Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier Lesson 3: God’s Creation of the World

Tonight we are going to talk about creation and original sin. Last week when we were talking about God, we said everything that is not God is outside of Him (not outside of Him in the sense that it would be beyond Him, but outside of Him in the sense that it is not God) and anything outside of God was created by God. Creation means “the production of something out of nothing.” God started with nothing at all and made what He wanted. “Out of nothing” means there was no pre-existing material which was used or shaped into the formation of a new being. It is not like dealing with the leftovers in the refrigerator; it is starting from scratch. He had to decide what it was He was going to make and then He had to make it, unlike what we get to do. There is the joke of the scientist who said, “God, we don’t need you anymore. We’ve figured everything out now. We’ve figured out all the chemical makeup of a human being, and everything is right there in the dirt, so we don’t need you.” God said, “Is that right?”

The scientist said, “Yes, we can do it all by ourselves.” And God said, “Good. Make your own dirt.” Science can only go back so far, and then they get stuck. When God made something, He started with nothing.

Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier

Lesson 3: God’s Creation of the World

[Class begins with a greeting by Father and the recitation of the Hail Mary.]

We have to ask: Why did God create the world? Well, He made the world to manifest His perfection, and that is done through the benefits He bestows upon creatures. What is very important is that we understand that God does not get anything out of creation. It does not intensify His happiness in any way, and He does not acquire any perfection that He did not already have. We talked about that last week when we said God is the Supreme Being, “Supreme Being” meaning that He is perfect and there is nothing lacking. We do not add anything to God; we do not give Him something that He did not already have. So it was not to get anything out of it for Himself, yet at the same time we can say that the world is made for the glory of God. That is the purpose of creation. Having said that, again, keep in mind what we said a moment ago, that God does not get anything out of creation. If He did, it would imply that He could change. And if He could change, it would mean He is not perfect. As I said last week, if He is not perfect then you may as well worship yourself, because why would you worship an imperfect being? An imperfect being is clearly not God. So why did God create the world? First of all, for the revelation of the divine perfections and the glorification which flows from it. Secondly, for the communication of good to creatures, especially to those with intelligence. In other words, God created the world for us. It is a pretty wonderful thing when you think about it. Just look around at all the things that were created –they were created for us. That is the reason God made it. But He made us for Himself. Everything out there God made for you, but He made you for Himself.

Now let us go back a second here. We said that God created for His own glory, that it was one of His purposes. If we look at it within ourselves, we would say, “Isn’t that kind of egotistical, to create something for your own glory?” Suppose you were working on some invention and I asked you, “Why are you doing that,” and you said, “So I can receive some glory. I want to be recognized and known. I want the glory for being known to have the been the one who made this thing.” That is pretty arrogant, isn’t it? But when we are talking about God, remember that God gets nothing – absolutely nothing – out of creation. He derives absolutely no benefit from our good deeds, from our observance of the commandments, from our acts of virtue, from anything at all. God gets nothing out of it. The interesting thing is that we profit by these things; God does not, but we do. The paradox in this whole thing is that by knowing and loving and serving God, we achieve the purpose for which we were made and we attain happiness.

This is something Americans must learn. Happiness is found in glorifying God, not in glorifying the self. If you look at anybody who is caught up in themselves, they are terribly unhappy. You just have to think about it. I probably will remind you of this several times before we are done with the whole course: Heaven is looking at God for all eternity. Last week I described what I thought was the best description of what heaven would be: constantly a new vision of God, constantly being blown away. Hell is looking at yourself for all eternity. There is nothing more hopeless; there is nothing more despicable than looking at your own self. Yet, for some odd reason, we have been convinced by the devil and his pals that this is a good thing for us to do, and we spend so much time looking at the self, just sitting around navel-gazing. What good does it do us? It does us absolutely no good. We wind up being miserable. We wind up being neurotic. We wind up thinking all kinds of weird things because we are looking at ourselves. We are depressed; we are angry; we are miserable. And what are we doing? We are preparing ourselves for eternity.

That is what this time is. We only have a very short time to be alive in this world. Even if you are alive for 100 years, it is just a tiny drop when we are talking about eternity. Your soul is immortal; it will never die. Your body will, but your soul will not (we will talk about that more a little later). If that is the point, the little bit of time you have here is just tiny, and this time is spent making the decision, the choice, of where you are going to spend eternity. There are only two possibilities of where you can spend eternity: either in heaven with God, or in hell. In heaven, you will look at God and be completely filled with love, completely fulfilled, and perfectly happy for the rest of eternity. If you go to hell, you will look at yourself for the rest of eternity. That is pretty miserable. Imagine just looking at yourself for the rest of eternity. Try that even for a few minutes. Go home and look in the mirror for a few minutes, and try to tell yourself how wonderful you are. We know better than that.

In fact, the reason we are so unhappy is because we think we are so rotten and miserable, which is a lie, by the way, because God made us in His own image and likeness. He made us with immense dignity. We talked about that last week; it is right there on the first page of the Bible. And the first page of the New Testament says that God became one of us. God could not become trash. Our human dignity is so immense that God took it to Himself. If that is the case, we have to recognize the lies of Satan, and we have to reject those lies. Now we cannot replace it with another lie, that is, to say, “Well, because I’m not worthless trash, I must be the greatest thing that’s on two feet here!” No, that is another lie. We do not want to replace it with arrogance. One is false humility, and one is just plain pride. We need true humility. Humility is the truth; it is to be able to recognize the truth of what God has created and accept it as such. That is a hard thing for us to be able to do, but, again, eternity depends upon the decision you make here.

If we want true happiness, we need to learn to glorify God. The people here who have gray hair all know exactly why they were created. They learned that in the Baltimore Catechism in the very second question. (The first question, remember, was “Who created me?” The answer was: God.) Why did God create me? What is the purpose of life? Ask any teenage kid. That is what they are trying to figure out – Why am I here? What is this all about? What is the purpose of life? – and nobody knows the answer! Every 5-year-old kid way back when knew the answer to that question: “God made me so that I can know Him and love Him and serve Him in this life and be happy with Him forever in the next.” That is the purpose of life. If we can learn to focus on God and do His Will, we are going to be happy. When you look at the saints, for instance, you can see the suffering that some of the saints went through, and yet they were filled with joy.

Then you can look at what our society tells us is going to make us happy. We are supposed to be happy by having all kinds of money and all kinds of material things. I remember talking one day with somebody a number of years ago. I don’t know if it is still on or not, but there used to be a TV show about rich people. What a dull and boring TV show! Anyway, they would show these people who had 20 Rolls Royce’s and these great big mansions on the French Riviera. Really, what they did was to build themselves prisons. They built a huge mansion; they put a 10-foot wall around it; they had guards. They locked everything up, and they were on the inside. How stupid! The only people who get locked up behind walls that are 10-feet high with guards are people in prison. So these rich people had made themselves a nice prison to live in. This person was telling me that on every single show they asked the exact same question: Are you happy? And every single show they got the same answer. The person sat there with an absolutely flat affect and said dully, “I have never been so happy in all my life.” Well, they are not happy at all! Who could be, living in a prison? There is no joy. Money will not make you happy. Material things will not make you happy. None of them have. As I have pointed out many times in my homilies, look out in your garage, look up in your attic, look down in your basement, and look at all the things that were supposed to make you happy. “If I can just buy this thing, I’ll be happy!” Where is it now? It did not make you happy then; it does not make you happy now. It is sitting in the garage, but it is so important and it is going to make you happy, so you cannot throw it away. But you never look at it anyway. None of it is going to make you happy because your heart was made for God, and material things cannot fulfill what your heart desires.

So you want to make sure you are living your life for God. If we do that, we are going to be happy. You might not have much. Think of the religious. They make a vow of poverty, and they are filled with joy because they have everything – they have God. We think we need all these things, and we are miserable.

I remember when I went to India; I wandered around in these little towns. These are people who had nothing. They lived in thatched huts. You walk in, and there is nothing. It was just a little one-room thatched hut, not much of anything, and I have never in my life seen so many joyful people. They were filled with joy, and they had nothing. When I came back, I was telling people about that. I said, “The most astounding thing when I was over in India was to see the joy in these people.” I was so frustrated because over and over again I got the same answer: “Well, they don’t know any different. If they knew that they could have all the material things we do, they would want that.” I said, “Oh, so what you want to do is take away their joy? Then they could be miserable just like us. Why would you wish that on anybody?” Well, they had not quite thought of it that way because they think all the material things are supposed to make them happy.

Just take a quick inventory of your life. How many people do you know who are really joyful? You know what happens when we meet somebody who is? We say, “Wow, that guy’s really weird. He’s always happy.” Who is the weird one? We were made to be joyful. Joy is a virtue, by the way. And we do not have it. Again, these are things we can really ponder in our hearts and say, “If I’m not joyful, why?” It is because we are not looking at God. It is because we are too caught up in ourselves. Going back to where I started with this little homily, this time is preparation for eternity. How are you preparing? How much time everyday are you spending with God? And how much time everyday are you spending looking at your own self, not necessarily in the mirror, but all the navel-gazing? Where are you preparing to go for eternity? Are you preparing to be with God by learning now to be with Him? Or are you preparing for eternity with Satan by learning now to look at yourself? That is the real question. That is the one we all have to answer. If we want to be happy and fulfilled, it is only going to be by looking at God and glorifying Him rather than practicing any kind of self-glorification.

Anyway, when we think about God’s creation of the world, was God obliged to create the best of all possible worlds? No. The problem is that there are some people who think that would be the case: “Because God is all-loving, He had no choice but to create the best possible world.” Yet anybody who has had to deal with evil, suffering, death, and the grief that comes with some of that can think of a way things could be better; it does not take a genius. God did not have to create the best possible world because His perfections and happiness cannot be increased even in the best possible world. But the other thing we have to understand is that to deny that God had a choice between this world or any other He might have wanted to create would imply a limitation on His omnipotence. In other words, God can always create something better.

Well, what about evil? We will talk more about this, but to lay a foundation, what about the problem of evil? Evil flows from the misuse of the free will in a rational creature, whether that would be an angel or a human person. God could not create a world which was morally evil. He could always create a world which was better than the one we have, but God cannot create something which is evil. He cannot create a world which is morally evil because by virtue of His absolute holiness God cannot be the source of evil. God can choose whether or not He wants to give us His blessing, but God does not have the choice between good and evil. So the great question is: Is there anything God is incapable of? Is there anything God cannot do? The answer is “yes.” The only thing God cannot do is something that would be a logical contradiction. God cannot be called good and then do something evil. He cannot be all-loving and then do something that is not loving. He cannot create your soul to be immortal and then wipe it out and destroy it. Certainly, it is not because He does not have the power to do it, but it is because He is not going to contradict Himself. Once He has made a decision to do something, that is the way it is going to be and He will never contradict it.

I remember when we were kids, we would always ask the question: Can God make a rock too big for Himself to pick up? The answer is “no.” God cannot make a rock too big to pick up. But God cannot do something that would be a contradiction. When we look at it, then, God is all-good and He cannot be the author of anything which is evil. God cannot do anything evil. Only a free creature can be the source of evil because only a creature whose nature is limited and changeable can choose something which is inappropriate. God can never make a wrong choice; He is perfect. He cannot do anything that would be inappropriate, but we unfortunately can and so can the angels. The angels are not perfect. Only a free creature (that is, a creature with free will) can make a bad choice. Looking at the world, obviously we admit that there is sin and evil in the world, but still we would consider this world to be relatively the best because, being a product of Divine Wisdom, it corresponds to the end predetermined for it by God and is uniquely suited to achieve it.

When we look around at the evil in the world, we ask, “Why, if God is all-good, does He allow this?” The only thing I can ever tell people is this: Read Scripture and ask yourself why the world is going to end one day. It is not going to end because it is so good; it will end because it is so evil. We live in the most sinful society the world has ever known. That was proclaimed by the late Pope Pius XII in the 1950s. Things have not improved, so we can honestly say that we do live in the most sinful society in the history of the world. If that is the case, we have to understand that God is allowing this for a reason. The reason He is allowing it is so that we can become saints. There has never been a better time in the history of the world to be a Catholic because there has never been a better time to be a saint. There has never been a time when it was easier to become a saint than right now because you have to make a choice. For far too long, people have been trying to walk on both sides of the fence. It does not work very well. If you think of it as having one foot in the boat and one foot on the pier, well, right now the boat is pulling very far away from the pier, and you have to make a choice. Either you are in the boat or you are on the pier, because if you keep one foot on both you are going to be in the water. We have a wonderful opportunity to make the choice for God and to live it. And that will have to be a very radical choice because things are going to get really bad. They are bad right now, but they are going to get really bad. We have to make a choice of whether or not we are going to serve God in the midst of all the evil that will be around us. It is a great opportunity, but remember that the world is going to end because it is evil, not because it is so good. And remember Saint Paul’s statement: Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. If that is the case, and it is, there is an absolute abundance of grace available to each one of us right now. Because sin is so abundant, grace is going to be even more abundant.

There is a little story I always like to tell (whether it is true or not does not matter) about these two nuns sitting in Saint Peter’s Square during a canonization ceremony. On this particular day, there were several Italian saints who were canonized, and one Irish saint who was canonized. One nun was Italian, and she was sitting next to a little Irish nun. The Pope comes out and canonizes the first Italian, and they all jump up and down and cheer with glee. The Italian nun elbows the little Irish nun and says, “Ha, what do you think? Here we have another Italian saint!” Then the next Italian saint is canonized, and the same thing happens. The Italian nun smacks the little Irish nun and says, “See, two of them for Italy!” Then there is a third one for the Italians. The Irish saint gets canonized, and the little Irish nun gets up and claps then sits down quietly. Again, another Italian saint, and the little Irish nun gets smacked some more. When it is all over with, the Italian nun looks at the little Irish nun and says, “Ha, five new Italian saints and only one Irish one. What do you think about that?” The Irish nun looks at her and says, “God raises them up where He needs them the most.”

God needs saints, and He needs them desperately. You could be one of them; there is absolutely no reason in the world why you cannot. You can come up with any excuse you want, but it does not matter. You can be a saint, and you can be a great saint. We do not need any more mediocre Catholics; we have way too many already. We need saints. The question is: Are you willing to be one? Are you willing to strive to do the Will of God? Do you want to be a saint? Not just theoretically: “Oh, yeah, of course. That sounds cool.” No, I mean practically. Are you willing to be a saint? We have the opportunity to be saints, and we are going to see in our day the greatest saints, next to Our Lady and Saint Joseph and Saint John the Baptist, that the world has ever known. That is a guarantee. We are going to see the greatest saints in the history of the world, and you could be one of them. There is no reason why you cannot. You can say, “But look at my sins and look at all these things.” Well, open up the Bible and read about Mary Magdalene. She was one of the closest people to Jesus. She was a prostitute who was possessed by seven demons. Can anybody here beat that? She is a great saint. It does not matter what you have done in the past; the question is what you are going to do in the future. If your sins are forgiven, they are gone. Do not keep beating yourself up about them. Do not let the devil in there to beat you up about them. They are gone. Move forward; do not keep looking back. That is what Saint Paul says: I do not look back; I look forward. That is what we have to do too. You have to keep looking forward because God wants us to be saints. To know Him, to love Him, to serve Him, that is what it is to be a saint – to do His Will.

Back to the world here. Did the world have a beginning in time? Putting it another way, has the world existed from all eternity? The world does have a beginning in time because the world is created. A creature without a beginning is impossible because an unchangeable creature is impossible. If it is created, that means it did not exist and then started to exist; there was a time it was created. The world is that way. Changeability necessarily exists in all finite creatures, and the world is a finite creature. So the idea of eternal creation, which some people suggest, involves an intrinsic contradiction because creation out of nothing means first “not to be” and then “to be,” as Saint Athanasius said back in the 300s. The world is not eternal; the world is a creature.

If God created the world, and He did, now we ask ourselves: What role does He play in keeping the world in existence? In other words, did He just wind it up and throw it out there someplace, and now He is waiting for the spring to run out? Or does God play a role in the existence of the world? Obviously, He has to keep it in existence. If God forgot about you even for an instant, you would cease to exist. God has to hold all things in being. We can say, then, that God created everything in one act, but He must sustain all things in being at all times. Whatever He created it, He decided to do it, but He did not just throw it out there and leave it, whether that is the world or each one of us as individuals or any of the things in the world. God must sustain all things in being at all times. Another way to say this is that the act of creation continues from the first moment until the present, and will continue for all eternity for all those creatures who will continue to exist (both the saved and the damned). That is us and the angels. Your soul is immortal; your soul cannot die. It will spend eternity in one of two places.

Purgatory, by the way, is an infallible teaching of the Church. It is not up for grabs; it is not up for discussion. Purgatory exists, it is real. Purgatory is a temporary place and the souls that go to Purgatory will go to heaven. Every single soul that is in Purgatory will go to heaven. Once you get to Purgatory, you cannot go backwards. The word Purgatory is the same as our English word “purge.” You are being purged of everything that is imperfect so you can get into heaven. Scripture says that nothing imperfect or impure can enter into heaven. How many of us really think we are going to be perfect on the day we die? If you had to be perfect when you died or you would go to hell, not very many people would be in heaven. It would be a lonely place up there. Purgatory is part of the mercy of God. People think of it as a punishment, but it is not a punishment at all. It is mercy, because God is giving us an opportunity to be perfected in order to get into heaven without being able to sin anymore. You have to be in the state of grace in order to get into Purgatory, and it is there to remove any venial sins that are on our soul when we die and any of the effects of the other sins, mortal or venial, that we have committed throughout our lives that have not been purified out. Then on the last day of the world, Purgatory will cease to exist. The day the world ends, Purgatory ends.

If you think about it, we are a whole lot better off now than the poor souls who lived thousands of years ago. At Fatima, Our Lady talked to the children about a young girl who was 19 and had died in the village of Fatima. The kids asked about this young lady, and Our Lady said, “She is okay, but she will be in Purgatory until the end of time.” There was a man who was given by God the grace to appear to Therese Neumann. Therese Neumann was a German mystic who had the stigmata, an astounding woman who lived for 39 years on nothing but the Eucharist. She did not eat or drink anything except the Host once a day for 39 days. She was a pretty hefty lady too; she was not skin and bones. All she lived on was the Eucharist, an amazing lady. She has not been canonized yet. Anyway, this man appeared to her and asked for her prayers. He told her that God had granted him the favor of being able to come to her and ask for her prayers. He said that He was in Purgatory. She asked how long he had been there, and he said, “For about fifteen hundred years.” She said, “Why?” He said, “For a sin against the Sixth Commandment for which I was not sufficiently repentant.” Fifteen hundred years! You put it into context, and you say, “Here we are today, I hope the end of the world is not too terribly far away because some of us may be sitting in Purgatory until the end of the world.” That guy lived fifteen hundred years ago; if he is in Purgatory until the end of the world, that leaves him there fifteen hundred more years than we are here today.

So there are some advantages to being around now. Also, you have to understand that those people at the end of the world are not going to have the opportunity to go to Purgatory, because Purgatory is going to cease to exist. Now we could sit back and say, “Oh, those lucky dogs!” No, no, no. That means they have to be purified before the end. That is why the Lord says it will be a time unprecedented in evil, because those souls who are going to choose God must be completely perfected before the world ends as there will not be an opportunity to be perfected after they die. So count your blessings that we are not alive at the end of the world. I would not want to be, personally. It would be neat to be able to see the Lord return, but when you think about what Saint Paul tells us, the Lord is going to return and then all of the dead are going to rise. The prophet Daniel says that those who are going to hell will be an everlasting horror and disgrace, and those who are going to go to heaven will shine like stars in the sky. The people who will be alive are going to have to sit around and watch as all the dead rise. The good will be glorious; the bad will be horrific. Then they will have to deal with their own judgment. Personally, I do not think I would like to deal with that. We are all going to rise from the dead. This body of ours will rise from the dead and be reunited with our souls and live forever in one of two places. At least if you have already died and endured your judgment, you know exactly where you are going to go. If you are sitting around at the end of the world, you are having to watch all of the chaos. And if you are going to go to heaven, you are the last one. The souls of the condemned are getting taken care of first, and you are sitting around waiting and watching. A pretty horrific time to be alive. Thanks be to God we are alive now. This is when He chose to create us, to be saints today. Well, thanks be to God we are not alive at the end of the world because it is not going to be a fun time. You can count your blessings on both sides.

Anyway, the point I was getting at is that if God did not sustain all things by the same power with which He created them, they would immediately fall back into nothingness. There was a time we did not exist, and God has to hold us in existence or we would cease to exist.

Where is the world headed? That is the $64,000 question. In other words, is there a divine plan which makes world events and the lives of individuals intelligible? We believe that God has a plan for each creature individually and for the totality of creation, and He carries out His loving plan by a rule or governance which we call divine providence. This means that from God’s view nothing happens by chance. We talked about that last week. God knows everything, including the things that for us are in the future, but He sees it all in the present. Nothing happens by chance. Nothing catches God off guard. He will never be able to say, “I didn’t know that was going to happen; you fooled Me.” He cannot. God knows it all. Divine providence is the plan in the mind of God according to which He directs all creatures to their proper end. This presupposes, therefore, that God wills the goal or the end that He has made for the creature. Since it pertains to God Himself, divine providence is universal, infallible, and immutable because God cannot change. So divine providence is one of the divine attributes which we can talk about with regard to God.

This teaching on providence is going to immediately bring up a couple of questions and some problems. “If all that is so, where does human free will come into play?” Human free will is part of the plan of God; it is part of divine providence. God wills an end to be achieved by two different kinds of created agents. There are necessary causes and there are free causes. Necessary causes are things like gravity and chemical reactions; they are always going to be the same. If you go into the science lab and put these two chemicals together, this is the reaction you are going to get and it is always going to be the same. It is a necessary cause. Then there are free causes. Free causes are things that we make a free choice to do. Those would be things like love, obedience, and repentance, any of the virtues that we have to make a choice to practice. Then we put that on top of the question of evil because that is the other area that comes up with providence. As we said before, evil proceeds from the misuse of freedom in a rational creature. You have to understand that God has such a high regard for our freedom that He will not interfere with our use of freedom, even if we choose to use it against Him. Put yourself in that position for a minute. What if you were to create a creature, and you created that creature so it would be able to love, so it would be able to receive your love and respond to that love; but in order for that creature to make a free choice to love, you also have to give the creature the freedom to reject you. That is what God has done. He will not force us to do what is right. He will not force us to love. He will not force us to do anything ever. He will encourage us, sometimes rather strongly, but He will not force us to do anything because He made us free. And the greater the freedom that is involved in something, the greater the merit that is involved, the greater the act. That is what God allows, for us to use the freedom He has given us to choose to do what is right, to choose to love Him. So then we can put that right on top of evil and ask: Why does God allow evil? Because greater than evil are the free acts of love, faith, obedience, hope, humility, mercy – the list could go on and on and on – that we can choose to perform.

On a broad scale, we can say that God allows evil so He can bring good out of it. Only God could do something like that. But if you look back in your own life, you will be able to understand it. Think of the worst things that have ever happened in your life. Most people would say (other than things that might be abusive or something like that), “I don’t like the fact that it happened, but I wouldn’t trade it in for anything. I don’t ever want it to happen again. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, but the most important lessons I’ve ever learned came from these things that at the time looked so horrible to me.” So we see that good comes out of things that appear to be bad. That is the way God works. He brings good out of evil.

We have to understand that in order to eliminate evil, God would have to eliminate free will. We are stuck in a situation where we have to say that either God is not strong enough to get rid of evil (in other words, that God is not all-powerful, and we are not going to say that), or we have a free will. If evil proceeds from the misuse of free will, then the only option is to say that we would have to take our free will away so we would not commit evil. But then you would just be a puppet on a string. Heaven would mean nothing to you if you did not make a choice to go there. That is why God is not going to force you to do what is right. You have to choose it because then heaven is going to mean everything to you since you struggled to get there – you made the choice; you did what was right to be able go there. If you were just a puppet on a string, you would sit up there in heaven and say, “So what?” But when you made the choice to love then it means the whole world to you. Actually, I guess it would mean even more than the world.

Now within the context of the world, where did human beings originate? An interesting question that comes up rather frequently these days is: Where did we originate? Can we as Catholics hold to the ideas of evolution? Well, the radical forms of evolution hold that everything, including human beings, evolved from inanimate matter. This view holds that both the body and the soul have evolved from the beasts. That is an idea that absolutely must be rejected because it denies the direct creation of the soul by God. That is a point we have to understand. Your soul is created immediately by God. Immediate means that there is nobody else involved. Your parents provided the physical matter for your body, but your parents had nothing at all to do with the creation of your soul. Only God can do that, and God creates it immediately. At the moment you are created, God makes your soul and infuses it into the little zygote that is there at that point and life begins. We must hold to the creation of the soul by God. The soul cannot evolve. It is a dogma of the Church that every human soul is created immediately by God. Dogma means it is an infallible teaching, so it is not something we can even discuss as far as the possibility of thinking something different. It is an infallible teaching of the Church. Doctrine means it is a teaching but not necessarily infallible; dogma means it is an infallible teaching. So the discussion about that is over.

Regarding the body, Catholics can hold (but are certainly not required to hold) that the human body evolved up to a certain point. Again, we must hold that a special intervention of God was required for the production of the human soul. That is true no matter what you want to believe about the origin of the body. Just look at it from another perspective. Philosophically, evolution does not make any sense because what they are saying, first of all, is that if you really want to think we came from an amoeba, we are talking about billions and billions of mutations to be able to get to us. Normally, mutations cause something that is weak, something that is less. In evolution, they are trying to say that billions of mutations created something greater. That by itself is a problem because two lesser things cannot create something greater than themselves. It does not happen. In other words, a husband and wife cannot unite together and have something greater than a human being pop out; it is not going to be. Neither are two animals going to get together and pop out a human being; they cannot. And so the idea does not make sense.

If you want to think of it another way, think of the odds of being able to suggest that this just happened randomly all by itself. I checked this out once. We have a calculator that has 13 digits on it, so I simply said, “If we put 13 pennies of successive years into a bag, what are the odds of pulling those pennies out in order?” In other words, you pull out the first penny, and say it is 1990. Then the second one is 1991, and the third one is 1992, and the fourth one is 1993, etc. You get all the way up to 2003 and you have 13 pennies sitting there in order. What are the odds of pulling them out in order? Whatever it is, it is 1 over a 13-digit number (because that is how high the calculator would go). They are astronomical odds. That would be only 13 mutations, and they are talking about billions of mutations for evolution. For 13 mutations to come out just like that, the odds are 1 over trillions. They are talking about billions upon billions of mutations to get to us. They are talking about odds that would be so incredibly astronomical there is no way we would ever be able to find the number. It would be more practical to say that if a tornado came through a junkyard and picked up all the pieces of these various cars, then when the tornado set down on the other side of the junkyard you would have a perfectly good car – put together and operational – from all the pieces the tornado picked up from the different cars in the junkyard. It put them all together, and there it is. There would be a better chance of that happening than of you evolving from an amoeba. Ponder it for a while. It sounds really cool to say, “Oh, we evolved from inanimate matter.” How could you? It was inanimate. They are talking about rain falling on a rock and then we came about! How??? It does not make sense. It just plain does not make sense.

Now there might be some of us who would say, “Our relatives probably are rats,” but for the most part, you look at it and say, “It doesn’t make sense.” Besides that, as long as humanity has been watching, no one – absolutely no one – has ever seen something evolve into something else. It does not happen. However, there is microevolution. Microevolution means adaptation, basically. If you take a person from the deep woods of Africa and put the person in Iceland, and take a person from Iceland and put them into the deep of Africa, what is going to happen? The skin tone of the African person is going to start turning lighter, and the skin tone of the person from Iceland is going to start turning darker. Over the generations, their bodies will adjust and their children will come out lighter or darker accordingly. There are things like that happening. They tell us that every dog came from one pair of dogs. Well, look at all the variety of dogs out there. They can tell us scientifically that they all came from one pair of dogs, so we see that there are these changes that happen. There is microevolution, but not macroevolution. Macroevolution means one species changing into something else. That does not happen. Dogs can look like a different dog, but they cannot become a cat. It just is not going to happen. A giraffe cannot give birth to anything other than a giraffe. A human woman cannot give birth to anything other than a human being. That is the way it is going to be.

What about Adam and Eve? Well, the Church does teach that the human race stems from one single human couple. In fact, science now can tell us that this is the case. It is not a dogma, but that is because it has never really been challenged. Scientists have been denying things that are in Scripture; they just deny them left and right. Now what is happening? Scientists – with their tail between their legs – are saying, “Oh, that was right all along,” including Adam and Eve. Now they can tell us, and it is scientifically provable, that every single human being came from one couple. That happened back in the 1990s. They found something in the mitochondria of the cell of every single woman and they were able to tell that every woman receives it from her mother. So then they checked women from every different culture, and, lo and behold, it was identical in every single woman. It did not matter what race they were from; it did not matter what age they were; it was identical. Then they tried to see if they could find something in males. Finally, they were able to do so back in the late 1990s. They were able to find something that every male received from his father. They checked males from every culture and generation, and they found it was identical. If every woman received that thing from her mother, they knew that every woman goes back to one woman. And if every man received this from his father, they knew that every man came from one male. So they can prove now scientifically that we all had to come from one couple. Even the scientists called them “Adam and Eve.” That is the reality of what is going on.

From a theological perspective, the fact that we all came from one couple is actually a necessary presupposition for the dogma of Original Sin and also the redemption of the whole human race by Christ. If there was polygenism (which means many parents to begin with), we could not have one redeemer because we would have to have one redeemer for this strain of humanity, and we would need another one for this branch of it, and another one for that branch, because they all started with different parents. There was not an Original Sin if that was the case, but rather there were many original sins: the sin this couple originally committed, the sin this one did, and so one. But there was only one couple to start with; therefore, sin spread through all.

We are made in the image and likeness of God. Being in the image and likeness of God, we all have a mind and a will. And because we have a mind and a free will, we are persons. The definition of a person is a living being with a mind and a free will. Are there any other persons on earth? Not physically. Are there any other beings with souls? The answer is “yes.” I should point out before going on with the soul that there are three kinds of persons. There are human persons, angelic persons, and Divine Persons. There are the three Persons of God, countless angels, and countless human beings. Those are the three types of persons. But with regard to the soul, that is a different matter.

We will pick up on that when we come back from break.

[End of Lesson 3]

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