The Recusant refutes Fr. Robinson's evolution

The short answer is “No.” And at that point, we ought to be able to finish the article here and say no more on the question. Indeed, if this were still 10 years ago we could have done just that. Today, however, we are forced to confront the unfortunate fact that the SSPX is now no longer sure whether the Flood as recounted in Genesis and referred to by Our Lord in the Gospels ever actually took place. Denying it is now fine, it seems.

Following our review of the book “A Realist Guide to Science and Religion,” our attention was drawn to an article on the website of the Kolbe Centre in which it became clear that the book’s author, Fr. Paul Robinson, in his “Guide,” explicitly denies the worldwide Flood as recounted in Genesis. We still have not read the book and refuse on principle to buy a copy, but it is clear that someone at Kolbe Centre has. Thank goodness for that, since in many ways this denial is worse than anything which we were able to identify from Fr. Robinson’s various interviews, distressing though that material was.

The next line of defence which I would expect a defender of the contemporary SSPX to take would be to try to contain the damage by limiting it to just that one priest. ‘So alright, maybe Fr. Robinson got something a bit wrong and ended-up denying something which he ought to accept, very well, but that’s just one priest isn’t it? You don’t have to tar the whole Society of St. Pius X with the same brush just because one priest slips up do you?’ (Or something similar). In which case we may need to remind ourselves once again that this is not just one priest with a lone, errant opinion. Fr. Paul Robinson’s book was allowed to be published by his superiors in the SSPX, the same SSPX superiors who prohibited Fr. Johannes Grün from publishing his far superior book on Creation. Fr. Robinson’s modernist book was approved of by his immediate superior, the Rector of Holy Cross Seminary in Australia, Fr. Daniel (“Resistance to What?”) Themann. Finally it was not only approved-of, not only permitted to be published by Novus Ordo publisher Gracewing, but was energetically promoted via the Angelus Press, the SSPX’s websites and at various Society-owned locations (the book launch was at St. Mary’s Kansas, the largest SSPX parish in the world). Hence the damage done by any false teaching contained in the book is also the responsibility of the SSPX for promoting it, and not merely the author for having originally written it. But what about the flood? The flood is an historical fact. It appears in Sacred Scripture, in Genesis where it is recounted explicitly, in some detail and at length. It is recounted factually as an important episode of human history, just like the Fall, the Tower of Babel, the departure of Abram from Ur, the crossing of the Red Sea, the Babylonian captivity and so many other historical facts. It was accepted as an historical fact (by a good 1900 years-worth of Church Fathers, Doctors and Saints as well as ordinary Catholics. It also appears in the New Testament where it is referred to by none other than Our Lord Himself in the Gospel, in such as a way as to make clear that He takes Genesis to be literally true (otherwise his words would make no sense). In reference to His own Second Coming, Our Lord teaches the following:

And what of God’s Church? The Fathers all tell us that the Ark is a type, an old-testament foreshadowing of the Church. Just as the only people to be saved from the flood were those on the ark, and all outside it perished, so the only souls saved will be those inside the Church and no one outside will be saved. That is why the Church is so often referred to as the ark of salvation. But if we are talking about the small, local flood taught by “progressive creationists”, then what sort of an ark does that mean, in reality, and what sort of Church does that in turn imply? One which is not entirely necessary, useful perhaps for a portion of the population which happened to be living in one place, but not for everyone and certainly not unique and necessary across the whole world? Or is perhaps the ark entirely fictitious? In which case, were the Fathers of the Church unanimously wrong to teach that the ark was a type of the Church when in fact it never really existed? The more one delves into this line of thinking, the more questions and problems it throws up. Nothing makes sense any more.

If the flood had only been a local flood, why did God tell Noe to build an ark and put all the animals on board? (Or didn’t He? Perhaps Scripture is wrong about that?) Why did He not just tell him to move? Doesn’t that make God out to be perverse and capricious, wasting Noe’s time in the unnecessary effort of building an ark which really wasn’t needed? And what about the rainbow, what of God’s promise never to do it again? Since the time of Noe, down to this day there has never been a worldwide flood, but there have been plenty of local and regional floods.

If the flood wasn’t worldwide, as Fr. Robinson claims, wouldn’t that make God a liar and a perjurer? Or is Scripture just spinning a yarn and recounting a false history, a “story” which has no bearing on reality whatsoever? And if Scripture is capable of getting it so wrong and falling so wide of the mark, if Scripture is capable of such an exaggeration that it changes the very nature of the thing in question (a regional flood vs. a worldwide flood is not merely a difference of degree, but a difference of kind, something with far-reaching implications) then ought we not to ask: what else did Scripture get wrong? Where else is it unreliable? What else does it exaggerate to the point of meaninglessness? If we cannot trust Genesis to give us a reliable account of what really happened, can we trust Daniel, or Ezechiel? What about the Genalogies in the Gospels connecting Our Lord to David and all the way back to Adam? Are they “literally” true or are they unreliable? Can we trust any of the books of the Old or New Testaments?

I am given to understand that Fr. Robinson has been known to address his critics (yes, there are others, thank God. Perhaps more people will wake up?) by accusing them of being propo-nents of sola scriptura (which is obviously not true in our case), or of “Biblicism”, a term of his own invention. He accuses them (us) of taking the bible too literally to the exclusion of scientific evidence. The irony here is that not only is this not a reasonable criticism, it is the opposite of the truth. There is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence for a global cataclysmic flood several thousand years ago. Some of this evidence has been presented in these pages before, but by no means all of it. From literally hundreds of “flood myths” from all over the globe from every people and language, many of whom had no contact with one another let alone with Biblical lands (were there Hawaiian tourists visiting Babylon in Old Testament times?) to ‘polystrate’ fossilised trees standing upright and running through many layers, even though each layer is supposed to be millions of years old, to multi-layers of rock bent and twisted together in a way that can only happen to a soft material, to fossils of animals which died instantly by being crushed in a cataclysmic event, to vast ‘graveyards’ of skeletons all of the same animal, suggesting that entire herds of elephants and other animals died together in unusual circumstances... the list is endless. And it is something with which no fair-minded scientist can argue. So they pretend it doesn’t exist.

That is what is really going on in the world in our day. It is not science versus religion. It is both science and religion together against phoney “science”. Ours is the age in which the goals of Freemasonry have triumphed and in which man has been persuaded that he is the pinnacle of the chaos and meaningless hazard of which everything consists, the age which effectively has abolished God and set up in his place a masonic standard of man, with a high-priesthood calling themselves “scientists” to tell us whatever our rulers wish us to hear, for whatever purpose they have in mind next (population control, “global warming”, you name it), that same construct is what is regarded, unfortunately, by many as “science”. In the old Soviet Union and in the Eastern bloc countries it was a given that only one view was allowed among scientists at the Universities and in the world of academia. Ask anyone who remembers what it was like to be a University student in Poland or Hungary or East Germany in the 1980s and they will tell you. Only one view was allowed, the view officially favoured by the Communist rulers. Is it really so hard to grasp, is it really so much of a stretch, is it so improbable that something very similar now prevails throughout the Western World too?

That is the not-very-amusing irony in all this. It is Fr. Robinson’s own world-view which is at fault, the very one which serves as the premise for his entire book. When he talks of “Science and Religion” he means something totally different. By “Science” he means the officially state-sanctioned, politburo-approved, lodge-friendly bogus man-centred evangelically-atheist propaganda.

Real science does not interest a “Progressive Creationist” or a “Theistic Evolutionist” (the two are basically the same, with some nuances of difference), because their standard of truth is not what is scientific but, ultimately, what our rulers and gatekeepers say we are allowed to believe in today.

All this is nothing new. The heresy of Evolutionism and the Mordernism it spawned may be new, but the desire of men to twist Sacred Scripture for their own purpose, to have it say something other than what it plainly says, that in itself is nothing new. Fr. Robinson and all those who are helping to support him and promote his work might wish to consider carefully the Council of Trent’s condemnation of all those who “twist Sacred Scripture to their own meaning”(“Sanctam Scripturam ad suos sensus contorquens”) or who “even dare to interpret Sacred Scripture itself contrary to the unanimous consensus of the Fathers.”(“...aut etiam contra unanimem consensum Patrum ipsam Scripturam Sacram interpretari audeat.”).

[ See www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/1781-1781,_AA_VV,_Sacrosanctum_Concilium_Tridentinum,_LT.pdf ]

It is very hard to see how Fr. Paul Robinson does not fit that description. Evolutionists, like their intellectual grandchildren “Theistic Evolutionists,” “Progressive Creationists,” or anyone else claiming to believe in a “billions-of-years” timescale, that there was no worldwide flood, and so forth, will always find themselves having to twist Sacred Scripture since it clearly does not support their own imaginary view of the past.

This is not a matter of personal preference. It is extremely serious and concerns the very foundation of the Faith itself. Take a look for yourself.

“Furthermore, in order to restrain petulant spirits, [this Council] decrees, that no one, relying on his own skill, shall, in matters of faith, and of morals pertaining to the edifi-cation of Christian doctrine, wresting the sacred Scripture to his own senses, presume to interpret the said sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which holy mother Church, whose it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures, hath held and doth hold; or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; even though such interpretations were never intended to be at any time published. Contraveners shall be made known by their Ordinaries, and be punished with the penalties by law established.”(Council of Trent, Session IV, Second Decree, 1546)