Creationism - National Center for Science Education

music are, to McCann, self-evidently not explainable by materialistic evolution, which
are helpless in accounting for mind and genius. McCann’s chief objection is that
evolution ignores God and denies the soul, and reduces man to a brutish, apish “thing”:
Of course if there is no God, and no soul, and no free will, and nothing but a monkeyfied descent from the
lemur, then it follows that conscience itself is a mere movement of atoms; that it cannot hold in check
man’s greed or his lust, his passions or his nameless instincts... By whom can a soulless man, a THING
evolved from an ape, be held accountable? ... This THING without soul, the prince of brute creation, is
himself a brute, and the moral order ends. [1922:272-273]
This new “chemic creed,” that out of the lowest clod man has developed in common with the toad and the
cockroach, through the power of material evolution, freed from the intervention of a God, rests squarely on
a foundation compounded of the romance, invention and intervention of theorists who have been caught in
the act of forging proof, of faking plates, of lying in the name of “science” in order to fool the gullible who
haven’t time or training sufficient to examine the facts for themselves. [1922:273-274]
Though McCann’s book is full of quotes from the scientific literature, fellow
Catholic George Barry O’Toole, professor of theology, philosophy and zoology at Seton
Hill College, while praising McCann’s anti-evolutionism, criticized him for relying on
sophistry, extreme bias, and inaccurate arguments. O’Toole included these criticisms in
The Case Against Evolution (1926), which carries the “Nihil Obstat” of the Catholic
censor, and the “Imprimatur” of the Archbishop of New York. (The “Nihil Obstat” does
not mean that the Church necessarily agrees with all ideas or theories contained therein;
merely that the work contains “nothing that is opposed to faith or morals.”) This literate
attack on evolution is likewise full of scientific quotes and references, and contains no
biblical or religious references. O’Toole demonstrates “that Evolution has long since
degenerated into a dogma, which is believed in spite of the facts, and not on account of
them” (1926:xiv). Comparison with the Galileo affair shows that the evolution
hypothesis, unlike heliocentricity, does not hold up under scientific investigation.
Galileo’s theory was quickly and decisively confirmed, but, says O’Toole, “the whole
trend of scientific discovery has been to destroy, rather than to confirm, all definite
formulations of the evolutional theory, in spite of the immense erudition expended in
revising them” (1926:xii).
According to O’Toole, science has rejected the theory of natural selection, which
was the only original element of Darwinian evolution, because Mendelism now shows
that new variations are not hereditary. O’Toole points with some satisfaction to the
rivalry between Darwinian Transformism, relying on natural selection, and Lamarckism,
arguing that each proves the other wrong (1926:10-16). Lamarckians argue rightly that
natural selection would not allow gradual evolution of incipient traits to survive, and
Darwinists have shown that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited.
Besides quoting Bateson and other anti-Darwinian scientists, O’Toole praises
G.M. Price’s geological arguments. Following Price, he exposes the circular reasoning
employed by evolutionary geologists in dating rocks and fossils (1926:112): “Our present
classification of rocks according to their fossil contents is purely arbitrary and artificial,
being tantamount to nothing more than a mere taxonomical classification of the forms of
ancient life on our globe, irrespective of their comparative antiquity.” “The
paleontological argument,” he concludes, is simply a theoretical construction which
presupposes evolution instead of proving it,” citing the supposed evolution of the horse
and other examples from the fossil record (1926:126).