Paul Athanasius Robinson's Blog: Realism Rampant

Religious Liberty (Continuity or Contradiction?): Reading Dignitatis Humanæ within Tradition by Bernard Lucien

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This book attempts to reconcile Dignitatis Humanae (DH) with the constant teaching of the Church and starts out, in the foreword by Dr. Alan Fimister, by claiming that one who believes that DH contradicts Church teaching is an apostate!
There are two strategies that one can use in attempting this very difficult task (because DH says the very opposite of the infallible Quanta Cura of Pope Pius IX):
1. Try to find a way to say that DH is saying the same thing as Quanta Cura. A true mission impossible!
2. Admit that DH contains a different teaching but claim that the different teaching is compatible with past teaching.

This book attempts the first strategy. It contains two essays by Fr. Bernard Lucien and one by one of his disciples, Fr. Antoine-Marie de Araujo. I did my level best to understand what Fr. Lucien is saying. But he speaks briefly and without clarity. So, to the best of my ability, here are the claims that he makes, along with my responses to them.

1. DH is saying that men have a natural right to act according to their conscience, while the previous magisterium says that men do not have a natural right to act as they wish. Thus, the two are not in contradiction.
Answer: Even if Fr. Lucien is correct about what the previous magisterium is saying and I don’t think he is, it is still an error to say that men have a natural right to act according to their conscience. The previous Popes condemned liberty of conscience very clearly. Plus, it is a totally Protestant idea, championed by Luther.
If you are taught by your parents from birth that lying in order to get out of difficult situations is good, and so that is what your conscience tells you, it still does not give you a right to lie, or even not to be hindered from lying.

2. In the time of Christendom, it was legitimate to assume that a person who was going against the Catholic faith was not following his conscience and so they were right to oppose heretics then.
Answer: We cannot presume to know the conscience of others, even if they are living in a Christian state. Were Jewish children living in 15th century Spain aware of the teachings of the Catholic Church? Certainly not! In their conscience, they thought that the Jewish faith was the true one.

3. Now, the Catholic faith is not well-manifested, even in Catholic countries, and so we cannot presume that a person is acting against his conscience if he is opposing the Catholic faith. Thus, DH is saying that a state needs to tolerate members of false religions publicly practicing their false religion, for the common good.
Answer: This is a total distortion of the teaching of DH. It states on a number of occasions that all human beings, by the fact that they are human, must not be hindered from practicing their religion. “An injury is done to the human person, and to the order established by God for men, if man is denied the free exercise of religion in society assuming that, in that exercise, a just public order is maintained” (par. 3).
This is a clear repudiation of past Catholic teaching and practice, because it is for all people of all times; it refers to the order established by God for men.

4. Since DH reasserts Catholic dogma, it is part of the ordinary magisterium and is infallible.
Answer: If it did reassert Catholic dogma, we would agree. But we disagree with Fr. Lucien’s interpretation of DH and we believe that DH is wrong, even with his interpretation.

Besides this, there is a major problem with Fr. Lucien’s presentation: no one agrees with him that this is what DH says. Certainly, no one interpreted DH that way after the Council, especially the Conciliar Popes did not. On the contrary, when Pope John Paul II had the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger reply to the dubia of Abp. Lefebvre on religious liberty Religious Liberty Questioned, Cardinal Ratzinger chose the second strategy, not the first. He chose the hermeneutic of continuity strategy.

In the end, while it is understandable that one would want to reconcile DH with constant Church teaching, because it is such a scandal that an ecumenical council of the Church would teach error, you can never avoid the plain fact that DH says the complete opposite of that teaching.




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God's Use of Instrumental Causality by Édouard Hugon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I did a podcast about Fr. Hugon's book here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoyO5...
You can also find the Foreword that I wrote for the book here: https://therealistguide.com/blog/f/fr...



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Two Timely Issues: The New Mass and the Possibility of a Heretical Pope by Arnaldo Vidigal Xavier de Silveira

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It is said that Abp. Lefebvre once commented to a seminarian in 1977 that this was the best book on the New Mass. That is quite believable given the excellence of this book. The author's research is deep, his arguments are compelling, and his judgments are reasoned and measured.

The work tackles three difficult questions head-on (not sure why the book was given the unfortunate title of "Two Timely Issues"):
1. Whether the New Mass is good or bad -- De Silveira's devastating presentation of the problems with the New Mass was so feared by Pope Paul VI that he forbade the publication of the work, seven years after he had abolished the Index. This is one of the reasons why this book is so little known in the English speaking world. The book is worth the purchase for this section alone.

2. Whether it is possible for a Pope to promulgate a liturgy that is dangerous to the faith -- De Silveira points out that, while theologians have traditionally held that disciplinary laws are infallible, they have yet always qualified their opinion with limiting clauses. As such, circumstances can indicate that they are not so. In the case of the New Mass, it was clear that Pope Paul VI did not want to engage the charism of infallibility by the fact that he stated: "the rite and the respective rubrics are not by themselves a dogmatic definition; they are susceptible of theological qualification of varying value, according to the liturgical context to which they refer".

3. Whether a Pope can be heretical and, if so, whether he falls automatically from his office -- This has to be the clearest presentation of this topic that I have seen to date. De Silveira takes St. Robert Bellarmine's treatment of the question and identifies five different possible opinions on the question. Then, he considers which opinions theologians in the history of the Church have chosen as their own on the question. De Silveira himself leans towards the fifth opinion, that a heretical Pope automatically loses office once his heresy becomes manifest. This does not mean that De Silveira is a sedevacantist. On the contrary, as he clarifies on p. 230, the heresy is not manifest as long as the vast body of the Church continues to accept the Pope. There needs to be some procedure against the Pope by which he is rebuked for his heresy and he persists in it for the heresy to be manifest.

In short, this book is gold and I highly recommend it for the thoughtful reader trying to make sense of a very confusing time in the Church.



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Fr François Laisney, former District Superior of the United States and then of Australia, author of Archbishop Lefebvre And The Vatican and Is Feeneyism Catholic?, and current prior in New Zealand, has written a positive review of The Realist Guide on the Angelus website. Among other things, he says the following about the book:

I read the whole book, and truly consider its contribution to the defense of the Faith very important in our modern world… Note that Father Robinson does not support evolution. The big-bang theory, which Father shows as compatible with the faith, should rather be put in parallel with the growth of a baby in the womb: it starts very small (the primeval atom / the first cell) and unfolds in a most marvellous way, yet perfectly PLANNED by the Divine Intelligence. Both unfolding manifest in a beautiful way the Wisdom and the omnipotence of God as the Author of Nature. And that is much better than the notion of God as a fairy with a wand making all things on the spot as we see it today: this is imagination, and not theology.

Fr Laisney has also had occasion to defend the position that The Realist Guide takes on the question of The Great Flood. He has given permission for an excerpt from a letter he wrote on this subject to be published on The Realist Guide blog. Here follows the excerpt, which continues to the end of this page.

“You joined some thoughts about a sentence in Fr Paul Robinson’s excellent book The Realist Guide to Religion and Science, questioning what he writes ‘against a geographically universal flood.’ It is quite providential that your letter arrives so close after the feast of the Ascension. Indeed, the homily of St Gregory at Matins of that feast sheds light on that very matter. In the third reading of that homily, ninth lesson of Matins, St Gregory says:

When then, He had rebuked the hardness of their heart, what command did He give them? Let us hear. "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature." Was the Holy Gospel, then my brethren, to be preached to thing insensate, or to brute beasts, that the Lord said to His disciples: "Preach the Gospel to every creature"? Nay, but by the words "every creature" we must understand man, in whom are combined qualities of all creatures. Being he hath in common with stones, life in common with trees, feeling in common with beasts, understanding in common with angels. If, then, man hath something in common with every creature, man is to a certain extent every creature. The Gospel, then, if it be preached to man only, is preached to every creature.

Now let us reflect on what St Gregory teaches. Our Lord Jesus Christ said: ‘preach the Gospel to every creature.’ And St Gregory explains: it does not apply to every creature, but only to every man. Thus, we are not obliged to go onto the moon to preach to the stones there, nor to go to Mars or Venus, nor any other planet or star. We may stay on the earth and even there, we are not obliged to preach to every penguin in Antarctica: it is sufficient to preach to every man.

Similarly, when Moses says in the book of Genesis “And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the earth: and all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered – opertique sunt omnes montes excelsi sub universo caelo” (Gen. 7:19), it is sufficient to say: it covered the whole heaven where men were living, so that all men were engulfed in the Flood, not necessarily the top of Mount Everest, because there was no one there, nor anywhere around, because men had not yet spread over the earth: it was before the tower of Babel.

Do you see the parallel of such interpretation with that of St Gregory? As St Gregory is not opposed to the truth of the Gospel when he applies the universality of the words of our Lord merely to all men, so is Fr Paul Robinson not opposed to the truth of Genesis when he applies the universality of the flood merely to all men. He does not say the Scriptures is wrong, he says its universality is that of all men (and women!). Such interpretation is not a denial of the inerrancy of the Scriptures, it is rather proposing the right interpretation of the Scriptures and is in perfect conformity with St Gregory according to the exegetical principles of St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine.

Please, do consider this: God does not say one thing to one and the opposite to the other. He is the Author of Nature, and one can consider Nature as a big book that speak to us about its Author. Every flower tells us: “God made me!” The Scripture itself tells us: “The heavens shew forth the glory of God, and the firmament declareth the work of his hands” (Ps. 18:2). And that is true not only of the heavens, but also of the earth: every creature somehow speaks to us about its Creator.

Now when we study the book of nature, we find fossils that “tell” us that they are very old. Did God create dead fossils that appear to be so old, but in fact never lived? Were they created dead? Not a single Father of the Church ever claimed that! We should rather believe that God is as true in the Book of Nature as in the Scriptures! This is the teaching of the Fathers and of the Church. The important thing is to understand properly the one and the other. What Father Robinson teaches – and very well – is precisely that the conflicts between religion and science only comes when people do not understand properly one or the other or both. And the way to reach a proper understanding of both is precisely to adopt a realist philosophy, which is that of St Thomas Aquinas, and which the Church made her own.

So, similarly, when St Peter says: “the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished” (2 Pet. 3:6), he does not mean that the whole universe perished, but only the inhabited world, it was everything that the men of the time had ever known, their world. Such interpretation is very much respectful of the truth of the Scriptures, and follows exactly St Gregory’s exegesis.

At the end of your reflections you mention the principle of uniformity. This principle states simply that the Laws of nature, as we know them today, have been the same since the beginning of creation and shall remain the same until the end of time. Such principle is most certainly not opposed to the faith. First of all, the very acknowledgement of natural laws evidently implies that the acknowledgement of the existence of a Lawmaker, i.e. God! Moreover, such principle is not against miracles: God is not limited by the very laws that He has set. He can produce an effect without its normal natural causes. Now the Flood is like the crossing of the red sea: both are miracles, and both signify Baptism. A miracle such as the Flood does not terminate the Laws of nature: they were true before and remain true after even though God bypassed them for the duration of that miracle.

Thus, the dogma of the flood is not opposed to the natural principle of uniformity.

I hope that these explanations can be of a help, to better understand the holy Scriptures and to appreciate the value of Father Paul Robinson’s excellent book.

Geology and Revelation: Or the Ancient History of the Earth by Gerald Molloy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Why would you read a book that is 150 years old, much less review it, especially when it is partially about science? Well, Forgotten Books points out that they reprint writings that are “historically important”. If any book is still in print after a century and a half, then it must have an intrinsic worth.

For one thing, this work by Irish priest Fr Gerald Molloy is a fair representation of the authentic response of the Catholic mind to the explosive findings of geology in the 19th century. What was that response? The answer is provided in the preface to the American edition of this work, written in 1870:

Reviewing the progress of opinion touching the relations of Science to Revealed Religion, it is noteworthy that while many Protestant theologians and writers on both sides of the Atlantic have, until a recent period, treated the discoveries of science, and especially of Geology, so far as they affect theological dogmas, in a manner, if not of contempt, at least of distrust or unfairness: on the contrary, the Romanist writers who have discussed these themes, have done so, generally, in a spirit of broad catholicity well calculated to command the respect it merits. They have shown no sensitiveness or timidity lest, perchance, their exegesis might be disturbed by candidly admitting the changes demanded by the discoveries of Science. (p. 11)

My own studies have confirmed this statement in spades, and Geology and Revelation is just a new addition to a long list of references to Catholic broadmindedness in manifesting the agreement between the Bible and science, not by denying science’s legitimate discoveries, but by showing their compatibility with a correct interpretation of Scripture.

Mr. Hugh Owen of the Kolbe Center once accused Fr. Fulcran Vigouroux, of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, of being “intoxicated with his confidence in the truth of the wild speculations of Lyellian geology”. On this score, Fr. Molloy is likewise in a state of inebriation, and probably further under the table than the learned assistant of St. Pius X.

In what ways does Fr. Molloy agree with Sir Charles Lyell? In several: he refers to two works of Lyell as being “classic” (in 1869!), he thanks Lyell for allowing him “to reproduce some of the drawings that embellish his works” and, most importantly, he wholeheartedly adopts Lyell’s principle of uniformitarianism. The word as such is never used, yet the notion of uniformitarianism reappears again and again, for instance on pages 47, 88, 117-119, 126, and 279. Here is how he explains the principle on page 47:

In the physical sciences it is a common principle of reasoning to account for the phenomena that come before us in nature, by the operation of natural causes which we know to exist. Nay, this principle seems to be almost an instinct of our nature, which guides even the least philosophical amidst us, in the common affairs of life.

Here is an example of his application of this principle, on page 117:

As the stream of water flows down the slopes of the hill, a thin layer of Travertine rock is produced on the surface of the earth, almost before our eyes; and so it was previous to our own time, and so it has been for ages, as history and tradition testify. The quantity produced in each year and in each century is comparatively small, but we can have no doubt that it has been produced by the means described. Now, beneath the surface of the Earth, immediately below these modern formations, of which we have so clearly ascertained the origin, we find strata of the same kind, composed of the same materials, and arranged in the same way, layer resting upon layer, down to a depth of two hundred feet: and the Geologist accounts for the formation of the one according to the same laws which he has seen at work in the production of the other.

None of Fr. Molloy’s charming Irish prose has any difficulty with this process of scientific reasoning, nor does he see any threat to the faith from it whatsoever. It is rather the opposite: he has no time for anyone who argues that geological formations were not built up by natural processes over long periods of time, but rather were just created directly by God. He points out that we would never use such reasoning if we were gazing at the ruins of an old castle:

It is true that God is Omnipotent. He might, if it had so pleased Him, have built the old castle at the creation of the world, and allowed it to crumble slowly into ruins: or he might have built it yesterday, and made a ruin begin to be where no castle had stood before; and covered the stones with moss, and mantled the walls in ivy… All this is true: but yet if any one were to argue in this style against us, he would fail to shake our convictions; we should still unhesitatingly believe that human hands once built the castle. (p. 48)

The uniformitarian reasoning of the geologists, then, is not at all unreasonable. In the second half of his book, when he considers revelation, after having considered science in the first half, Fr. Molloy goes even further. At that point, I already knew that Fr. Molloy and I were kindred spirits, geeky priest-scientist types who are as sensitive to the rights of reason as those of revelation, and who want to communicate that balance to the faithful. But it was really when I came to page 282 that I discovered how astonishing can be one’s feeling of seeing eye to eye with someone whom one has certainly never seen with physical eyes, but can only use written words as a means to encounter and get to know the person. It was there that Fr. Molloy expressed the same theological reservations that I have about Young Earth Creationism: it would involve God in deceiving us, and it is not reasonable to hold that we have such a God.

In the context, Fr. Molloy is relating how fossil evidence demonstrates that the Earth is likely millions of years old. The creationists of his time, to get around this, claimed that God created the fossils ex nihilo. Here is Fr. Molloy’s answer:

Absolute metaphysical certainty [about the geological evidence] we have not; but we have a firm and rational conviction. We feel quite satisfied that the great Creator of the Universe did not bring suddenly into existence the withered remains and broken fragments of animals which had never lived; that He did not stamp upon the massive rocks, buried in the profound recesses of the earth, the impress of a luxuriant vegetation which had never flourished; that He did not, in short, create under millions of forms, the delusive appearances of things which had never been, and scatter them through this world of ours in wild profusion, well knowing that after many centuries they would come to light to bewilder human reason, and to lead it into error.

But this book has many more benefits to its credit besides the fact that it agrees with me. The first section, which provides a thorough tour of geological science, is readable and fascinating. Fr. Molloy is very knowledgeable in his subject and he has the art of effortless communication. He provides the reader general principles, topics that are clearly separated one from another, and many concrete illustrations from human history of the phenomena he describes.

The second section showcases Fr. Molloy’s exegetical skill. He exhaustively considers the teaching of the Fathers, the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, and the Counter-Reformation theologians on the subject of the meaning of “day” in Genesis 1. He points out that the opinion of the Fathers on the subject was quite diverse, a remark that is worth quoting:

No one who will take the trouble to investigate, with any reasonable diligence and research, the nature of the Mosaic Days, can fail to be struck with the remarkable diversity of opinion that existed on the subject among the Fathers of the Church. Yet this diversity of opinion is often overlooked by modern writers. They fancy that the meaning of the word Day is so plain as to leave no room for doubt or controversy; that a day can be nothing else than a period of twenty-four hours, marked by the succession of light and darkness; and that in this sense the Mosaic narrative was universally understood until quite recently, when a new explanation was invented, to meet the requirements of modern science. All this is far from true. The meaning of the Mosaic Days has been, in point of fact, a subject of controversy from the earliest times. (pp. 318-319)

This enables Fr. Molloy to argue, as Fr. Vigouroux also argued, that he is not departing from the spirit of the Fathers by understanding “day” means as an indefinite period of time. Once more, Fr. Molloy treats this topic with great thoroughness and mastery, considering all possible objections to his opinion and even descending to the analysis of the Hebrew words used for “day”, “evening”, and “morning”. He proposes that God created the universe and the earth at some time before the six days. The days themselves indicate certain stages in the development of the earth.

The appearance of light corresponds to the time when the vapor surrounding the Earth thinned out, allowing the rays of the sun through. The formation of the Earth’s crust is day two. Then, there is the appearance of plants on day three. On day four, the atmosphere clears sufficiently for the sun, moon and stars to be actually seen. Finally, days 5 and 6 can easily be reconciled with what the layers of the geological record shows us about the appearance of animals and man. (the technical name for this manner of matching science with Scripture is called “concordism”)

If I cited all of the passages of the book that I would like from this most quotable book, this review would run on to an indefinite and no doubt (more) unwieldy length. Let these suffice, then, to provide the reader with a taste of the author’s style and views. In my own mind, it is an extraordinary testimony to Fr. Molloy’s accomplishment that his book is still in print after the passage of so much geological and astronomical time. It could almost be used as a study guide for today’s Catholics on things geological and exegetical, and is certainly a most useful resource for steering Catholics away from the temptations of Protestant fundamentalist exegesis. Tolle et lege.




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Two positive reviews, one by Dr Jason Morgan and one by Mr Brian Welter, appeared in the January-March 2019 edition of the journal Studia Gilsoniana.

Here are some excerpts from what Dr Morgan wrote in his review:

Paul Robinson’s The Realist Guide to Religion and Science is [] a very welcome addition to the growing, and increasingly activist, remnant of truth-seekers who want to do more than fritter away their intellectual dhimmitude on the margins of post-modern and Marxian anti-scholarship. More than a call to action, The Realist Guide to Religion and Science is a plan for it, as well as a rallying cry to go on offense in taking back the academy for purposes higher than identity politics.

Divided into three parts—Reason, Religion, and Science—Robinson’s book is a double-hearted adventure. On the one hand, Robinson, a Kentucky native and Catholic priest currently teaching in Australia, patiently and methodically rebuilds our capacity for knowing and loving truth by returning to Aristotelian and Thomistic principles and in-sights, showing how realism—Robinson’s term of art and the keystone of this book, on which more below—is the approach needed for the human mind to look for, know, and delight in what is objectively true. On the other hand, The Realist Guide is a ruthless dismantling of the various false edifices and untenable ideologies that thicket the modern academy. Going down the list from pagan pantheism and Protestant biblicism to the thoroughly unscientific claims of Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and Daniel Dennett, Robinson does not attempt to find common ground with the enemies of truth. His objective is to annihilate their falsehoods forever. The Realist Guide is a bracing frontal attack on every idol of the age, and in section after section Robinson picks apart the enemies’ defenses with all the confidence of a seasoned combat veteran.

Like the soldier fighting for love of country, Robinson’s cut and thrust blossoms forth from a very simple notion, namely, that truth exists, and that the human mind was made to know it. From this starting point, Robinson’s thinking, and his book, follow.

To read the rest of Dr Morgan's review, go here.

Mr Welter's review starts off as follows:

What makes The Realist Guide to Religion and Science both accessible and sensible is Father Paul Robinson’s illustration of Thomist philosophy’s coherence, starting from a basis in philosophy of being. This congruity contrasts with the incoherence and falsehoods that abound in idealism and empiricism, the latter followed by most scientists today. After outlining the strengths and weaknesses of Aristotelian philosophy, the author argues that the medieval Christian worldview enabled repair of these flaws. The resulting unified, multifaceted philosophy guided science (and other endeavors) yet kept science from swaying into metaphysical terrain. This helps readers comprehend modern science’s wrong turns and possible corrections. Anyone unsettled by modern science’s hubris will find this engaging reading. Robinson’s book is above all a work of apologetics, as it addresses why the Catholic faith provides the most logical belief system, and why seemingly sophisticated attacks on the Church and its beliefs by seemingly rational philosophers and scientists are not only erroneous, but actually irrational. Counterarguments can be easily evoked.

Robinson argues convincingly that philosophical realism enabled the experimental method and mindset to develop in the Middle Ages sufficiently so that the later Age of Science and its aftermath survived realism’s waning. In the “Foreword,” Paul Michael Haffner notes, “Realism affirms the existence of universals against nominalism. Against positivism, realism proposes that reality extends beyond that which the natural sciences can measure.” Throughout the book readers see realism compared to idealism and empiricism on a scale, with concrete examples illustrating why certain thinking harms both scientific and religious worldviews.

To read the rest of the review, go here.

Fr Robinson would like to thank Dr Morgan and Mr Welter for kindly taking time to read his book and write these positive reviews.

Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy by Yves Chiron

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This short biography of Archbishop Bugnini was useful for many facts that it provided. It was, however, disappointing overall, not so much for what it contained, as for what was absent.

Chiron seems to studiously avoid painting the deeper portrait of character that one expects from a biography and, as such, the reader does not really know Bugnini at the end. What were Bugnini’s motivations? What was he thinking? What made him tick? Beyond what he did, who was he?

Besides not providing the reader with any solid content from Bugnini himself that might assist the reader to understand the man, Chiron also did not bring forward his own judgment. What does the author think about Bugnini? Was he a Modernist? Was he a sincerely Catholic prelate who was just blind to his own errors? Was he pompous and overbearing? Or was he meek and virtuous? The reader finishes the book without receiving Chiron’s own assessment of the man that he is presenting.

Because these key elements are left out, I was getting the impression that Chiron read through Bugnini’s memoirs, possibly when preparing his biography of Paul VI (which I have not read) and figured that he was in a position to write a biography of Bugnini for that reason alone. That seems to me to explain why he cut so many corners throughout the whole work and made it so superficial. It did not seem to me that he did research for Bugnini; it rather seemed that he did research for Paul VI and then just took whatever of that concerned Bugnini and wrote a Bugnini biography from that.

One thing that leads me to think this is that the biography seems to lose track of Bugnini for a few chapters. Chiron leaves Bugnini to give a history of all of the steps in the liturgical “reform”. Taken by themselves, one would not be able to guess that those chapters were part of a biography on Bugnini.

The treatment of the changes in the Church is very cold, similar to the treatment of Bugnini himself. The changes were devastating, tragic, and the Church is still very much suffering from them. But Chiron just relates them as a series of facts without showing any emotion, and so this gives the reader the impression that experimenting with the sacred liturgy, concocting new liturgies from scratch, taking a wrecking ball to the canon, and so on are just, well, things that happen in the life of the Church.

A more minor drawback is that the biography is Francocentric. What Bugnini did affected the entire Church, but Chiron seems to focus mainly on French prelates and things going on in the French orbit. The translator even had to correct some statements he had made, because Chiron had not read English sources like Michael Davies.

In conclusion, I think it is important for the reader to realize, when he picks up this book, that he will not really understand much about Bugnini from reading it. He will learn about things that Bugnini did, but will not really know who Bugnini was.




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Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution by Michael J. Behe

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Of the many books on Darwinian evolution that I have read, the best fall into three different categories:

1. Scholastic dispute – these books start with a statement of the question to be addressed, such as “What is the origin of life?” or “What caused the Cambrian explosion?”, then consider philosophically the methodological tools to be used to answer the question, then look at the complete range of attempted solutions, and finally present the correct solution. Stephen Meyer’s books Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt are of this form.
2. Engineering problem – the angle of this type of book is to consider what it would take to build a living cell or an animal body or some other biological component. Based on our detailed knowledge of the components of living things, what would it take to assemble the parts? Michael Behe’s first two books Darwin’s Black Box and The Edge of Evolution are of this form.
3. Assumption checking – this last approach considers the fact that Darwin proposed his theory of random mutation and natural selection as a possible explanation of the emergence of new biological forms, that the theory relied on various assumptions that he made about nature, that science had not advanced sufficiently at the time to test those assumptions rigorously, but we are in a position now, 150 years later, to evaluate those assumptions with precise scientific data. The New Biology by Robert Augros and George Stanciu follows this approach.

Behe, in Darwin Devolves, definitely engages in the type of engineering analysis that made his first two books so effective, and dabbles in scholastic disputation, but the book as a whole is of the third type. Time and again, he repeats that we have much more scientific information available today that we did a century and a half ago, and even than we did twenty years ago. For instance, in the final chapter, Behe states:

Darwin did not show that apparently purposeful systems could be built by natural selection acting on random variation. Rather, he just proposed that they might. His theory had yet to be tested at the profound depths of life. In fact, no one then even realized life had such depths. Darwin built a case with the best science available in the nineteenth century. The case was pretty strong for a few of his theory’s multiple aspects, including the descent of modern organisms from earlier ones. It was extremely weak for his proposed mechanism of evolution. A major reason for its weakness is that the science of Darwin’s day had no understanding of the molecular foundation of life. Only now, only within the past twenty years has science advanced sufficiently to examine life in the molecular detail necessary to rigorously test Darwin’s ideas. (pp. 255-256)

So, that is exactly what Behe the biochemist sets out to do:
1. Note Darwin’s assumptions about the capabilities of random mutation and natural selection to account for the origin of new biological species.
2. Use the incredible advances of today’s science in the understanding of life’s molecular processes to evaluate what random mutation and natural selection can actually accomplish.
3. Compare the evidence of science with Darwin’s assumptions and draw conclusions about the real explanatory power of Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism.

So, first of all, what were Darwin’s assumptions (chapter 3)?

Darwin’s last theory—call it the ‘theory of natural coherence’—is the presumption that repeated rounds of random variation and natural selection would, by a succession of separate steps, build elegant compound interactive biological systems. (p. 89)

The important thing to note about this assumption is that Darwin makes evolution out to be a process that perfects in a cumulative fashion. It has successive stages that build on one another. It is not just a question of one change happening here and another disconnected change happening over there. Rather, it is change built upon change built upon change, over long periods of time, that progressively produces the panorama of living things.

Before using modern science to see whether these expectations of Darwin can be squared with biological reality, Behe first spends two chapters considering how other scientists have attempted to reconcile today’s knowledge with a century-and-a-half-old theory. All of these scientists realize that they have an extremely tough job on their hands, and they give it their best shot.

Chapter 4 speaks of neutral theory, which speculates that mutations that are neither advantageous nor disadvantageous pave the way for later advantageous mutations and so bring about new biological features; web of life theory, which opines that species of microorganisms might pass genes among themselves and so the long history of life has just been a constant interchange of genetic material that originated because we are part of an infinite multiverse in which everything possible happens an infinite number of times (not a joke!); and self-organization theory, which holds as a possibility that living things have the built-in capacity, under the right conditions, to organize themselves into other more complex living things.

Chapter 5 considers attempted improvements to neo-Darwinism that are classified as being part of an extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). The proponents of EES posit various mechanisms as being capable of enhancing the chances for Darwin’s theory to be plausible, such as:
• master genes: perhaps random changes in those genes could cause the development of new and complex features
• inclusive inheritance: perhaps traits that are not coded in DNA and are passed on to successive generations can cause more variations for natural selection to choose from
• niche construction: perhaps the way that animals interact with their environment causes genetic changes in animals
• developmental plasticity: perhaps plants and animals, in adjusting to their environments, alter their behavior so that they survive and, in doing so, pass on those alterations to the next generation
All of these ideas that are meant to help modern Darwinists to the explanatory finish line suffer from the same defect:

[N]either neutral theory nor complexity theory, neither the ideas of the extended evolutionary synthesis nor the latest Darwinian innovations—none of them even try to account for the sophisticated machinery of life. None even try to account for the purposeful arrangement of parts. (p. 137)

That is the million-dollar question to which Behe continually returns: where did ancestral plants and animals get their traits, and how did their lineages come to differ? EES does not attempt to answer that question and so is not able to really boost evolution’s explanatory power.

This leaves us with classic random mutation and natural selection. Are they able to account for the origin of species, as Darwin thought they could? Based on what we know today, the answer is: certainly not.
In chapter 6, Behe showcases various field studies that help us determine the reach of random mutation. Peter and Rosemary Grant did exhaustive investigations of the Galapagos finches and, using newly-developed techniques, sequenced the genomes of 120 of them, enabling them to determine which genes cause variation in the finches’ beak size. Similar studies were done on hundreds of species of cichlid fish in African lakes, with differences being traced all the way down to the level of the genome. In those cases and others cited by Behe, the changes were quite small and they were never sufficient to introduce a new biological family into the world (in the Linnaean system of taxonomical classification, species is the lowest level, then genus, then family).

We reach the heart of the book in chapter 7, as it provides the new information about random mutation that Darwin could not know:

The amazing but in retrospect unsurprising fact established by the diligent work of many investigators in laboratory evolution over decades is that the great majority of even beneficial positively selected mutations damage an organism’s genetic information—either degrading or outright destroying functional coded elements. (p. 183)

In other words, when random mutation provides a benefit to a plant or animal, it almost always does so by damaging its genetic material. Just as throwing cargo overboard can sometimes make for the survival of the crew, so too, in the world of life, the destruction of certain functions has sometimes provided lifeforms with a survival advantage. When it does, natural selection steps in to conserve the damaged genetic material. The plants or animals with certain debilitated functions are the ones that survive. Knowing this, we arrive at the shocking realization that the mechanism which Darwin hoped would cause an evolution actually causes a devolution.

Chapter 8 tracks what happens from there. After a random mutation that destroys functionality causes a survival advantage, the damaged genetic material spreads throughout a population. Once that takes place, there is no getting the good genes back again. You throw the cargo overboard in order to obtain a temporary advantage, but you have to suffer the long-term consequences: there is no way to retrieve the cargo.

Degrading machinery can be useful for some purposes—perhaps because its function is unneeded at the time, and so the scrapped machine doesn’t waste energy; or because in changed circumstances the product the machine made is now detrimental; or some other reason. But natural selection can’t build a coherent new system. (p. 201)

Natural selection preserves the degradation, and it cannot reconstruct the missing function. The reason is that natural selection is blind. Behe explains that it is a mere metaphor; there is no actual selection taking place. If there were, the selector could note that damaged animals might have a temporary survival advantage, but retaining them in the population would not be good in the long run. Since natural selection is blind—since it is simply a term saying that those who survive in nature are the ones more apt to survive—it “will favor the increase in the number of organisms that do better in their environment for any reason, regardless of the basis of the variation” (p. 203). And, as we have seen, in the vast majority of cases, the basis for doing better is a damaging of the genome.

What we have learned, then, through a more detailed knowledge of the molecular basis of life, is that the little variation that we are able to observe in nature as being caused by random mutation and natural selection—the appearance of new species and genera—is actually the result of loss of function and so devolution, reduces the possibility of any further change by restricting the variability of the genome, and provides no explanation for any notable feature of the biological world.

To emphasize just how inadequate empirical data has shown the Darwinian mechanism to be, Behe revisits his famous notion of “irreducible complexity” in chapter 9. There, he shows that we not only have no reasonable expectation that random mutation and natural selection can build systems that need all parts to be present for them to be functional (irreducibly complex systems), we can’t even expect it to be able to build the parts of those parts in anything close to the time needed (mini-irreducibly complex systems).

Behe is extremely kind to evolutionists throughout the book—including some vociferous opponents of his science—but be he ever so kind, or be he ever so Behe, he does have to ask the question: why are so many 21st century scientists sold on an idea that their own science has shown definitively to be utterly inadequate? Effectively, he believes it is due to two reasons (p. 218): a) they are believers in outdated mathematical studies that did not take into account biological reality as we know it today; b) they are unable to see the real problem that they have to solve, which is also the hardest problem, the million-dollar question mentioned above. Quoting Chesterton, he notes that they are “in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea” (p. 245).

The obsession with Darwinism leads some scientists to come up with the craziest of proposals—that mind is just the product of neural impulses, that our free will and desires do not really exist, and that reality is just a computer simulation. Besides the fact that these ideas, which Behe treats in chapter 10, destroy all scientific endeavor, they also manifest how humans can sometimes be willing to sacrifice their very rationality in order to hold on to a cherished idea.

It has been obvious to most everyone in the history of the world that the purposeful arrangement of parts that is manifest in every member of the biological world is the product of mind. Atheists like Richard Dawkins were hoping that random mutation and natural selection could prove that lifeforms are only apparently designed. People of common sense knew all along that they were building castles in the air. But now that Darwin’s mechanism has been tested at the molecular level of life, we can definitively show its utter inadequacy to account for anything of real moment in the world around us.

I highly recommend Darwin Devolves for an authentic 21st century scientific account of the explanatory power of Darwin’s theory. And while Behe does engage in some geek-talk occasionally, overall the book is extremely readable. It is loaded with the analogies for which Behe has a gift, movie references, and helpful diagrams and tables. Even for someone who is not conversant with the literature treating evolution, Darwin Devolves promises to be an interesting read.




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The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise by Robert Sarah

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Father, why did you give the book only three stars and not five stars? Well, firstly, it was not out of a lack of respect for His Eminence. He is clearly a man who loves the faith, who has suffered a lot for the faith, and has the genuine piety of a devout Catholic. It was just that his piety is at times accompanied by doctrinal ambiguities, which is a major fault in someone of his high position in the Church. Secondly, it was not because I did not like parts of the book. On the contrary, there were several passages that were not just good, but were excellent. Here are three in particular:

1. Reverence – on several occasions, His Eminence roundly criticizes the lack of reverence in modern Catholic liturgies and emphasizes the transcendence of God and our corresponding need to humble ourselves and even prostrate ourselves before almighty God. This is a message that the Catholic world desperately needs. Here is an example:

“God is great. God is beyond contingencies, God is immense. It is true that I would never automatically use the word ‘familiarity’ in speaking about God. When you are familiar with someone, you take almost every sort of liberty, and you are less careful about your gestures and words. It is not possible to allow oneself to behave that way with God, even though he is our Father.” (p. 206)

2. Poverty – the Cardinal’s perspective on poverty is a wholly supernatural one and it was very refreshing to hear him set the record straight on the true attitude of a Catholic toward poverty. Here is what he says:

“I am surprised by the way in which poverty is understood in the world today, and even by many members of the Catholic Church. In the Bible, poverty is always a state that brings God and man closer together. The poor of Yahweh populate the Bible. Monasticism is an impulse toward God alone: the monk leads his life in poverty, chastity, absolute obedience, and lives on God’s Word in silence. Perversely, the modern world has set for itself as an odd objective the eradication of poverty. Above all, there is a kind of disturbing confusion between misery and poverty.” (p. 168)

3. Inculturation – again, His Eminence hits the nail on the head when he states that the liturgy must not adapt itself to cultures, but cultures must adapt themselves to the liturgy, which transcends individual cultures. The liturgy must form people in the worship of God; it is not there for them to choose how they want to express themselves in their relationship with God. Here is part of what Cardinal Sarah says on this question:

“I am an African. Allow me to say it clearly: the liturgy is not the place to promote my culture. Rather, it is the place where my culture is baptized, where my culture is raised to the height of the divine. Through the Church’s liturgy (which the missionaries brought everywhere in the world), God speaks to us, he changes us and grants us a share in the divine life.” (p. 225)

Despite these positive aspects of The Power of Silence, there were three other things that I found disappointing, such that I wavered between giving the book two or three stars. I would have given it 2.5, if possible. Here are those three things:

1. Piety without doctrine – there are many beautiful passages about the fruitfulness of silence in approaching God and the damaging effects of noise. However, the presentation is not orderly and it lacks intellectual discipline. There is a lack of clear definitions and distinctions. The reader needs to be told that not all silence is good. The Buddhists have silence, the Quakers have silence, the Quietists have silence, but their silence is different from the silence of the authentic Catholic contemplative. Why? Because they have the wrong idea of God. Unless one is grounded in a proper understanding of who God is (dogma) and how He is to be sought (proper methods of prayer), then one will easily go astray in one’s practice of silence. Buddhists are definitely not “encountering God” in their silence. But the reader is never told this and may walk away with the impression that all silence is good, no matter how it is practiced, that it is some sort of panacea. This need for a proper understanding of God in order to orient prayer correctly, which is not mentioned in the book, at least as far I could tell, brings me to the second point.

2. God – The Cardinal makes some ambiguous statements about God, in his treatment of the problem of evil, that can be misleading. He speaks of how the Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas justifies God’s “silence” at the Holocaust by saying that God suffered by it. Cardinal Sarah rightly points out that this is to take away God’s omnipotence. But then he goes on to try to find a way to say that God suffers by man’s sins, to try to allow Catholics to think of God as being vulnerable in order to help them deal with the evil in the world. “To believe in a silent God who ‘suffers’ is to make the mystery of God’s silence more mysterious and more luminous, too” (p. 92). For me, this is a dangerous anthropomorphizing of God that sacrifices doctrine for piety. It does not make God more luminous, but more human, and so less God.

3. Ecumenism – another manifestation of the book’s lack of clarity, mentioned in point 1, is in the Cardinal’s willingness to cite all manner of authors and sources, without cautioning the reader that some of those sources are dangerous. He quotes Teilhard de Chardin once and Thomas Merton many times, but does not warn the reader that these authors made strange amalgamations of modern thought and Catholic thought. Chardin married naturalism with Catholicism; Merton married paganism and Catholicism. These marriages were unnatural and contrary to the Church’s true marriage with Our Lord Jesus Christ. The fact that the Cardinal quotes them without warning the reader again gives the impression that, as long as you favor silence, no matter what you believe, you will find God. But this is simply not the case. Likewise, I was confused as to why the Cardinal would cite approvingly a parable from the “tradition of mystical Islam” (p. 160), without any warning that Islam is a false religion, and so giving the impression that doctrine is not important.

4. The liturgy – I know, I only said three points, but in fact there is a fourth. This concerns the Cardinal’s unwillingness to take a stand in favor of the traditional liturgy. “I refuse to waste our time pitting one liturgy against another or the rite of Saint Pius V against that of Blessed Paul VI. Rather, it is about entering into the great silence of the liturgy; it is necessary to know how to be enriched by all the Latin or Eastern liturgical forms that give a privileged place to silence” (p. 134). This statement is massively disappointing and confirms the reader in the impression that the Cardinal has turned silence into something that is good in itself, without considering the orientation of the one being silent. He seems to think that if we simply add silence to the New Mass and face ad orientem, if we make a “reform of the reform”, then everything will be good. Of course, that is not at all the case, because of the doctrinal problems of the New Mass. The Cardinal seems to imply that examining the doctrinal differences between the New Mass and the old is a waste of time. But the destructive influence of the new liturgy cannot in any way be reduced to the fact that it lacks silence, far from it!

Besides this, I did appreciate the passages of the abbot of the Grande Chartreuse, Fr. Dysmas de Lassus. He articulated the teaching of the Church more clearly. The passages about the life of the Carthusian monks at the charterhouse helped me also appreciate better, I think, how those monks were able to invent such a fantastic liqueur as chartreuse. For those who made it all the way through The Power of Silence, I would invite them to treat themselves to a taste of yellow or, preferably, green chartreuse. In silence, of course.




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Mike Church of the Mike Church show kindly interviewed Fr Robinson for over an hour at the end of January. They discussed all three section of The Realist Guide to Religion and Science, including the following topics:

– epistemology and the Realist Guide's epistedometer,
– the Church's teaching on biblical questions like the universality of the Flood and the age of the earth,
– problems with modern empirical science,
– scientific problems with geocentrism.

The interview may be listened to here.