Six Days of CreationAnswered

Is belief in a young-earth, six-day creation a fundamentalist Protestant position?

A viewer says he has been told that young-earth creation is a fundamentalist Protestant position, which he does not understand, and asks Robert to explain how that could be so.

Answer

Those who say that do not know what they are talking about, because none of the Fathers or medievals believed in evolution, even though they could have gone that way, since some Greeks held evolution-like ideas long before Darwin, just as some Greeks held heliocentrism. From the early Fathers onward, everyone taught the earth was created in six days; the only one with a symbolic slant was Augustine, and even his spiritual reading compressed creation into a single instantaneous day, not millions or billions of years. So creation out of nothing, quickly, is not a Protestant fundamentalist invention; it came from the Catholic Church from the beginning. I dislike Karl Keating's framing in Catholicism and Fundamentalism, because it treats taking the Bible literally as a disease, which is why he and Catholic Answers accept evolution while still insisting on a literal reading of John 6. But our own catechism, and Leo XIII, and Providentissimus Deus, say we interpret Scripture literally unless it is impossible to do so, with any allegorical or symbolic sense alongside, not instead. In fact, when Darwin's Origin of Species appeared, Catholic theologians opposed evolution strongly in about six official instances between 1870 and 1899, at one point getting the Vatican to endorse the condemnation; it was only in the twentieth century that things fell apart. The modern Protestant creation movement began in the 1960s under Henry Morris, though he refused to take on geocentrism, which is a Catholic doctrine from the beginning. So if being a fundamentalist means interpreting the Bible literally, then our Fathers and medievals were fundamentalists too, which is exactly how we got the doctrine of the Eucharist.

Dr. Robert Sungenis

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