Creationism - National Center for Science Education

ook, calling it ‘a fairy tale,’ and insisted that a work ‘so fantastic and so burlesque’ was,
doubtless, only a huge joke...” Pope Pius IX thanked James for this book in which he
refutes, by “true science,” the aberrations of Darwinism masquerading as science:
A system which is repugnant at once to history, to the traditions of all peoples, to exact science, to observed
facts, and even to Reason itself, would seem to need no refutation, did not alientation from God and the
leaning toward materialism, due to depravity, eagerly seek a support in all this tissue of fables... And in
fact pride, after rejecting the Creator of all things, and proclaiming man independent...goes so far as to
degrade man himself to the level of the unreasoning brutes, perhaps even of lifeless matter... [Pius IX,
quoted in White 1960:(1)75]
The Pope also made James a member of the Papal Order of St. Sylvester. The
Archbishop of Paris urged him to write a new edition stressing the scientific truth of
Genesis; James did so, titling his revised (1892) edition Moses and Darwin: The Man of
Genesis Compared with the Man-Ape, or Religious Education Opposed to Atheistic.
St. George Mivart, the “renegade Darwinian” who became one of Darwin’s most
persistent and troublesome critic, was a convert to Catholicism. British Catholic writer
Hilaire Belloc attacked H.G. Wells’s strongly evolutionist Outline of History (1920) with
two works (1927a, 1927b), presenting many of the standard objections to evolution.
Belloc’s friend, novelist and journalist G.K. Chesterton, was also a lay expositor of
Christianity who included anti-evolution arguments in some of his works (e.g. 1925).
Continuing this literary tradition, Mortimer Adler, the University of Chicago neo-
Thomist philosopher of Great Books fame, expressed extreme skepticism towards
evolution in several works (1937, 1940, 1967), calling evolution a “popular myth,” an
elaborate conjectural history which vastly exceeds the scientific evidence (quoted in
Jauncey 1961:58).
Alfred Watterson McCann wrote a scathing but witty and amusingly satirical
attack on evolution called God—Or Gorilla: How the Monkey Theory of Evolution
Exposes Its Own Methods, Denies Its Own Inferences, Disproves Its Own Case in 1922.
He denounces the “ape-man hoax,” and expresses outrage and amazement at the
distortions, pretensions, and plain bad science of the evolutionists. McCann, though
Catholic himself, says that Augustine, Aquinas, and other Catholics have proven
vulnerable to faulty evolutionist science. He presents many of the standard creationscience
arguments, especially criticisms of the alleged fossil prehumans, but also attacks
evolutionist claims based on embryology, convergence, the horse series, blood anti-serum
reactions and other biochemical evidence. McCann, fortuitously enough, begins with a
chapter ridiculing Piltdown Man as a proposed man-ape (this was before its exposure by
scientists as a hoax, though some scientists had always been skeptical—McCann in fact
relies on some of these skeptics for his debunking of Piltdown); he then directs his scorn
upon Trinil (Java) Man and many other proposed ancestors or missing links, gleefully
describing the confusion and conflicting opinions of paleoanthropologists regarding the
age and relationship of these fossils.
The scientist, says McCann, knows there are no missing links and “admits there is
no evidence in favor of any such ascending evolution.” Though he objects primarily to
the “ape-manologists,” he also argues that there is no evidence of descent between any
major group of organisms. He rebukes H.G. Wells at great length for the evolutionist
propaganda in his Outline of History, and castigates Haeckel for his fraudulent
embryological samples and other lies. “Psychical activity” and the esthetic appeal of