution.org. And so, they take principles of thomistic philosophy and apply that to the question of evolution to show how from a Catholic perspective we can understand life forms changing over time and also the universe being very old. And then yeah, I can think of other Christians. I mean, two pop in my mind, one is a Protestant Francis Collins, who’s written a book called the language of God. Another is, I believe he’s Catholic. His name is Ken Miller, who’s written on the subject as well. But I think thomisticevolution.org might be a nice resource for people, as well as the Benedict book you recommended.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. And Collins founded an organization called BioLogos, B-I-O-L-O-G-O-S, BioLogos. And they have a website where they have a lot of arguments and articles dealing with these subjects.
Trent Horn:
Okay, great. Well Jimmy, is there anything else you’d like to share? Maybe a point we didn’t cover in the debate you thought would be helpful for listeners or if not, you can always just point people to more of your great resources.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, actually one thing that I wished I’d had a chance to follow up on but didn’t, was an argument that Gideon made towards the very end of the debate. And I may actually write about this just to get it out in a more permanent form, but he made an argument that essentially went like this. I’m going to do my best to reconstruct it since I don’t have the videotape to play, I can’t show you exactly what he said, but basically how I understood his argument was that the theory of evolution causes a philosophical problem in that it obliterates the distinction between essence and accident. And if you obliterate the distinction between essence and accident, then that results in our doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist being incoherent. And so you’ve got this major premise that evolution obliterates the essence accident distinction, and you’ve got the minor premise or a second premise anyway, that it would therefore impact the doctrine of the real presence, because essence and accident are essential to that.
Jimmy Akin:
And I would say both premises are false. First, while many theologians have used the essence accident distinction, which I’ll explain what that is in a second, while many have used that to articulate the real presence. That’s a theological opinion, that is not church teaching. In its teaching, so if you go to the Council of Trent, for example, where it infallibly talks about this, it does not use the terms, essence and accident. It uses the terms, substance and species. And the substance is the fundamental reality of what something is. So after transubstantiation has occurred, the substance of the elements is Jesus Christ. The species refer to the appearances that exhibit to the senses. This doesn’t have anything to do with an essence accident distinction, at least not necessarily. You can explain it in those terms, but as long as you say, “That’s really Jesus.” But it doesn’t look like Jesus, you’re covered.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay. How you explain that philosophical terms is up to you and the church does not mandate that we do it with the essence accident distinction. Now, as far as what that is, as I know you’re aware Trent, philosophers for a long time, many of them have drawn a distinction between what are called essential properties and accidental properties. An essential property is a property that something must have in order to be what it is. An accidental property is one that it doesn’t have to have to be what it is. So I, Jimmy Akin, am an entity and I’m a human being. That quality of humanness is essential to me being Jimmy Akin. If you took the matter in my body and rearranged it into a collection of frogs, so that it’s no longer human, well, you now have a collection of frogs. You wouldn’t have Jimmy Akin anymore.
Trent Horn:
Or it’d be like how your… Jimmy, as much as we hate to admit it, Jimmy Akin’s beard is accidental. He’d still be Jimmy Akin without his beard, but you wouldn’t be Jimmy Akin without your head.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. Well, and my beard was what I was going to cite as an accidental quality.
Trent Horn:
There you go.
Jimmy Akin:
So you have some properties that you need in order to be what you are, other properties you don’t. And what an essence is, it’s just a collection of the essential properties. And so, the reason that it’s false, that evolution would destroy the essence accident distinct is, it would involve a philosophical mistake in thinking that properties cannot transfer from one category to another, so that you can have, over the course of evolution, you can have properties that used to be accidental at one stage of development, becoming essential to what something is at another stage of development and vice versa. And the way that would seem obvious to try to prevent that from happening would be to say, well, let’s say we’ve got a bird and the bird, it has to have wings in order to be a bird, and…
Jimmy Akin:
I’m still figuring out the best way to articulate this, but… There’s sort of a built-in assumption or appears to be a built-in assumption here that the essences or bundles of essential properties that we are aware of and we see in nature are the only ones God has available to him, but that’s not the case. God can have intermediate essences that have different properties and he can transition something from one to another. So, for example, using our bird example, it’s essential, I would say to a bird that at least on the genetic level, an individual bird may have a birth defect or something. But it’s essential on the genetic level that a standard bird have wings that are capable of flight. Now, there are some exceptions I’m not talking about ostrich’s and penguins.
Jimmy Akin:
But if we’re thinking about a mainstream bird, it’s essential to being a bird that this animal have, or being that kind of bird that this animal have flight capable wings. Well, on the evolutionary account, birds came from ancestors that did not have flight capable wings. They may have had wings that were, or they may have had limbs that were feathered and that allowed them to glide or something, as a preliminary stage to full flight and then at some point they became capable of full flight. So if you imagine a transition from… You’ve got a population where some of the members have preflight capable wings that are essential to them, it’s just this species has preflight capable wings. And then from that, a population may emerge where some of members have flight capable wings and some of them don’t.
Jimmy Akin:
At this point, the flight capable wings would be accidental. Some of them have them, some of them don’t, but it’s still the same population. It’s still the same species. And then eventually you get a population where all of them have flight capable wings, and it’s now essential to this new population, this new species that they have flight capable wings, because they’ve come to depend on them to survive. And you make a mistake philosophically if you assume that this intermediate form is not available to God, but it actually is because due to his omnipotence, God can have one form where flight capable wings are not present at all. And then an intermediate form where flight capable wings are accidental to the species essence and another form where flight capable wings are essential to the species essence. And that’s how you can transition from one species to another, with a property that not used to exist becoming accidental and then eventually becoming essential. So actually the first premise of the argument that evolution is going to [inaudible 00:51:49] the essence accident distinction is simply inaccurate.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, that doesn’t seem true to me because we look at a snapshot of course of creation, how it exists now, we can clearly see some things have a particular essence, these accidents, or that accident. We also see in the briefer snap, going forward a little bit more in our brief existence, we see things change over time and I think we see this. What’s hard with evolution I think many people wrap their heads around is that it’s long scale changes. It’s not like a bird gives birth to a monkey or something. It’s very, very gradual changes that add up. The closest we have to demonstrate that to people is if you took an organism that had a very short lifespan like bacteria, and you can grow thousands and thousands of generations of bacteria and find amazing changes in them.
Trent Horn:
[inaudible 00:52:40] they’d taken some bacteria that you have one source of nutrients and they evolve, actually, these have been discovered in the wild too, to eat nylon. Nylon was not invented prior to 1930. And that they’re able to feed on this because their environment [inaudible 00:52:57] nylon plant or whatever condition them to do that. So it’d be like… Because you could argue that the essence of me as a human being is I have to eat an essence of one thing is that it eats organic matter. Well, what do you do that might be essential. What do you do when it… Eventually we watch it with our own eyes that the generations are able to eat inorganic matter. Well then, what’s essential is now accidental. So I think you’re onto a good point here.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. And I agree with you. Looking at extremely rapidly multiplying organisms like microbes is a way to watch evolution happen in a shorter time scale. And we do have new species of viruses and new species of bacteria coming up all the time. Not all of them have been the product of human tinkering like COVID, but others emerge naturally.
Trent Horn:
See, you don’t mind saying things that are controversial, so I think… But I agree with you on that one. Alrighty. Well, Jimmy, thanks so much. I think this was super helpful. I’ll encourage people to check out Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. I’m sure I’ll leave some links below for people to check out the episodes of your podcast that deal with evolution. Once again, thank you guys for listening. If you agree, leave a comment. You disagree, leave a comment. That’s great. I’ll look through a lot of things and I’ll probably return to this topic because I want to always help people to keep faith and reason together, whoever they may be. So thank you guys so much for watching and I hope you have a very pleasant day.
Speaker 1:
If you like today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit Trenthornpodcast.com.