The fingerprints of an intelligent mind are all over the genomes of life

 

 

“There are different categories of pseudoscience, but the type relevant

to Darwinism occurs when a legitimate scientific theory makes predictions critical to that theory that are subsequently falsified, but the theory continues to be promoted as science, often with creative story-telling and the use of technical terms mixed with words and phrases such as “over time,” “is conceivable,” “probably”

and many others which can be described charitably as words and phrases one uses when confirming data is unavailable”.

 

Kirk Durston

 

 

Apparently certain Christians, as well as certain scientists, so determined to ‘prove’ their agenda-driven arguments, will actually resort to lying to ‘make good their case’, or to ‘save the appearances’.

 

In the case of Creationists, for instance, Geology professor Ian Plimer has exposed such desperate falsifying in his book, Telling lies for God: Reason vs creationism (Random House Australia, 1994).

 

I (Damien Mackey) wrote about this unhappy situation, for example, in my article:

 

Abandonment of common sense, telling lies for God, not necessary prerequisites for biblical interpretation

 

(11) Abandonment of common sense, telling lies for God, not necessary prerequisites for biblical interpretation

 

One review of professor Plimer’s book reads as follows:

Telling Lies For God by Ian Plimer - 9780091828523

 

A powerful and controversial analysis of creationism - the belief that the Biblical description of the earth, and all life on it, can be applied literally - and an attack on the arguments put forward in its support. Ian Plimer, Professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne, examines in detail the arguments of the creationists, and draws on his own scientific background and the expertise of many of his academic peers to refute them point by point.

 

He details the implications of treating the Old Testament as a scientific text - and takes an equally searching look at the material used to back up the more unusual statements made by some creationists here and overseas.

 

This is an issue which arouses great argument and passion amongst many Australians. We are all entitled to our beliefs - but in a pluralist society we should also expect them to be subject to public scrutiny.

 

Kirk Durston (2025) will tell of how the same situation can occur with Darwinian scientists: Darwinism as Pseudoscience | Science and Culture Today

 

How Darwinism Became a Pseudoscience

 

Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein has a reputation for some pretty wild ideas outside his area of expertise that I might not want to defend. But when it comes to some comments he made a few months ago, within his own field of expertise, he was spot on when he provided a disturbing reality check on the current state of Darwinism. As a scientist, I have my own reasons why this is so. He stated,

 

In my opinion, the mainstream Darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood … I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it. I’m annoyed at my colleagues for, I think, lying to themselves about the state of modern Darwinism. I think I know why that happened. I think they were concerned that a Creationist worldview was always a threat … and so they pretended that Darwinism was a more complete explanation, as it was presented, than it ever was ….

 

As a biophysicist specializing in the information encoded in the DNA of protein-coding genes, and how that information prescribes the 3D structure of proteins, I have my own reasons for agreeing with Weinstein on this issue. Although he thinks he knows “more or less how to fix it,” my knowledge of the extreme difficulty (a colossal understatement) of locating sequences that will code for a functional protein with a stable 3D structure, tells me that neither he nor anyone else is going to fix it (although I would be fascinated to hear his proposed solution).

 

That said, there are some phrases in his statement that deserve to be pointed out: “telling a kind of lie,” “broken,” and “lying to themselves.” Note, also, the motive for promoting this broken theory.

 

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Darwinists are conspiring to deliberately corrupt science and mislead people, although such corruption and misleading is certainly happening. Rather, scientists who should know better, but continue to promote Darwinism, are living in denial, motivated by their own a priori commitment to materialism and scientism driven by an antagonism against any possibility that there is an intelligent mind behind the software encoded in the genomes of life.

 

Three Predictions of Darwinian Evolution

 

About 35 years earlier, I sat in the office of a professor of evolutionary biology at a major Canadian university. I had noticed three predictions of Darwinian evolution that appeared to be consistently falsified by experimental evidence, so I asked him about it. To my shock, he admitted that all three were major problems for which we had not yet found satisfactory answers. Keep in mind that this was 35 years before Bret Weinstein’s interview.

 

The main difference between then and now is that advances in science have made the problems even more obvious.

 

Eugene Koonin, an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist, published a paper in 2007 admitting that even RNA replication, a proposed stepping stone to life, was so impossibly improbable, that it was unlikely to occur anywhere in the universe. …. His solution was to propose an infinite multiverse, which would offer an infinite number of opportunities to solve this problem. It is especially interesting to read the reviewers’ comments. They expressed the fear that intelligent design might be seen as a better explanation for the origin of life. Consequently, the concluding sentence of Eugene Koonin’s paper absurdly states that his hypothesis of an infinite multiverse “leaves no room whatsoever for any form of intelligent design.” One might think that a mind, which we know exists given that we all have one, might be a better “Ockham’s Razor” option than proposing an infinite number of untestable universes … but rational deliberation is often sidestepped in pseudoscience.

 

If one wonders what the driving force behind Darwinism is, and what the motive might be for Darwinists to be “telling a kind of lie,” as Weinstein puts it, one might want to think about both Koonin’s denial of any kind of intelligent design behind life, and what Weinstein said about the so-called “threat” of the theory of intelligent design as an explanation for the origin and diversity of life. This “threat” and denial have resulted in Darwinists lying to themselves and the public. The result is that Darwinism has degenerated into pseudoscience.

 

Variation vs Darwinism

 

The average person tends to understand the word “evolution” as the theory that the full diversity of plant and animal life has descended from a very simple cell that somehow arose in the past and began to self-replicate. People are often confused to learn that evolution is often defined as variation in a population of plants or animals over time, via a combination of genetic drift, mutations … and natural selection. (Note: In this article, “mutation” includes insertions, deletions, duplications, inversions, and translocations.) Since we observe variation throughout nature, a Darwinist can look you in the eye and confidently state that “evolution is a fact!” But defining evolution as simply genetic variation over time is misleading. To avoid using the term “evolution” in a misleading way, I will refer to variation within a population over time as, simply, variation. As for the neo-Darwinian theory of common descent, we will describe that belief as Darwinism.

 

How Can We Tell the Difference?

 

Unfortunately, there is a disturbing lack of rigor in evolutionary biology when it comes to distinguishing between variation and Darwinism. I often observe Darwinists insisting that the two are the same thing, but as science advances this belief has become obviously false. Rigor must be an essential component of good science and using the word “evolution” to refer to two very different concepts is no exception. There is, in fact, a central, objective quantification of genetic change that allows science to clearly distinguish between variation and Darwinism. Absolutely central to life and its survival, reproduction, and variation, is the functional information encoded in the DNA of organisms. 

 

Functional Information

 

The concept of functional information as required by biological life was first proposed by Jack Szostak in a short article in the science journal Nature in 2003. …. 

Four years later, he coauthored a more extensive technical article in PNAS with Robert Hazen et al. further defining functional information. …. That same year I published an article in TBMM laying out how we can estimate the amount of functional information from actual data for protein families. …. I used a more complete equation than Hazen et al. used, but for the general cases they discussed, the equation I used reduces to the identical one they proposed. To confirm this, I contacted both Robert Hazen and Jack Szostak directly, showing them the derivation of their equation from the more extensive one I used for protein families, and they each confirmed that I was correct and that we are all using the same general equation for measuring functional information. ….

 

The Difference Between Variation and Darwinism

 

When we quantify the observed change in functional information in genetic variation within a population over time, we observe that there is none. If there is any change, it is usually a loss of information if the deleterious mutations are not compensated for at the same rate as beneficial mutations. A statistically significant increase in functional information has never been documented. 

 

Darwinism requires novel protein families and gene regulation systems, all of which require enormous increases in the functional information encoded in the DNA of the new type of plant or animal. Some Darwinists will point to the gain of a new function as positive evidence for Darwinism; however, when the functional information required for these gains is calculated, it turns out that a gain of function can occur without any increase in functional information. Therefore, gain of function fails to correlate with whether or not there has been a corresponding gain of functional information. 

 

To summarize, functional information is the key distinguishing factor between variation and Darwinism — the latter requires significant levels of new, protein-coding information, while variation within a population over time does not.

 

Categories of Pseudoscience

 

There are different categories of pseudoscience, but the type relevant to Darwinism occurs when a legitimate scientific theory makes predictions critical to that theory that are subsequently falsified, but the theory continues to be promoted as science, often with creative story-telling and the use of technical terms mixed with words and phrases such as “over time,” “is conceivable,” “probably” and many others which can be described charitably as words and phrases one uses when confirming data is unavailable. Those scientists who promote this sort of pseudoscience are “telling a kind of lie” to themselves and to the public. Once you start to see this, you cannot unsee it. Much of the origin of life literature is rife with it.

 

Critical Predictions

 

For the scientific method, a theory should be testable by making predictions which can be potentially falsified. A critical prediction is one that, if that prediction is falsified, the entire theory collapses.

 

One can find data that can be interpreted as “evidence” for virtually any belief or theory. Evidence in favor of a theory, however, is trumped by falsification of a critical prediction. 

 

As in any theory, one can find evidence supporting Darwinism, which textbooks dealing with Darwinism cover extensively, while at the same time completely ignoring or glossing over the critical predictions and their falsification. In this way, scientists “are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood.” Emphasizing the evidence that supports a belief, while glossing over or ignoring the evidence that falsifies it, is another characteristic of pseudoscience.

 

For example, some aspects of the fossil record, phylogenetic trees, and genetic similarities can be interpreted in a way that supports Darwinism. However, the same observations are also predicted by the theory that there is an intelligent mind behind the software of life. In science, falsification of critical predictions entails that the evidence was misapplied. Due to creative storytelling, the line between science and science fiction has been blurred in Darwinism to the point of being almost indistinguishable. What we need for a critical prediction is something that is both essential and unique to the theory such that if it is falsified, we are forced to declare that Darwinism is, in fact, broken, as Weinstein might put it. Falsification exposes the creative storytelling of Darwinism for what it is — “telling a kind of lie.”

….

 

Summary

 

For Darwinism to be true, nature must provide an arena where novel, functional, stable, 3D proteins are relatively easy to find, and the rate of production of novel functional information encoded in the genomes of life is greater than the rate of destruction.

The reality is that neither is true. The laws of physics determine that stable 3D protein structures are unimaginably rare and the natural process of mutation leads to a net deterioration of whatever functional information is already out there. This is why every selective breeding experiment hits a limit if we try to see how far we can go. Nature ensures that the two critical predictions of Darwinism will continue to be thoroughly and consistently falsified. 

 

Darwinism began as a fascinating theory, but the falsification of its critical predictions means that those who continue to promote it are promoting a pseudoscience. They are, as Weinstein put it “lying to themselves” and “telling a kind of lie” to the public.

 

Ending on a Positive Note 

 

As Weinstein stated, “modern Darwinism is broken.” I am often asked what I have to offer as an alternative. My response is that we should go where the science points. In this case, the science shows that protein-coding genes require an impressive level of functional information, which is already encoded in the genomes of life. The only thing science has ever observed that can produce functional information are minds; we do it every time we message someone, write an essay, or write computer code. The fingerprints of an intelligent mind are all over the genomes of life in the form of the functional information encoded in the DNA. Science has no other observable, repeatable option; to ignore this is bad science. The ability to produce statistically significant levels of functional information is unique to intelligent minds. The key word here is “unique”; no other such process has ever been observed by science. Even genetic algorithms require an intelligent mind to design the fitness function and are, thus, examples of intelligent design in action. I have written a short introductory article, “Why This Scientist Believes that Intelligent Design Was Required for Biological Life,” presenting a positive, scientific method to test the hypothesis that the functional information found in life requires an intelligent mind. The job of science is to reverse engineer²⁰ the cell with its information-processing and gene-regulatory systems to understand how it all works. ….

 

22^nd October, 2026

Feast-day of pope-saint John Paul II ‘the Great’

 

 

 

John Paul II evolution controversy

 

by

Damien F. Mackey

  

“The subsequent official English-language translation of the speech,

published October 30, 1996 in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, translated the section to read that new knowledge "has led to the recognition

of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution"

(John Paul II 1996, this issue p 382).”.

 Eugenie C. Scott

 

 

Back when pope John Paul II issued his highly controversial statement about evolution  to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences entitled “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth” (October 22, 1996), I, pondering the matter, wrote in an article:

 

Pope John Paul II and that: «L’évolution est plus qu’une hypothèse …»

 

(1) Pope John Paul II and that: «L’évolution est plus qu’une hypothèse …»

 

I, having as I did (and still do) a great respect for the pope and his philosophical

expertise, found it very hard to accept that he had said that, as translated: “Evolution was more than a hypothesis”. Checking the French original of the speech, I wondered if it could actually be translated as “more than one hypothesis” (of evolution). According to a French academic I asked at the Geology Department of the University of Sydney, the French phrase could thus be translated into English. Though a Jesuit priest afterwards told me otherwise, that the French phrase would need - to convey my hopeful meaning - something additional like «plus qu’une seule hypothèse»

 

Now I learn that my suggestion was actually the translation provided in an official English-language translation of the speech:

Creationists and the Pope's Statement | National Center for Science Education

 

Creationists and the Pope's Statement

 

by Eugenie C. Scott

 

…. But it wasn't only conservative Protestants who objected to the Pope's statement.

 

Conservative Catholic columnist Cal Thomas, working from the Vatican press release (as were all journalists when the story broke) bemoaned the "more than a hypothesis" phrase as proof that the Pope had capitulated to the idea that humankind was a product of a gradual evolutionary process, "a philosophy that stands at the core of communism" (Thomas 1996:A18). Thomas regretted the Pope's "remarkable shift" because, "if man is not a unique creation of God, he is of no greater value and has no greater moral standing than an animal . . ." (p A18).
Fairly quickly, however, Thomas's dismay was assuaged by an apparent translation error, which he felt allowed him to reinterpret the Pope's statement. The Vatican press release quoted John Paul II as having said (in French) that evolution was "more than a hypothesis" ("la theorie de l'evolution plus qu'une hypothese").

 

The subsequent official English-language translation of the speech, published October 30, 1996 in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, translated the section to read that new knowledge "has led to the recognition of more than one hypothesis in the theory of evolution" (John Paul II 1996, this issue p 382). Seizing upon the relative ambiguity of "more than one hypothesis," Thomas wrote a second column claiming, "it is clear that the Pope was not watering down or liberalizing the church's view that the origin of man remained open to debate. He said that there are several theories of origin within the scientific community" (Thomas 1997:B8).

 

Thomas was joined in his enthusiasm for the revised version by the conservative Catholic World Report, which lambasted the news media for the "more than a hypothesis" translation, claiming that the preferable "more than one hypothesis" reflected "a lack of unanimity within the scientific community itself as to which particular hypothesis best explains the theory of evolution . . ." (Delano 1996:51). ….

 

Some Australians seem to have evolution theory around the wrong way.

 

They actually think that they come from Darwin (a Milton Jones joke).

 

Darwin wasn't always an evolutionist.

He slowly became one over time.

 

How did Charles Darwin propose to his wife?

He said that she was his natural selection.

 

One day, a zookeeper noticed a chimpanzee reading two books ...

--The Bible and Darwin's Origin of the Species. Astonished, he asked the ape,

"Not only can you read, you're reading two books at once!?"
"Well," said the chimp, "I'm trying to figure out if I'm my brother's keeper,

or my keeper's brother."

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Sacred Heart of Jesus

 

 

Jesus’s heart is so on fire with love for humanity that it has to spread.

He wanted Margaret Mary to spread this love as it contains the graces

necessary for salvation.

 

 

Jesus’ Heart

 

Shortly after she was professed, Mary Margaret received a tremendous grace. She was praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament when she was filled with Jesus’ presence, to the extent that she forgot where she was.

 

Jesus had her lie against his chest like St. John at the Last Supper. He told her the secrets of his heart.

 

“My Divine Heart,” he said in her autobiography, “is so inflamed with love for men, and for you in particular that, being unable any longer to contain within itself the flames of Its burning Charity, It must spread them abroad by thy means, and manifest Itself to them (mankind) in order to enrich them with the precious treasures which I discover to you, and which contain graces of sanctification and salvation necessary to withdraw them from the abyss of perdition.”

 

Jesus’s heart is so on fire with love for humanity that it has to spread. He wanted Margaret Mary to spread this love as it contains the graces necessary for salvation.

 

Then he asked her for her heart, which she begged him to take. He put it inside his own.

She described this as watching a little atom consumed by a furnace. When he pulled her heart out, it looked like a flame. He put it back in her. He told her that her burning heart would consume her until the end of her life.

 

The Aftermath

 

Margaret Mary was accused of being possessed. The sisters threw copious amounts of Holy Water over her to cure her. She was also sent to speak to many theologians, who openly doubted her.

 

Finally, she went to Confession to St. Claude de Colombière. For the first time in her life, someone believed her immediately. He taught her the discernment of spirits and advised her to thank God for the graces he had given her constantly. He permitted her to pray the way God had taught her and ordered her to stop punishing herself for struggling with vocal prayer.

 

Shortly after this, she went to receive Communion from Claude. Jesus gave her a vision of both their hearts being consumed by his. He told her that they were to work together to spread devotion to his Sacred Heart.

 

Claude eventually wrote a book about her visions. This brought a new dedication to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and also vindicated her in her community. Today the Sacred Heart of Jesus is revered by Catholics around the world.

 

Taken from: St. Margaret Mary and the Sacred Heart – Ascension

Homily of Pope Leo XIV at Lourdes

 

“In the Gospel, Jesus looks with truth and deep sorrow upon hearts that have remained closed, “you did not repent” (Mt 21:32). Why does this wound

the heart of Christ? Because God does not want his children to be lost”.

Pope Leo XIV

  

APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF POPE LEO XIV TO FRANCE
AND VISIT TO THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE UNITED NATIONS ORGANIZATION
FOR EDUCATION, SCIENCE AND CULTURE (UNESCO)
25-28 SEPTEMBER 2026

 

HOLY MASS

 

HOMILY OF POPE LEO XIV

 

Prairie of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes
Sunday, 27 September 2026

 

___________________________________

 

Brothers and sisters, pilgrims from France and from throughout the world, in seeing you gathered here this morning in our Mother’s home, I see the universal face of the Church.  Some of you have crossed continents, traveled far, and brought your joys and burdens to this sacred grotto.  What a joy it is to be together, as one heart and one family.

 

I would especially like to greet the pilgrims who have come from every province and diocese of France.  Today you stand on this blessed ground that has received so many graces.  May this pilgrimage rekindle the flame of faith in your homes and parishes.  Take the consolation of Lourdes back to your neighbors, your loved ones and the whole French people.

 

This Sunday’s readings touch on a central part of the message that the Virgin Mary entrusted to Saint Bernadette: the call to conversion, both tender and urgent.  In the Gospel, Jesus looks with truth and deep sorrow upon hearts that have remained closed, “you did not repent” (Mt 21:32).  Why does this wound the heart of Christ?  Because God does not want his children to be lost.  The prophet Ezekiel reminds us, “When a righteous man turns away from his righteousness and commits iniquity, he shall die for it.”  However, since “he considered and turned away from all the transgressions which he had committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die” (Ez 18:26, 28).  This is why the call to repentance runs through Sacred Scripture and the preaching of the Gospel down the centuries.  Its gravity reminds us of the urgency and necessity of conversion.  It is today, not tomorrow, that we must repent.  

 

Indeed, now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation (cf. 2 Cor 6:2).  God wants us to live, to open our eyes and return to him.  To repent is to leave the paths on which we lost our way, and to follow the way of life, opening our hearts to the sole joy that never passes away.

 

Jesus himself is quite direct in calling us to repentance.  As Saint Luke tells us, “Unless you repent, you will all perish” (Lk 13:5).  But he also extends our horizon beyond this earthly life to the horizon of eternal life.  For while happiness in this world is fleeting and relative, and sadly sometimes out of reach for some, true happiness is promised to everyone in hope, and this is what we should seek above all else, in all our efforts and choices.  Did not the Virgin Mary say to Saint Bernadette, “I do not promise to make you happy in this world but in the next”?

 

This promise, made right here, has a particular force in this land of France, and it challenges the way we think today.  

 

In an age and society that seek progress and material wellbeing, but can sometimes forget the horizon of eternity, Mary comes to remind us of the greatness and richness of our calling to life, to eternal life.  In the face of current trends that seek to redefine the value of human life in illness, suffering and old age, the grotto of Massabielle stands as a place of Christian hope.  Here, no one is turned away due to their frailty.  Your crutches, your wheelchairs and your hidden tears are not obstacles; instead, they are the very place where you are fully respected and welcomed, and where you can experience a transforming encounter with the infinite love of God.  Lourdes is blessed as a place for professing the beauty and sanctity of life, for life is welcomed here as a precious gift from God, and is called to flourish for ever in the love of the Father.

 

“I promise you!”  Indeed, eternal life is a firm and certain promise that the Lord makes to us.  He has already won it for us by his death on the cross and his resurrection, and through the grace of baptism he is bringing it to fulfilment in us each day.  It is within our reach, but we must freely welcome it, take hold of it and not stand in its way.  For the obstacle to grace and eternal life — the only obstacle to this love — is sin, whereby we turn in upon ourselves, refusing God and shutting ourselves up in our own darkness.  Our personal responsibility therefore comes into play, and a great responsibility it is.  God has made us free, since freedom is necessary for love; no one can be forced to love.  We must therefore use our freedom to say yes to Christ, relying on his grace, like Mary.  This is a yes that we renew until our final breath — “now and at the hour of our death” — as we say in the Hail Mary.

 

We hear the same urgent call to conversion in the words which Mary spoke right here, “Penance! Penance! Penance!”  She repeats the word three times.  And she asks Bernadette to perform certain acts of penance.  Why?  Are we slow to understand?  Do we too easily think of ourselves without sin?  Do we not practice penance enough?  The Virgin asks us to do penance not only for ourselves, because we too need it, but also “for sinners,” for a world that is going astray.  How can our hearts not be moved by the conflicts that are spreading and destroying so many innocent lives?  Yet the evil of our time comes from the human heart.  God is not responsible for it. As he says to the Israelites, “Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just?” (Ez 18:25).  It is therefore human hearts that must change, beginning with our own.

 

Penance is an act of love, carried out in solidarity with the human family. It is an act of love for God, because we want to make amends for the wounds our sins have dealt to his heart.  It is also an act of love for those brothers and sisters of ours who do not heed this call to conversion, and whose sins lead them towards death.  This call to conversion also concerns the Church herself as she makes her earthly journey.  She must have the courage to begin with herself.  In order to heal the deep wounds, infidelities and painful errors that have occurred within her, we must humbly place ourselves under the Lord’s purifying gaze.  Recognizing our own faults is essential to our spiritual growth.  As Saint Augustine wrote, “Do not be content with what you are, if you want to become what you are not yet” (Disc. 169, 15, 18). Our Mother’s reminder of our duty to pray and repent fills us with great hope, because she shows us that the way to change the course of things is by uniting ourselves to the passion of Christ.  

 

Dear friends who are sick, so many of you here in Lourdes are familiar with suffering.  You can live your trials and pains in this spirit of offering, and so take part in the redemptive work that the world so greatly needs.  In this way, you are truly at the heart of the Church, and your role is irreplaceable.

 

Pilgrims, brothers and sisters, you will not leave Lourdes as you arrived.  You will leave as missionaries of hope.  Indeed, the miracle of Lourdes is that it can awaken the joy of hope in the very midst of suffering and hardship.  The Virgin Mary heals our outlook and changes our hearts, giving them peace.  In your countries, dioceses and families, become living witnesses to this divine strength and tenderness, which help us to persevere towards our goal.  Sustained by the prayers of the sick and the love of our Mother, walk with confidence into the future.  Do not be afraid of the storms of the world, for the holy Mother of God watches over your journey, she shelters the Church beneath her mantle of tenderness and, as the radiant Morning Star, guides your steps, so that with joy she may bring you to new birth in the very life of her Son Jesus.  Amen.

 

Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s shocking endorsement of Teilhard de Chardin

 

480 × 360by

 

Damien F. Mackey

“The whole world is ascending towards Christ the King, even the irresistible surge of the ocean tides under the Pull of the moon and sun . . . His [Teilhard de Chardin’s] fundamental orientation was to attain heaven through the fulfillment of earth. Christify matter”.

 Fulton J. Sheen

  

For some of my highly unfavourable views concerning père Teilhard de Chardin (d. 1955), see e.g. my articles:

 

Teilhard de Charlatan

 

(5) Teilhard de Charlatan

 

Teilhard de Chardin a “giant gnostic snake”

 

(5) Teilhard de Chardin a "giant gnostic snake"

 

Teilhard de Chardin’s genocidal eugenics ideas

 

(5) Teilhard de Chardin's genocidal eugenics ideas

 

Reading Teilhard de Chardin has led to a great loss of faith amongst teens

 

(5) Reading Teilhard de Chardin has led to a great loss of faith amongst teens

 

Now, I was aware that Archbishop Fulton Sheen, about to be beatified (today, in fact, 24^th September, 2026) – and whom I have greatly admired for many years – had flirted with Teilhardianism.

 

Here the Kolbe Center recalls just how serious that regrettable situation was (September 19, 2026): Archbishop Sheen and the Teilhardian Deception – Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation

 

Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,

 

Pax Christi!

 

Our Lord Jesus Christ warned that toward the end of the world, many false prophets would arise and seduce many:

 

And then shall many be scandalized: and shall betray one another: and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall rise, and shall seduce many. And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold. But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom, shall be preached in the whole world, for a testimony to all nations, and then shall the consummation come (Matthew 24:10-14).

 

This Thursday, September 24, Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen will be beatified at The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Archbishop Sheen is rightly revered for the many contributions he made to the life of the Church, most especially through his promotion of daily Eucharistic Holy Hours for priests through retreats that he gave all over the world. For the honor and glory of God, however, we believe we are obliged to use this newsletter to show how even a man as gifted and devout as Venerable Archbishop Sheen was deceived by the arch-deceiver Satan through his chosen instrument, the anti-theologian Fr. Teilhard de Chardin—may God have mercy on him! We trust that the Venerable Archbishop would be the first to want us to bring his deception to light, as a warning to all of us to be on our guard against the seductive errors of theistic evolution.

 

The Young Fr. Fulton Sheen Rejects Theistic Evolution

 

Archbishop Sheen’s eventual embrace of Teilhardian errors is all the more astonishing in view of his earlier writings in which he thoroughly rejected them. As a young theologian, he wrote an extensive review of modern philosophy which had seen “the birth of a new notion of God”:

 

It is God in evolution . . . God is born by successive creations. As the world progresses, He progresses; as the world acquires perfection, He acquires perfection. [Moreover,] man is a necessary step in the evolution of God. Just as man came from the beast, God will come from man.

 

In one of his early works, Love One Another, Sheen mocked the notion that one could derive the great commandment of Christ to “Love one another as I have loved you” from an evolutionary struggle for existence over millions of years:

 

“Man came from the beast; therefore, he ought to love his fellowman.”

How silly that sounds! Everyone knows that the law of the survival of the fittest can never evolve into love, nor can the struggle for existence develop into human brotherhood. If we come from the beasts, then we may appropriately be expected to act like beasts.

 

After completing a 300-page survey of modern philosophy, the young Fr. Sheen concluded:

 

The wisdom of the ages and the epitome of our experience is given in the simple truth understood by the simple and forgotten by many a philosopher, that we are not “God-makers but God-made.”

 

Archbishop Sheen and “Evolution’s Greatest Triumph”

 

Archbishop Sheen’s “conversion” to theistic evolutionism must be understood as part of what the German anatomist and Darwinian apologist Ernst Haeckel called “evolution’s greatest triumph,” the conversion of the Catholic intellectual elite to the conviction that they had to reconcile the microbe-to-man evolutionary hypothesis with the Catholic Faith—in spite of the clear condemnation of the thesis that “evolution can be reconciled with Christian doctrine” by the Congregation of the Index in 1878, the decrees of the Pontifical Biblical Commission upholding the special creation of Adam and Eve and the literal historical truth of Genesis 1-3, and the condemnation by Pope St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane in 1907 of the proposition that the condemnations of the Congregation of the Index could be taken lightly.

 

Darwin had argued that similarities in structure among diverse life forms proved that they had all evolved from a common ancestor. According to Haeckel, the existence of similarities in embryos of various kinds of organisms proved that the higher life forms “recapitulated” their evolutionary history before birth and that they had all descended from a common ancestor. To make this “proof” more compelling for his contemporaries, Haeckel doctored drawings of the embryos of fish, salamanders, chickens, turtles, rabbits, pigs, and human beings to exaggerate their similarities and minimize their differences. Although Haeckel’s fraud was discovered and exposed during his lifetime, the evolutionary hypothesis demanded common descent, and the concept of embryonic recapitulation continued to exert a profound influence on the study of embryology for many decades. In the United States, the renowned scholar Fr. John Augustine Zahm at Notre Dame University, devoted more pages of his influential book Evolution and Dogma to “embryonic recapitulation” than to any other “proof” for Darwin’s hypothesis.

 

When, on the centenary of the publication of Origin of Species in 1959, the world’s leading evolutionist scientist Sir Julian Huxley pontificated that “embryology” as displayed in Ernst Haeckel’s drawings provided “the most striking proof of evolution,” his evolution-believing colleagues had enjoyed control of almost all of the universities and research centers in the Western world for more than half a century. Yet “embryonic recapitulation” was, by his own admission, the best proof that they could come up with.

 

In 1950, Pope Pius XII in Humani generis had exhorted Catholic experts to “examine” the evidence for and against the evolutionary hypothesis, but it was apparent that hardly any Catholic scholars subjected Huxley’s pontifications to rigorous examination. For example, in Germany pro-abortion activists:

 

skillfully exploited the disunity of the German Catholic intellectuals to bring their demands for the legalization of abortion to the legislature. … Karl Rahner, who was in the forefront of the fight over [the loosening of] paragraph 218, wrote in Naturwissenschaft und Theologie (brochure 11, page 86, 1970):

 

“I think that there are biological developments which are pre-human, but these developments are still aimed in the direction of man. Why cannot these developments be transferred from phylogeny to ontogeny?” (emphasis added)

 

With these words, the most influential Catholic theologian in the German-speaking world formulated an Haeckelian evolutionary rationale for abortifacient contraception and abortion by affirming that human beings passed through all the stages of evolution in their mothers’ wombs. To this day, biology textbooks all over the world argue that similarities between embryos of fish, amphibians, reptiles, humans and lower mammals constitute evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis. Typical of examples too many to cite is the caption that accompanies drawings of embryos of various life-forms from a widely used American biology textbook published in 2002. Entitled “Embryonic development of vertebrates,” it states:

 

Notice that the early embryonic stages of these vertebrates bear a striking resemblance to each other, even though the individuals are from different classes (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals). All vertebrates start out with an enlarged head region, gill slits, and a tail regardless of whether these characteristics are retained in the adult.

 

The statement gives the impression that human embryos—as members of the vertebrate phylum—possess gill slits. But this is patently false. The pharyngeal arches in human embryos have no connection with gill slits whatsoever but develop into the outer and middle ear, and into the neck bones, muscles, nerves, and glands. Moreover, after the discovery of DNA, confidence in the truth of the evolutionary hypothesis led many evolutionary biologists to predict that similar body parts in diverse organisms would be controlled by the same genes. This, however, proved to be false, as embryologists have discovered that the realization of the same body plan—such as five digit extremities—in diverse organisms (such as whales and humans) is controlled by different genes and is achieved through totally different embryonic pathways. In spite of the fact that the myth of “embryonic recapitulation” had no scientific basis, however, it would appear that Archbishop Sheen was as badly deceived as Fr. Rahner—because we find him eight years after Humani generis rhapsodizing confidently about Teilhard’s writings on the evolution of life from non-life:

 

For Teilhard there is a continuity between an animal seeking food and a magnet pointing to the north; between a male and a female uniting in the act of generation and two atoms uniting to form a chemical compound. The meaning is not the same in each instance, but there is more than a mere figure of speech in this unification. Atoms are not alive, it is true, but they have what might be called pre-life.

 

The Deadly Deception of Archbishop Sheen

 

Without knowing all the inner workings of Archbishop Sheen’s mind, it is easy to see that his conviction that molecules-to-man evolution was no longer an absurdity but a “fact of science” must have had terrible consequences. His apparent belief that the Church’s traditional doctrine of creation could be replaced by theistic evolution in light of the new “science” of evolution certainly helps to explain his enthusiasm for the ideas of John Courtney Murray at the Second Vatican Council and for the replacement of the traditional vision of a Church-centered Catholic society with the ideal of religious liberty as practiced in the United States.

 

In reality, it is no more possible to “evolve” the ideal of American-style religious liberty with its separation of Church and state from the traditional ideal of the Catholic union of Church and state than it would be to evolve the life of a one-celled organism from the “pre-life” of atomic particles.

 

Writing in 1967, Sheen echoed and embraced the Teilhardian vision of matter evolving to the Omega Point. He wrote:

 

The whole world is ascending towards Christ the King, even the irresistible surge of the ocean tides under the Pull of the moon and sun . . . His [Teilhard de Chardin’s] fundamental orientation was to attain heaven through the fulfillment of earth. Christify matter.

 

An elderly priest friend of mine whose life overlapped with Teilhard’s commented on Fr. Teilhard’s reputation for kindness, and it is true that a belief in the Christification of matter might motivate a person to show kindness to all people and to all things because of the divine element within all of them. But this is a false kindness if it fails to acknowledge the divinely-created hierarchy of goods in the universe—the transcendence of God; the creation of man in God’s image and likeness; man’s dominion over creation; the infinite superiority of supernatural goods to natural ones; and the moral imperative to do good and avoid evil.

 

In Teilhard’s system, as revealed in his pivotal spiritual experience as a young man, when he encountered “a presence” he described as “the combined essence of all good and all evil,” the divine energy drives all of the activity in the universe, thus making it impossible to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural, the good and the evil, insofar as Teilhard’s divinity manifests through them all.

The conflation of the order of grace with the order of nature occupied so central a place in his “new Christianity” that the kindly Teilhard forgot his manners when Dietrich Von Hildebrand cited the writings of the Doctor of Grace, St. Augustine, against his evolutionary doctrine. “Don’t speak to me of that unfortunate man,” he protested violently. He “spoiled everything by introducing the supernatural.” True to their master, the Teilhardians of today find the “divine element” even in pagan religions and in immoral sexual behavior which objectively separates souls from communion with the living God. Yet Archbishop Sheen was so convinced of the fact of molecules-to-man evolution and of the credibility of Teilhard’s doctrine that he predicted the eventual elevation of Fr. Teilhard to the honors of a Doctor of the Church by 2017:

 

It is very likely that within 50 years when all the trivial, verbose disputes about the meaning of Teilhard’s ‘unfortunate’ vocabulary will have died away or have taken a secondary place, Teilhard will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century.

….