I've already dealt with his article once, but as it is long, it is more to it:
Introibo Ad Altare Dei: Human Origin
Monday, January 29, 2024
https://introiboadaltaredei2.blogspot.com/2024/01/human-origin.html
From the above we can know the Church teaches us as truth:
- the Creation of the world ex nihilo* (out of nothing) by God at the beginning of space-time
- the special creation of the First Man
- the special creation of the First Woman from the First Man
- the souls of human beings are created immediately ex nihilo by God
- the entire human race descends from a single man and a single woman; our First Parents
- our First Parents were in a state of Original Justice and by disobedience brought us Original Sin
- Original Sin is passed down by being a descendant of the First Man (Adam)
- Original Sin came about at the instigation of Satan
- God promised to send a Redeemer Who is the Lord Jesus Christ
Now, can we defend Young Earth Creationism as being in fact obligatory from these truths?
Well, yes.
First of all, we must eliminate as inherently sufficiently orthodox, but no longer remotely scientific, the extension of time before Adam, while keeping the Biblical chronology of Adam from then on.
The usual view of scientists about the halflife of
14C is, it is 5730 years. An atmospheric level of 100 pmC (and I will assume the overall carbon content in the atmosphere is constant, to illustrate my point, since the contribution of new
14C is very minute compared to the overall content of C) will in 5730 years decay to 50 pmC. Insofar as the
14C is moderately constant, this means that an amount of
14C corresponding to 50 pmC will also be produced in this time.
So, let us take the first 5730 years of the atmosphere, I am speaking in abstract possibilities, not the actual history. Let the initial amount be no
14C at all, or one atom of it created in Creation, so it is
included in Creation. There obviously was a time when creation was finished, when God was, from then on, only creating new examples and maintaining the existance of things, but no longer creating new things. So, in the Creation, there must be at least 1 atom of
14C. 5730 years later, it is 50 pmC.
But what about the decay in the same time? Well, that's taken into account. You see, in half the time, 2865 years, the
14C-level sinks to 71 pmC, and
14C is created to the level of 29 pmC. Yet in 5730 years, this doesn't mean an addition of 58 pmC, but only of 50 pmC, because precisely some decayed. Or if we quarter the time, in 1432 and a half years, the 100 pmC sink to 84 pmC, meaning 16 pmC is recreated; nevertheless, in 5730 years the 4 * 16 do not add up to 64 pmC, but only to 50,
because some decayed. So, yes, after 5730 years, the atmosphere would necessarily have 50 pmC.
Add another 5730 years. The 50 pmC from the first period are reduced to 25, and another 50 are added. After 11460 years, the atmosphere would be up in 75 pmC. So, when we approach 17190 years after Creation, the 75 pmC will be reduced to 37.5 pmC and 50 added to that, 87.5 pmC. 22920 after Creation, 88 pmC are halved to 44, adding 50 to that gives 94 pmC.
There is no known way to speed up a lowering of the pmC either in a sample or in the big sample known as the atmosphere. High radioactivity might decay atoms of
14C, but it will also turn
12C into
14C. Diluting the
14C by adding new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would work, but is anyone willing to pretend atmospheric carbon levels
doubled at some point? That is what it would take for 100 pmC to go down to 50 in one go. And oviously, at
normal speeds of production, we would need to be at least 11460 years and some after such a point to have reached 100 pmC again.
I think you get my point. If Adam was created when the atmosphere was already old, and a human skeleton is dated to 40 000 years ago, this requires Adam to have lived at least 40 000 years ago. In other words, the idea that yes, the men who came to Bacho Kiro Cave and who are dated to 45 000 years ago, by carbon dates, both descend from Adam and lived within the last 7000 years, can ONLY stand if Adam was created only moderately later than the overall creation of Earth's atmosphere. Like 5 seconds to 168 hours later will do. Because in that case, the atmosphere can have started out with a much lower
14C content. And in
that case a faster production since Creation or since Flood (I prefer the latter) would account for cramping tens of thousands of carbon years within less than 2000 real years (I would say between Flood and Fall of Troy).
So, can we see this as settled then? IF Adam lived 7000 years ago, or according to non-LXX chronologies, 6000 years ago, and IF all real men descend from him THEN the Universe was created only shortly before Adam. Cardinal Wiseman's Gap Theory, Father Fulcran Vigouroux' Day-Age theory, they are NOT heresies against the faith, but they ARE incompatible with science.
Unless, of course, you add in lots of other years AFTER Adam was created, tens of thousands, to be exact, or even hundreds of thousands.
This will be
my second point. Such an idea, unlike time added only BEFORE Adam, or Adam created AFTER other beings anatomically identifiable as men, actually involves heresy.
Let's take the
second case first.
the entire human race descends from a single man and a single woman; our First Parents
We do not have the right to follow some Jews and KKK who have pretended Black people do not descend from Adam and Eve or the first couple came thousands or tens of thousands of years after the first men or Genesis 2 didn't happen on or close to day 6.
So, the case would rather be about human anatomy without the image of God. Given we have Neanderthal genes that bring us back to 42 000 years ago, or morphological and genetic divergence within our present day mankind which were already around 10 000 years ago (like Neolithic Anatolian Farmers, the people of Sardinia looking like them, or Western Hunter Gatherers with blue eyes or Eastern Hunter Gatherers with blonde hair, unlike Yamnaya, they go, in the conventional view of carbon dates, back to before Adam existed).
The idea would therefore involve us descending, not just from Adam and Eve, but also from non-human people ... or strictly speaking, non-human non-people. Pretty important. If they did not descend from Adam, they were not the image of God. If they were not the image of God (and some Protestants miss this) they could not talk or interact normally. If I can express "give me that banana" I might be an ape or a man. But if I can express "I ate yoghurt with cherry pieces last week" and not just "let's bury this dead man and pray for him" I'm already the image of God. Image of God is not a kind of theological status, as state of innocense, state of original sin, state of grace, state of glory. Image of God is about essence, like fish or plant or mineral is about essence. So, the idea is, the ones who built Göbekli Tepe or who sculpted Dame de Brassempouy, beings we clearly physically descend from, were somehow not human. Could not have expressed "I ate a yoghurt last week". Impossible.
The
first case second.
What if Adam himself was created some 750 000 years ago, before Neanderthals and modern humans diverged? Take a look at approximately the latter half of the list of truths:
- the entire human race descends from a single man and a single woman; our First Parents
- our First Parents were in a state of Original Justice and by disobedience brought us Original Sin
- Original Sin is passed down by being a descendant of the First Man (Adam)
- Original Sin came about at the instigation of Satan
- God promised to send a Redeemer Who is the Lord Jesus Christ
The idea this happened 750 000 or even just 90 000 or 40 000 years ago poses some very uncomfortable questions:
- how could we know after so much time had passed? wouldn't several parallel humanities have had time to misjudge the stories and mix them and give a false impression of just one humanity? wouldn't religious changes have given occasion to change the role of the serpent?
- if we were to say Moses received this as prophecy, why did that prophecy get the timespan between Adam and Abraham (genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11) so wrong?
- and how would it have been just to allow mankind to wait, not for 4000 to 6000, not for 10 000, but for 100 000 years or half that, before He eventually sent the Messiah? was he taunting hunter-gatherer humanity and saying "nah, you must develop agriculture first"?
So, no, Adam created within the last 10 000 or better still strictly Biblical
less than 8000 years ago, and no human like being existing before then is a requisite of the faith, and this means that the world was created not much longer back either than that.
So, my third point is, Young Earth Creationism is not just necessary, but also scientifically possible.
Stratigraphy means "older creatures were buried lower in the fossil record, younger creatures higher, we know such a lot of changes in fauna that earth must be millions of years old" ... I have researched that this is not a true claim. Where fossils are found, there are two main cases. The aquatic case involves often enough several layers, but that is what you would expect anyway, given that the seas before the Flood like our own have animal and plant life on different levels. The terrestrial case, very typically, involves one layer of land vertebrates in any given place. There can sometimes be two "levels" or even more "surfacing" at different places, even very near apart, like twenty or fifty yeards apart, and the fact they are, visually, on "the same level" is then explained by the "levels" being slanted and the different slanted levels being cut along the
actual level of the surface. Whatever merit there be to that about stone layers or varves, the actual land fossils tend to be found at the same level. For aquatic ones, I don't know any given drill hole or other where a whale is above a plesiosaur, because the whale is later, instead, think of the Flood, the waters where plesiosaurs were near the surface would be waters without whales and the waters where whales were near the surface would have no plesiosaurs around. In other words, stratigraphy falls.
High mountains do not disprove a global Flood. When in 1920 a certain Jesuit named Eugène Mangenot wrote an article called Hexaméron, for the Dictionnaire de Théologie catholique, he gave as reason against Young Earth Creationism and a strictly global Flood this: given that the Himalayas could have risen after the Flood, it could still not have been global with the water we have on earth. Because even the Pyrenees are too high for that, and they are "much older" ... I think any Young Earth Creationist would say, the Pyrenees too rose
after the Flood, but in a different manner. And that's why they are slightly less high, slightly less pointed, than the Himalayas.
Various Radiometric, I'm referring to other Young Earth Creationists, like the RATE project. If the Uranium decayed to lead quicker than foreseen, as zircons would seem to suggest, this might have been overall a fairly moderate "heat problem" or even heat asset, helping to dry the earth up after the Flood.
Potassium-Argon, I'd go with Dr. Grady McMurtry pointing out that when lava cools quickly in cool water, and it cools quicker the more cool water there is, it gives older dates than the eruption. He gives the Hualalai Volcano, erupting in 1801, and when the lava cooled above water, it dated 0 million, a bit further out, 12 million and further out still 21 million years. 1801 is not 21 million years ago. The Flood involved more cooling waters to quickly solidify lava than the coast outside Hawai provides.
Carbon dating, I have already alluded to it, I do work myself. Oh, not dating in labs. Just recalibrating with mathematics, and replacing tree rings and potassium dates as "calibrants" or "calibrators" for the carbon dates. The 42 000 year old people like "Thorin" the last Neanderthal or the guys even older in Bacho Kiro cave would be pre-Flood. Anything beyond 39 000 BP or 37 000 BC is pre-Flood, I don't recalibrate further within the period. The pre-Flood world ended 2262 after Creation, so with
14C production like now into an atmosphere with roughly equal amount of atmospheric carbon would have ended up with 24 pmC before the Flood came. It didn't. 1.628 pmC when the Flood came means,
14C levels compared to overall carbon rose slower. Part of it could have been more atmospheric carbon, but that could hardly have been 14 times as much as now, so, part would have been that the production was actually slower. What about Venus from Brassempouy 25 000 BP or 23 000 BC, it would be post-Flood, right? Yes.
- 2811 BC
- 7.952 pmC, so dated to 23 761 BC
- ?? BC
- ?? pmC, so dated to 23 000 BC
- 2787 BC
- 8.996 pmC, so dated to 22 687 BC
Some time around 2800 BC would be the real date.
Some people have said things like "this can't be true, the scientists can't be all that wrong, if such and such a thing is 40 000 in carbon dates, the scientists must at least be within the same order of magnitude, so, say, 30 000 years ... but the scientists are neither apt or inept observers of years, what they observe isn't years. What they observe is remaining
14C in samples, and the conclusion from that depends on two not directly here observed things besides the observed one: a) the initial level of
14C and b) the halflife.
Now, the halflife is actually, unlike other halflives, observable, you just carbon date samples of historically known age. A wooden spoon from the Middle Ages, if you know what time a certain house was inhabited, you can use the remainder in that kind of sample to calibrate the halflife. But the problem is how to calibrate for the other factor, the initial amount. The scientists usually assume the atmosphere is old, see my initial discussion, and they also consider tree rings effectively calibrate as far back as 14 000 BP or 12 000 BC. So, to them, anything younger than 12 000 BC must have a younger carbon age than 12 000 BC. That would be a remainder of 18.387 pmC, by the way. To get a measure like 40 000 BP, we need to observe 0.792 pmC, obviously lower than 18.387 pmC, so also obviously older. Thing is, I agree what has 0.792 pmC is older than what has 18.387 pmC. I do not agree they started out with close to 100 pmC either of them. 0.792 pmC / 54.616 % = 1.45 pmC, some time not too far before the Flood. The 14 000 BP carbon date is between real dates 2659 and 2633 BC. I'll use the values from my table and test two possible in betweens, half/half and 2/3—1/3:
(2659 + 2633) / 2 = 2646 BC
(30.528 + 36.973) / 2 = 33.7505 pmC => 9000
9000 + 2646 = 11 646 BC
(2659 + 2659 + 2633) / 3 = 2650 BC
(30.528 + 30.528 + 36.973) / 3 = 32.676 pmC => 9250
9250 + 2650 = 11 900 BC
So, probably some time between 2650 and 2659 BC, the
14C level was not 100 pmC, but a bit lower than 32.676 pmC. What would that give us today?
32.676 pmC * 57.324 % = 18.731 pmC ... pretty much what you find in sth you date to 14 000 BP.
I do not have a calibrator for 2659 BC directly, it just is one date in a scale from 2957 BC (Flood) to 2607 BC (beginning of Babel) and that dated to 37 000 BC reaching 9500 BC. There is a bent in this, with an initially slower rise. My calibrants for Flood and Babel are Campi Flegrei volcanic ashes and earliest carbon date from Göbekli Tepe. The problem isn't that scientists somehow observed 40 000 years and this somehow is skewed for 30 000 or just 5000 years, the scientists actually didn't skew their observations. Just their expectations of what the initial
14C level was.
My fourth point is this: I say all of this as a Roman Catholic.
I do not try to promote Sola Scriptura. I only promote Tota Scriptura, patristice legenda, which is a doctrine given by the Council of Trent. I do not go around asking people if they are saved. I have not given up alcohol and do not intend to. I have no intention of becoming an Evangelical pastor. I'm an essayist, not an Evangelical missionary. I do not take the Catholic Christendom as historically a manifestation of "the Beast" nor those 1260 days as "prophetic days but literal years" as some do in order to malign the Catholic Church. Any Protestant who lauds me as a Protestant is dreaming, and probably doing a really selective reading. I have a blog for Young Earth Creationist Apologetics and I have one for Catholic vs Protestant Apologetics. The latter is much less read. Over the last 12 months,
Creation vs Evolution had 91.2 k page views, and
Great Bishop of Geneva! only had 23.6 k page views. Just above the quarter of the former.
Whenever I write on
Creation vs Evolution, I'm promoting Young Earth Creationism, not discrediting Roman Catholicism. Whenever I write on
Great Bishop of Geneva!, I am promoting the Confession of Roman Catholicism against Protestant versions of Christianity, not discrediting Young Earth Creationism.
When will people start to get this?
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Cordula
22.X.2024
Apud Coloniam Agrippinam sanctae Cordulae, quae, cum esset una ex sodalibus sanctae Ursulae, atque aliarum suppliciis et caedibus perterrita se occultasset, postridie, ejus rei poenitens, se ultro patefecit Hunnis, et, novissima omnium, martyrii coronam accepit.
I wonder if St. Cordula inspired the character in
Die Letzte am Schaffott by Gertrud von Le Fort, in English,
The Song at the Scaffold. In France, there is a remake in two stages, Georges Bernanos and the composer Poulenc, known as
Dialogues of the Carmelites. Either way, Gertrud von Le Fort, like myself, was a convert to Catholicism.
* Nihil is
usually only nominative and accusative, and as such
cannot stand after ex, a preposition requiring the ablative. If you want to put it after ex, there are two ways around it. You can make a circumlocution and say "ex nulla re" or you can go to a fuller form of nihil, namely nihilum, and use its ablative nihilo. The Bible of St. Jerome and therefore theological language does the latter:
Quia ex nihilo nati sumus, et post hoc erimus tamquam non fuerimus. Quoniam fumus flatus est in naribus nostris, et sermo scintilla ad commovendum cor nostrum:
[Wisdom 2:2]
Peto, nate, ut aspicias ad caelum et terram, et ad omnia quae in eis sunt: et intelligas, quia ex nihilo fecit illa Deus, et hominum genus:
[2 Machabees 7:28]
