The Six Days - Old and New - Part 3

Holy Scripture is very clear and emphatic about the fact that creation was finished, and no new things made, after the Six Days, the first week of the world and its history. No such thing as pre-historic ages. That is a myth of the Modernist Evolutionists. (Genesis 2:1 through 4.) Look at it this way: the very same elements of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc..that God created ex nihilo and in toto on Day One of the first week of the world, are the very same elements that now constitute my individual body.

Of course, my elements are but a very small, miniscule portion of those original elements. But the fact remains, my special elements were created on Day One. I like to think - and can so think without fear of heresy - that there is some mysterious and supernatural, (i.e., of Grace) relation between my special, unique and particular number and arrangement, i.e., order, of the elements and that purely spiritual being appointed by God on Day One to be, in time, my own special Guardian Angel. This wonderful, spiritual being received me as his special charge, guardianship, when God infused my soul into this particular arrangement or structure of cells that is my body and they became one substantial form, never to be annihilated! Here we must see the theological - metaphysical and physical Law -  that Form precedes function, that Form precedes or that is, comes before and is absolutely necessary for the operation of all processes. This law of nature leads inexorably and infallibly to the Existence of God - accessible, as Fact, i.e., as Actuality known with absolute certitude by the perception or apprehension of a non-conceptual affirmative judgment of the intellect. It is a simple Yes to the existence of things besides my own self.

But for the evolutionist, all is process. As St. Paul says, this modernist heretic is always learning but never arriving at a knowledge of the truth. (2 Tim. 3:7.) The Truth is Actuality, the Existence (esse) of things - the Form that must come before all processes, because all processes not only presuppose, but absolutely demand and require the actuality - the existence of the Form. The Form, if it is the Substantial Form, is immutable and unchanging in itself. As a physical substance, it has many accidents, or properties, in fact, precisely nine of them: quantity and quality, pre-supposing the Act of Existing. Agency and the disposition of passivity or potency; relatedeness, so necessary for all structures; time, which is the measure of motion and absolutely requires an agent; place, which is a requirement of all physical-corporeal beings; habit, we can translate as environment or habitat, or more accurately, "clothing"; and finally, posture...which I like to translate as the geometry of the elements - the atomic structure as shape.

All of these accidents or properties of some Substantial Form, are what God created in their totality, both potential and actual, on Day One - when He created the Body of the Universe. What is the relationship of these "categories" to the elements of the Periodic Table? I submit that the categories of accidents/properties of the Body of the Universe, help to define and describe the atomic elements and their operations. For example, every atomic unit or element is defined by its atomic number - the number of protons in its nucleus. Thus defines the atomic form as - an accident - and a quantitative entity. Qualities also, while being defined by something other than quantity, nevertheless, have their basis in quantity. Let's see if this is true. It is obvious to most people that sound is based on frequencies, which are quantitative entities. But so also are color, taste, odor and touch, based on the frequencies of the waves or the particles - or both - of some object emitting them and being received by the sense organs of our bodies.

I have just demonstrated what I set out to do! Have you noticed? It is absolutely necessary that there be plants, marine life, birds, land animals and mankind - if - the elements are to have a purpose. Now you may wish to hang all of your objections on that IF, but if you do, what do you accomplish? You simply deny one of those primordial - most basic GIVENS of all reality, GIVENS that are such because they cannot be proven. They are self-evident. We observe them and live by them. That is their PROOF.

 

Darwinism denies Purpose in Nature, and Father Stanley Jaki, O.S.B., spent most of his adult life trying to inject Purpose into Darwinian evolution and thereby "save " it. Did he succeed? Theistic evolutionism is the evidence that he did. However, theistic evolution simply takes on all the problems of the ideology of evolutionism. And they are not only major - but impossible to solve, because evolution is by definition, not only impossible to happen, but physically, metaphysically and theologically ABSURD. Those who really believe it simply demonstrate to the world that they are either mentally deficient or just not thinking. Rather than thinking, they are mindlessly taking the word of modern "science" as the ultimate authority. St. Thomas has something to say about this. Evolutionism is obviously based on purely or merely human reasoning, as a "rational", interpretation of scriptural texts. St. Thomas says that of all arguments in philosophy, those from a human authority are the weakest; whereas arguments from the authority of Divine Revelation are the strongest. (ST, I, q.1, a8, ad.2.)

 

Knowing this, the modernists (notably Fr. Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Kung, in their work on Revelation), set out to put into question - exactly what - and how do we know what, in Holy Scripture, is Divine Revelation and what is human authority or the philosophy of the time? This very question was an attack on Tradition, which never made such a division in the first place. But Pope Pius XII obliged them by writing Divino Afflante - on literary form and they promptly reduced Genesis 1-11 to Eastern Mythological genre. But their literary theory was seriously flawed. It was not based on the Aristotelian concept of Form at all. It was NOT based on the Traditional - classical literary theory of Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, but rather upon modern, post-Renaissance theories of genre, that is, historically relevant and conditioned concepts or the zeitgeist and by 19th century "nature" philosophy. It stressed the "intention of the author", - something impossible to know with any certitude. Milton's Paradise Lost - is a good example. The poet announces his "intention" to justify the ways of God to men" - but the poem comes off as a magnificently - architectonic, aesthetic structure - despite many weaknessess in the "joints". 
 

But Holy Scripture is another case altogether. As Divine Revelation, it completely transcends all literary categories. And yet, I submit it may best be described as a Divine Rhetoric - employing at the same time, recognizable literary forms - the most notable being historical narrative, prayers and wise sayings, as proverbs.