Evolution and Creation: A Catholic Understanding

By William Kramer

The spine is not even creased. Crisp, clean pages. No writing, highlighting, underlining. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879735112
• ISBN13: 9780879735111
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Our Sunday Visitor
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.48 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A clear, dispassionate and very accessible introduction

Published in 1986 by the Catholic editor «Our Sunday Visitor», *Evolution and Creation : A Catholic Understanding* is a 155-page introduction to the Creation/ evolution debate whose non-scholarly approach is justified by its intended readership: « those parents who must react wisely when their children return from school and announce that `the Bible is wrong'. »The author of the book, Father William Kramer, C. PP. S., was then Professor of Chemistry at St Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Indiana, whence he retired in 2000. Ordained in 1944, Kramer seems to have had a lifelong interest in the Creation/ evolution debate, as the book recalls an argument he had on the subject as early as 1940. His own position is that of theistic evolution, which he defines as the idea «that a transcendent Being totally distinct from nature created the universe from nothing and causes it to develop according to the laws he designed into it » (p133.) A corollary of this position is a nuanced understanding of the inerrancy of Scripture, holding that «the Bible contains no error in what the sacred writer intended to teach. But he presents his message in popular language and stories which reflect the views of the people of the time. God did not correct [his] views of nature» (p6.)The book is divided into eight chapters, the first of which narrates the «fundamentalist story», showing that fundamentalism is a distinctly 20th century, Protestant phenomenon, though it has also seeped into Catholic traditionalism. Kramer shows how eerily similar it is to the flat-earth movement Samuel Rowbotham launched in 1865, in its ill-advised and self-defeating assimilation of Christianity with a discredited scientific position, Darwin having replaced Newton as the scientific antichrist.Chapter 2 is a systematic refutation of 33 creationist theses collected from the writings of Henry Morris, the modern Pope of creationism, most of which are shown to be «not direct evidence for a young earth but a possible difficulty arising from an old one», «possible» itself being a diplomatic adjective since all the objections are answered in a paragraph or two.In Chapter 3, Kramer tries to clarify the debate by distinguishing three types of evolution (stellar, telluric and biological) and three understandings of the concept (as a natural process, a scientific theory and an ideology), spending the most time explaining and defending biological evolution by refuting such objections as the «missing link» argument or the argument from the second law of thermodynamics.Chapter 4 demonstrates that the evil of evolution lies not in the science but in the ideology it has been turned into or in its recuperation by atheistic and materialistic ideologies such as Marxism. Amusingly, Kramer explains that Marx offered Darwin to dedicate *Das Kapital* to him, but Darwin refused. After a short and rather weak chapter dealing with the philosophical concepts of design and chance (a chapter which begs the question since it