It is impossible to reflect on world history without confronting the doctrine of Darwinian evolutionism, particularly in the advanced forms it has reached today. This doctrine is everywhere: in school textbooks, movies and TV series, novels, music, and the news. Even when we are presented with the most fantastical documentaries about the existence of beings that fascinated J.R.R. Tolkien, like dragons, the underlying premise remains the same: the theory of evolution. It has perhaps been underemphasized that the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the one-party communist system is also a form of social evolutionism. According to this doctrine, the “primitive” forms of human society were successively replaced by increasingly advanced forms, ultimately culminating in a “multilaterally developed socialist society.” In short, evolutionism is everywhere—even in sociology.

Completely marginalized by the overwhelming pressure of the dominant cultural paradigm, many Christians have adopted sophisticated versions of “evolutionary” theology, attempting to reconcile the divine creation of humanity with the mutations that supposedly transformed apes into humans. Can you imagine an ape with a human soul, justified by the fact that the Church has defended only the direct creation of the soul by God but not necessarily the human body, which might “evolve”? Some seem capable of even such absurdities. Alongside this embrace of hallucinatory theories, other “conquests” of science have been absorbed without much questioning. For instance, the doctrine of long chronologies—the arguments supporting the universe and the earth being billions of years old, alongside the claim that living creatures developed over millions of years. Swept along by this tide, few Catholic believers question such assertions anymore.

And yet, why do evolutionists need these vast time spans? The answer is quite simple, although not immediately apparent. Evolution means minuscule changes occurring over long periods, changes that ultimately lead to “mutations” in living beings. Practically speaking, according to the Darwinian view, the chain of species stretches over long periods of time, which thus makes the thesis of genetic mutations plausible—a thesis absolutely essential to the core explanation proposed by this theory. When I mentioned that the axiom of long time spans implies ideas that are not immediately evident, I wasn’t referring so much to the time required for mutations but to another concept, one that can only now be unveiled: the naturalistic uniformity of the evolutionary process.

Regardless of how many millions of years are required to justify (im)plausibly the entire process, it unfolds strictly according to evolutionary principles, adhering to the same unyielding mechanism that underlies the explanatory framework offered by proponents of the theory.

In other words, regardless of how many millions of years are required to justify (im)plausibly the entire process, it unfolds strictly according to evolutionary principles, adhering to the same unyielding mechanism that underlies the explanatory framework offered by proponents of the theory. More concretely, this uniformity of nature excludes any divine intervention—God, the “Creator of heaven and earth,” is no longer necessary, not even to the minimal extent envisioned by deists who at least require a watchmaker to explain the workings of the giant cosmic machine. In contrast, evolutionists need only themselves and their brilliant minds—nothing more, and nothing less.

Here I can reveal another, less visible aspect—yet so characteristic of the modern mindset!—specific to this way of thinking: the perspective from which, more or less explicitly, we always reflect on the past is exclusively that of the present, which is considered absolutely superior. I would dare to say that this mindset is essentially and fundamentally anti-traditional: for any traditional thinker—whether Christian or pagan—the better and the superior were always found “at the beginning.” But for the modern person, the better and the superior are always in what is modern, contemporary, later—in other words, in himself and only himself. The course of history, like the course of species evolution, can only be upward, just as today’s world and technologies represent the pinnacle of culture and civilization. To maintain this vision intact, its proponents consistently use two argumentative strategies, chosen according to context: positing historical homogeneity (“Come on, even people in ancient times killed each other just as much as moderns in the 20th century’ wars”), and then treating the “primitives” with contempt (“Don’t you know the ancients were savages and the medievals unwashed?”). Let us return to the thesis of naturalistic uniformity to explore it further.

Specifically, this perspective assumes our ability to provide purely natural explanations, which make any appeal to divine or supernatural intervention unnecessary. Whether a scientist believes in God or not, evolutionists do not particularly care. But they do care very much that the scientist keeps his faith strictly private, with no influence whatsoever on his theories: nothing theological or metaphysical should be allowed to enter “scientific” discussions. Clearly, what we are dealing with here is—at best—a form of soft dictatorship that does not allow its foundational atheism to be questioned. From a Christian perspective, this stance involves not only the ignoring but also the rejection of Divine revelation and the truths it has disclosed to us. Two of these truths of faith concern both God’s ongoing intervention in creation (the so-called creatio continua of the Church Fathers and Doctors) and the supernatural acts which alone can enable an authentic understanding. Let me offer just one example that might appeal to atheists and evolutionists.

The “arguments” of Russian Marxist propagandists always suffer from the same flaw as those of evolutionist explanations (which, not incidentally, Marxists loved greatly): the exclusion of the power and supernatural intervention of God.

The example comes from one of the key books of Marxist propagandists in Communist Romania, titled The Bible for Believers and Non-Believers. Written by a zealous apostle of the one-party ideology of the Soviet Union, Yemelyan Mikhailovich Yaroslavsky, the book is a kind of handbook of materialist-dialectic apologetics based on the supposed “absurdities” of the Bible. Personally, I believe that catechists, priests, and theology teachers should only be certified if they are able to refute all the “arguments” found in such a volume. For while they may be rudimentary and simplistic, these arguments can be highly persuasive for Catholics who neither know their Faith nor the Holy Scripture well.

Thus, one of the chapters is dedicated, unsurprisingly, to the flood and the supposed absurdities of the Bible. How can we take seriously, the author asks, the passage in which God tells Noah, “of every living creature of all flesh, thou shalt bring two of a sort into the ark, that they may live with thee: of the male sex, and the female” (Genesis 6:19)? Can you imagine Noah chasing birds and other creatures to catch a pair of each? How long would he have needed for such a feat, which would bring a smile not only to our children’s faces but also to our grandparents’? Obviously, if we base our understanding solely on Noah’s natural abilities, the whole thing seems absurd. The same goes for the question of the water quantity: where could there have been enough water to cover the entire earth, even the highest mountains? And so forth.

The “arguments” of Russian Marxist propagandists always suffer from the same flaw as those of evolutionist explanations (which, not incidentally, Marxists loved greatly): the exclusion of the power and supernatural intervention of God. For the faithful Christian, Noah did not accomplish everything God asked of him solely through his own efforts. On the contrary, it is absolutely certain that he was supernaturally assisted by the Creator, just as the birth of the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, from the Holy Virgin Mary, occurred through a supernatural act. Even the world’s end by fire (2 Peter 3: 6ff.) will occur, according to Saint Thomas following Saint Augustine, through another supernatural intervention—although it may be associated with a natural fire source (such as that of the sun, as in the miracle of Fatima), just as the flood involved natural water:

“Others, following Augustine, say that ‘just as the deluge resulted from an outpouring of the waters of the world, so the fashion of this world will perish by a burning of worldly flames’ (De Civitate Dei, XX, 16). This burning is nothing else but the assembly of all those lower and higher causes that by their nature have a kindling virtue: and this assembly will take place not in the ordinary course of things, but by the Divine power: and from all these causes thus assembled the fire that will burn the surface of this world will result” (Summa Theologica, Q. 74, Art. 3).

So it’s not just a natural fire, but one that will also manifest through the intervention of God’s supernatural power. This is the detail always omitted by naturalist evolutionists, who set as a hidden axiom of their argument the exclusion of any manifestation of divine power in the natural world. Clearly, for a Christian believer, this is an unacceptable overreach, just as the opposite sin of excessive supernaturalism—superstition—must also be rejected.

To make things even clearer, I will offer another argument based on a different, very popular discourse today: that of global overpopulation. Unfortunately, not only environmentalists but all sorts of activists and politicians have embraced various forms of neo-Malthusianism, stemming from the alarming—so they believe—perspective of an overpopulated Earth. Their perspective, once again, contains a major flaw: they see the progressive increase of the population while excluding God’s intervention and the end of the world. Just as the world was created in the blink of an eye through an act of divine omnipotence, so too will the end of the world come—in an instant, suddenly. And if we have full trust in God’s power, as is expected of the faithful, can we doubt that God will ensure history ends long before humanity becomes too numerous? Such a way of thinking, which necessarily involves supernatural faith, is foreign to both Darwin and his followers (including those pseudo-Catholics who adapt to the worldly mentality for opportunistic reasons).

In fact, to conclude this brief essay on how we might think—correctly—about the life of species on this earth, we must understand and believe, believe and understand, that God intervenes not only when He acts supernaturally but also through that creatio continua that the saints speak of. The First Vatican Council has already defined this truth of faith:

“God, by His Providence, protects all that He has created” (Denzinger 1784).

He not only prevents creatures from returning to the nothingness from which they were created, but also continuously sustains them, discreetly and mysteriously, through His providential work. This is precisely what the theory of evolution systematically ignores, due to the atheistic premise hidden at its very root. As for us, Catholic believers, we must not only delve into the perennial Christian philosophy developed by the great Saints and Doctors of the Church, but also respond to such challenges by defending the presence and work of God in history.

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