Wednesday, April 29, 2015

The Evolution Myth/The Burden of Unbelief


...[I]n great measure the theory of evolution has not gotten beyond hypotheses and is often mixed with almost mythical philosophies that have yet to be critically discussed.
--Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1997, p. 31.

The ease of unbelief is...relative. It exists in the sense that it is easy to throw off the bonds of faith and to say, I am not going to exert myself; this is burdensome; I'm leaving that aside. This first stage is what you might call the easy part of unbelief.

But to live with this is not at all so easy. To live without faith means, then, to find oneself first in some sort of nihilistic state and then, nonetheless, to search for reference points. Living a life of unbelief has its complications. If you examine the philosophy of unbelief in Sartre, Camus, and so forth, you see that readily...

...The ease of unbelief and the difficulty of belief lie on different planes. Unbelief, too, is a heavy burden, and in my opinion even more so than faith is. Faith also makes man light...We can fly, because we no longer weigh so heavy in our own estimation. To become a believer means to become light, to escape our own gravity, which drags us down, and thus to enter the weightlessness of faith.
--Ibid, 28.

N.B. For a scholarly historical analysis of the myths and hyperbole involved in modern science's rejection of intelligent design see Science and Creation by Stanley L. Jaki (Award winning author, physicist, and Catholic priest).