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Introduction

Before reading any book of the Bible the first move is to try to determine the literary genre. A genre is a pattern of writing such that the writer asserts some things, not others. In a modern historical novel, he asserts the main line is history, does not assert that the fictional fill-ins are historical.

Vatican II, in Dei verbum §11 told us that everything that is asserted by the human writer, is asserted by the Holy Spirit, who is the chief Author of all parts of Scripture.

This information makes it possible to answer countless charges of error and contradiction: not everything is asserted. E.g. the narrative parts of Daniel - are they historical, or rather the genre of edifying narrative? If the latter then the writer did not assert everything really happened: a story of this kind serves as a lift - much the same as science fiction is to real science. Again, was Jonah meant as strict history or as a sort of parable? And the stories of the patriarchs -- many today think the genre is epic, i.e. the story of the beginnings of a great people, which still allows for considerable freedom or embroidery as it were (as we gather from epics of other nations). And the infancy narratives: how are they meant?

Very similar is the question of theologoumena (the singular is -on), e.g., when Scripture speaks of the virginal conception: is it meant as straight fact, or is it just a way of expressing her holiness?

It is obvious that what we have just said can be used well or badly. It can be used to solve problems. But it can also raise countless doubts. Early in the 20th century the Modernists used this sort of means to reinterpret almost everything in Scripture. No wonder them St. Pius X called it the "synthesis of all heresies."

Small wonder that the Church at that time reacted by restrictive measures -- disciplinary, not doctrinal. Yet even in that period the Pontifical Biblical Commission, on June 23, 1905, replied that we may take writings that at first sight seem to be history as something else, "subject to the judgment of the Church, and [when] solid arguments [show] that under the appearance and form of history, the sacred author intended to give a parable, an allegory, or a sense differing from the properly literal or historical sense of the words." ("literal or historical sense" is a broad term. Some think that the literal sense is found by treating the words as if written by a modern American, making no allowance for genera and other factors. The other, the right sense is: what the inspired author meant to assert).

So the decree does not forbid at all, as some foolish writers have been claiming, us to use the approach through literary genres. No, it insists on two things: our decision must be guided by the Church - and there must be solid reasons for our view.

These requirements are still true. Vatican II in Dei Verbum §10 wrote: "The task of authoritatively interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on [Scripture or Tradition] has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ." We believe the Church because we have seen (via apologetics) that Christ gave the Church this commission, and promised divine protection to it.

The other requirement: to have solid reasons is simply the demand of real scholarship in any field of knowledge. An example of the opposite is the view of some commentators that Jesus did not multiply the loaves -- He just got the people to stop being selfish: they had loaves hidden in their cloaks! What is the solid reason for that proposal? Zero, just the blind belief that there are no real miracles.

At about the same period, starting earlier, the proposal of Darwin shook the faith of many. They had taken on the notion - it was never taught by the Catholic Church - that we should take Genesis in a fundamentalistic way, e.g., a day in general is 24 hours. so it must be 24 hours also in Genesis.

The danger here was psychological -- like the case of the little boy who ran to Mommy saying I found out there ain't no Santa Claus - and I intend to look into this baby Jesus story too!

So, many began to doubt their faith because of an objection that had no basis. Evolution of the human body- if it is not atheistic - does not clash with Scripture (more on this later). But people thought it did. So the Church had to be restrictive on such writings until people would get over this vain shock.

As we indicated above the decrees were really disciplinary, not doctrinal. They did not teach doctrine, just asked people to keep away from things that, taken wrongly, could be a danger to their faith.

But today all this has changed: thanks to Pius XII in Humani generis (1950) we know that it is legitimate to discuss evolution, as long as we do not make it atheistic, or claim it is certain, which many of its proponents do. As long as we see the need of God not only to create a rational soul, but even for advances at earlier points, there is no problem. By 1950 the danger was over, and so restrictions on publications about have been dropped - they were only disciplinary anyway, not doctrinal.

There has been a parallel in the case of Modernism. New approaches to Scripture, not wrong in themselves, yet left people at sea. Then in 1943 Pius XII in his great Encyclical on Scripture, Divino afflante Spiritu not only permitted the study of genres, but positively encouraged it. He kept the same restrictions as before: following the Church, and demanding solid proofs. (Really. the nature of things demands that we consider genres - to find what the inspired writer meant to assert -- otherwise we might be imposing our own ideas on Scripture, instead of finding out what it was meant to convey)

Pius XII told us it is even necessary to study genres, since people of the ancient Near East did not write the way we do. He added what is obvious: we must not just guess what genres were in use then - historical research is needed. He added that there are very few passages of Scripture for which the Church has explicitly declared the sense. That did not call for forgetting what is obvious: even if the Church has not pronounced explicitly on a text, we must see that any proposed interpretation fits with the whole of Church teachings. If it does not, we must drop it.

Pius XII also told us about Semitic approximation: they did not write in our way, e. g, in the Hebrew of the book of Jonah, Jonah warns of destruction in 40 days. But in the Greek version, the Septuagint, made by native Jews, the number is 3 days. The message conveyed was the same in their minds. St. Paul in 1 Cor 10 says 23,000 fell for immorality. But Numbers says 24,000. Again in Galatians 2.1 Paul speaks of going to Jerusalem 14 years later-- without telling us from what point he was counting.

In all these instances, the message conveyed to them was the same: hence the lack of American precision on numbers.

With such latitude possible in several ways, it is clear people can be confused. But they should know: The Church has the authority to teach, and does teach at least indirectly. on the things that really count.

1) Genre of Creation Stories

So - what is the genre of the creation stories? John Paul II in an audience of Sept 29, 1979 said: "The whole archaic form of the narrative manifests its primitive mythical character." Then he explained further in an audience of Nov 7, 1979: "The term myth does not designate a fabulous content, but merely an archaic way of expressing a deeper content. In note 1 he cited at length Paul Ricoeur. The Pope also said on Sept 12, 1979: "... the first account of man's creation is chronologically later than the second. The origin of this layer is much more remote. The more ancient text is defined as 'Yahwist'...." Pope John Paul II in his Audience of November 7, 1979 said putting Adam to sleep could stand for a return to the moment before creation, so that man might reemerge in his double unity as male and female."

We note two things the Pope said: 1) The genre of the creation stories is myth; but he explained it is not just a fable. He meant it was using an ancient story to bring out some things that really happened. 2) He spoke of the second creation account of man as Yahwist, thereby accepting the JEPD Documentary theory. - These conferences were part of a public series of audiences, but were not published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis: His Conferences on Genesis were published as Original Unity of Man and Woman, Catechesis on the Book of Genesis, Boston, St. Paul Editions, 1981). Hence he did not mean to impose their contents on the whole Church.

Right after the 1943 Divino afflante Spiritu, scholars got a bit loose. Hence Pius XII in 1950 Humani generis, warned of such looseness, and said the stories, while not history of the modern type yet "pertain to history" in a way that needs further study.

The words of John Paul II, mentioned above, which say the genre of the creation accounts is myth, do not contradict Pius XII. He said "they pertain to history" in a way needing more study.

Now this is easily done. We say that through the medium of a story the writer teaches many things that really happened, and so were historical. The chief things were: God created all things. In some special way (note the room for theistic evolution) He made the first human pair. He gave them some sort of command - we do not know just what it was. They violated His order, fell from favor.

Incidentally, even though the Jews spoke hardly at all of original sin, yet it is there in Genesis which reports that they fell from favor, which in Hebrew is hen - it means favor or what God gives as a result of that favor: wisdom or blessing. Adam and Eve no longer had the results of His favor, that is grace, and so could not pass it on to their offspring. So the children came into the world minus grace. That is original sin. (In an audience of Oct 1, 1986 John Paul II explained that original sin is only a privation).

It is suggested that the writer of Genesis used either the Gilmesh Epic or the Enuma Elish.

The only thing in the Gilgamesh that has any resemblance to Genesis is the account of the flood, of which we will speak more presently.

The Enuma Elish shows something more. The opening lines are as follows:

"When on high the heaven had not yet been named [did not exist], firm ground below had not yet been called by name, naught but primordial Apsu [sweet water] their begetter and Mummu-Tiamat [salt water sea], she who bore them all, their waters commingling as a single body; no reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared, when no gods whatever had been brought into being, uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined: then it was that the gods were formed within them...." The only similarity to Genesis is that all starts with something like a chaos - yet not entirely so, for there are two distinct bodies, sweet water and salt water. Really, this was a generalization from the experience of the Mesopotamians, who saw new land appearing at the point where the two kinds of waters met, i.e., at the point where the Tigris and Euphrates entered the Persian Gulf. This is a crude notion, and has nothing in common with Genesis.

The really common feature is one found in many Near Eastern cultures: to name is the same as to bring into existence. [So, when the Messiah is said in many Rabbinic documents to have been named before the world began, it is apt to mean he had a preexistence]. - On the Enuma Elish, see, Alexander Heidel, The Babylonian Genesis, Univ. of Chicago, 1951. Heidel thinks the poem goes back to the First Dynasty of Babylon, which he dates 1894-1595 BC, with strands still older going back to Sumer. He gives complete text in translation, and other Mesopotamian variants, and discussion of similarities to OT. He sees too, many similarities (p. 129), which are too general. Enuma Elish does have the same sequence of creation of light, firmament, dry land, luminaries, man. But most of this is on only one of the 7 tablets, on tablet V. Most of the story is quite other. Heidel admits, p. 130: "In fact, the divergences are much more far-reaching and significant than are the resemblances." Even so, he thinks there must be a relation of Genesis and Enuma Elish - but the grounds are insufficient. Further, Heidel did not notice that Enuma Elish is based on observation of the way land formed by the mixing of waters - no such thing in Genesis, no such process.

Heidel also has another work, The Gilgamesh Epic, Univ. of Chicago, 1949. There is one part within it, the story of the flood, which really is remarkably similar to the account of the flood in Genesis. We will consider that part of it later on.

Generalization from experience shows also in a common Egyptian creation myth: The god Atum (meaning: totality - later, Ra-atum) stood on a mud hillock which arose out of the primordial waters (nun). He named the parts of his body, and so produced the first gods. A different version of the myth says since he had no female mate, he produced seed by masturbation. Then the resulting male and female deities took up the task of generation, produced further things. This myth seems to have been one of the oldest in Egypt. When Memphis became dominant, the question came up: where did Atum come from? They replied: Ptah, the god of Memphis, was the heart and tongue of the gods. Through the thought of the heart and the expression of the tongue, Atum himself and all other gods came into being. (Cf. John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951. esp. pp. 58-60).

The Egyptian myth, like the Mesopotamian, was generalization from Egyptian experience. When the annual flood of the Nile began to recede, the first things to appear were mud hillocks, sticking up through the water. In the heat and moisture, they were very fertile.

2) The Documentary Theory: Richard Simon, a priest (1638-1712) thought some "public secretaries" gradually added to the Pentateuch up to time of Ezra (5th cent). A Protestant, H. B. Witter, in 1711, was the first to suggest that different names for God could point to different documents. J. Astruc, a Catholic, in 1753, was the first to divide Genesis into documents. Karl Ilgen in 1798 divided Elohist into E 1 and E 2 (latter now is P). Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918) refined the theories. Thought Pentateuch and Joshua reached present form after Exile, c. 450 BC. Earlier, he thought Israel had a naturist religion, then the prophets introduced ethical monotheism. (Wellhausen's interpretation of texts and events was based on pagan Arabic parallels. He, like the 19th century in general, did not have good data on the ancient world And he admitted he was influenced by Hegelian concepts). This theory has been dominant until recently. The Pontifical Biblical Commission, on June 27, 1906 while holding Mosaic authorship of Pentateuch, said perhaps Moses entrusted work to one or several men to write, and finally approved it. It also said that there could have been modifications in the Pentateuch after the death of Moses, by an inspired author, and that the language forms could have been updated. John Paul II in his general audience talks on Genesis, e.g., on Sept 12 & 19, 1979, Jan 2, 1980, as we saw, spoke favorably, and took for granted the theory is true. He did this in his: Conferences on Genesis (Original Unity of Man and Woman, Catechesis on the Book of Genesis, Boston, St. Paul Editions, 1981) But the theory is now under heavy attack. Yehuda Radday, coordinator of the Technion Institute (Israel) project, fed Genesis into a computer programmed to make a thorough linguistic analysis of words, phrases and passages. His conclusion: It is most probable that the book of Genesis was written by one person. (Newsweek, Sept 28, 1981, p. 59. Cf. also Y. T. Radday & H. Shore, Genesis: An Authorship Study in Computer-assisted Statistical Linguistics, in Analecta Biblica 103, 1985). (For an earlier attack, very thorough, see U. Cassuto, Professor of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, The Documentary Hypothesis, tr. from Hebrew by Israel Abrahams, 1961. Jerusalem, Magnes press, Hebrew University. It is distributed in British Commonwealth and Europe by Oxford University Press. Hebrew original was 1941). Cf. also K. A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and Old Testament, InterVarsity Press, Downer's Grove, Il, 1966, for an answer to the reasons proposed for the existence of several sources, by comparison with other Near Eastern literature. (Eugene Maly, in Jerome Biblical Commentary (I, p. 5, § 24, 1968 ed.) wrote: "Moses... is at the heart of the Pentateuch and can, in accord with the common acceptance of the ancient period, correctly be called its author." For later hands might add to an original core).

Joseph Blenkinsopp, in his review of R. N. Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch, JSOT Suppl. 5, Sheffield, 1987, wrote (CBQ Jan, 1989, pp. 138-39): "It is widely known by now that the documentary hypothesis is in serious trouble, with no viable alternative yet in sight.... He [Whybray] has no difficulty in exposing the fragility of many of the arguments advanced in support of the documentary hypothesis in its classical Wellhausenian form. The criteria for distinguishing one source from another called for an unreasonable level of consistency within the sources, leading the documentary critic to postulate a multitude of subsidiary sources... and thus pointing to the collapse of the hypothesis from within. Curiously, too, the same consistency was not required of the redactors, who left untouched the many inconsistencies and repetitions which called forth the hypothesis in the first place." Whybray proposes that the Pentateuch is the work of a single "controlling genius" (p. 235) no earlier than 6th century B.C., who used a wide variety of sources not all of high antiquity. - The problem with that proposal is that it does not seem to take into account the probable long development of the legal tradition of Israel.

(Cf. also Isaac M. Kikawada, & Arthur Quinn, Before Abraham Was, Abingdon, Nashville, 1985. This work tries to find elaborate patterns which would cut across the lines of the supposed sources. The authors think the sin was refusing to fulfill the command, "Increase and Multiply": pp. 68 & 81. n. 9. But such a refusal would spread over a long period, whereas the Genesis account seems to portray a single occasion sin with a specific temptation. To refuse to have sex so as to multiply -- what sort of temptation would it be to make the refusal?.

A major argument for the documentary theory comes from supposed doublets, i.e., it is claimed that creation is told twice, in Gen 1 and 2. There are two genealogies of the descendants of Adam, in chapters 4 and 5. The flood is told twice there are some inconsistencies in the number of animals and on the timetable of the flood. And Noah enters the ark twice. There are also two accounts of the selling of Joseph into Egypt.

However, these special features may be due to a well known Hebrew pattern of using concentric circles in narratives: the story begins; after a bit, it goes back to the beginning, is retold with other details. This may go on for two or three rounds. Further, Kenneth A. Kitchen, of the University of Liverpool, in Ancient Orient and Old Testament (InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove IL, 1966. pp. 112-21) has discovered similar patterns of repetition in documents from Urartu and Egypt.

As to the so-called inconsistencies in numbers of animals taken into the ark, there are two answers: a) Within the concentric ring pattern, at first a general preliminary statement is made, which is then fleshed out in the second ring, which also adds the distinction of clean/unclean animals; b) in 6:19-20 the Hebrew is shenayim - which is a dual ending (besides singular and plural, Hebrew had dual, for a pair). Now one cannot add a plural ending on top of a dual, hence we see the form which indicates pair, without saying how many pairs. In 7:2-3 we translate "seven pairs". Actually, the Hebrew has shivah shivah = "seven seven." Hebrew is not rich in forms.

Another major argument proposed for the documentary theory is the variation in divine names, between Elohim, and Yahweh Elohim. Again, Kitchen has found parallels to this sort of thing in other ancient Near Eastern literature (pp. 121-22): There are three names for the god Osiris on the Berlin stela of Ikhernofret; In the Lipit-Ishtar laws Enlil is also called Nunamnir, and in the prologue to the Code of Hammurapi we have Inanna/Ishtar/Telitum; in the Babylonian Enuma elish epic, three gods have double names. The same phenomenon is seen in Canaan, Old South Arabia, and among the Hurrians and Hittites. In none of those cases do scholars try to invent two or three documents.

Those who favor the Documentary theory also point to stylistic differences: the style of the Yahwist has unified scenes bound together by a continuous thread. He prefers the concrete, is good at character portraits. The Elohist lacks the picturesque manner, has less dramatic vigor. The Yahwist goes in for anthropomorphisms, the Elohist does not. But we reply: The reasoning is in part a vicious circle: the alleged documents were differentiated on the basis of the styles - then the styles are used to prove different documents. Again, Kitchen helps us (p. 125) by showing that style variations are common in the Near East. He mentions the biographical inscription of an Egyptian official Uni (c 1400 B.C.), which contains flowing narrative, summary statements, a victory hymn, and two different refrains repeated at suitable but varying intervals. A similar phenomenon is found in the royal inscriptions of the kings of Urartu.

One further question for now: Could we believe that some of the names and facts were really transmitted orally for centuries? We know definitely that such a thing is possible. For example, the first name on the Assyrian King List is King Tudia. For long it was thought he was only a legend. But now the picture has changed: An Italian archaeologist, Paolo Matthiae, began excavations at Ebla (about 35 miles south of Aleppo in Syria), in about 1963 and uncovered a major ancient civilization, almost unknown up to that date. In 1969 he showed an inscription to epigrapher Giovanni Pettinato, who quickly recognized the name of King Ibbit-Lim of Ebla. Pettinato dates the clay tablets from Ebla at about 2500 B.C. Pettinato further has found a text of a treaty between the King of Ebla, and King Tudia, founder of the first dynasty of Assyria. So we now are certain that Tudia is not legendary but historical - the Assyrian king list giving the name of Tudia dates from about 1000 B.C., while the tablet from Ebla shows Tudia made that treaty around 2350 B.C. So memory preserved correct data on Tudia for about 13 centuries. (Cf. G. Pettinato, The Archives of Ebla, Doubleday, 1981, pp. 103-05 also 70 & 73).

Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954), in his Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, 12 volumes, Münster, 1912-54) presented evidence from a study of various primitives, at the lowest level of material culture, such as those of Tierra del Fuego in South America, the Negrillos of Rwanda in Africa, and the Andaman Islanders in the Indian Ocean. The 1990 printing of Encyclopedia Britannica, 26, p. 554 says Schmidt and his collaborators, "saw in the high gods, for whose cultural existence they produced ample evidence from a wide variety of unconnected societies, a sign of a primordial monotheistic revelation that later became overlaid with other elements.... Their interpretation is controversial, but at least [Andrew] Lang [1844-1912] and Schmidt produced grounds for rejecting the earlier rather naive theory .... Modern scholars do not, on the whole, accept Schmidt's scheme.... it is a very long jump from the premise that primitive tribes have high gods to the conclusion that the earliest men were monotheists."

What seems to be rejected is the extrapolation from finding that many low level primitives (hunting and fishing stage) are monotheists, to the conclusion that the same was true of the whole human race at a similarly low level of culture.

However, the evidence for many such tribes in historical times still stands. The case seems similar with the Greeks and Romans, both of whom came from the Indoeuropeans. In those days when people traveled, they often tried to see if some of the gods they found in other lands were really the same as their own gods. Herodotus did much of this (in 2.50 he says that almost all the divine figures came to Greece from Egypt). Many of these attempts were strained, and without real foundation. But when the Greeks and Romans got to know each other, they found they had some myths and divinities in common, even though with different names. But now we know that the names for the chief God, Jupiter and Zeus (possessive case: Dios) are linguistically the same, both going back to Indoeuropean dyaus - p schwa ter. (The computer does not have a character for schwa, which is an obscure vowel, like the a on the end of sofa ). The IE word means "Sky Father".

Really if one does not suppose that it is highly likely that conditions for the whole race at the same level of material culture as known primitives (hunter-gatherers) would be quite similar, there is no solid way to establish what the race was like. It is far better than the mere armchair imaginings, of an evolutionistic type that others have used. So the extrapolation proposed by Schmidt was and is quite reasonable. Actually some scholars today in archaeology do make precisely such an extrapolation. In a recent work, The Adventure of Archaeology, by Brian M. Fagan, published by the National Geographic Society in 1989, on pp. 344-46 we find: "Experimentation in archaeology is not limited to state-of-the-art technology. 'New archaeologists' seek innovative ways to study living societies in order to construct models that describe the behavior of past ones. Jeremy Sabloff of the University of New Mexico said, 'We've gone beyond filling up museums with art objects. The objects are not an end in themselves but a means to inform us about the social and economic behavior of ancient people.' In the 1970s Lewis R. Binford of the University of New Mexico observed Alaska's Nunamiut Eskimos, a modern hunter-gatherer society. Binford watched the Eskimos set up hunting camps and saw how they hunted, killed, butchered, and ate animals. His insights gave him a fuller understanding of how ancient hunter-gatherers chose their campsites, and helped him analyze the animal bones found at such sites."

Further, as the Britannica says, at least Schmidt blocked the silly evolutionistic view that primitive man must have been stupid, that one day he came out of his cave, saw lightning and heard thunder, thought they were gods. There never was a shred of evidence for such a view. It was just imagination built on the assumption that everything has evolved. Recent discoveries now show that the artists who created the cave images were people of spirituality and grace; they loved painting, music, and beauty as well as the function of their technology (p. 58). Flutes have been found in Ice Age caves that play notes similar to today's scales. Randall White of New York University thinks the artistic Lascaux cave paintings are only the midway of human art history, which goes back tens of thousands of years earlier. Some of the art work found is over 30,000 years earlier. (Cf. "The Dawn of Creativity" in U. S. News & World Report, May 20, 1996, pp. 52- 58.

Further, Don Richardson a Protestant missionary, in Eternity in their Hearts, tells his own experience. In going to a primitive tribe as a missionary, he was welcomed by the elders who told him their ancestors had said some time a white man would come with a book they needed. Richardson tells of other missionaries who had similar experiences. And Paul Raffaele in "The People that Time Forgot" reports a similar experience among the Korowai Tribe of New Guinea (Readers' Digest, August 1996, pp. 100-07).

Church fundamentalistic?: Had the Church once taught a fundamentalistic view? First, to retell the story of Genesis in the same or similar words, does not amount to an interpretation. But further, the Fathers of the first centuries seldom tried to find what the ancient author really meant to say (=asserted). We comment that the words "literal sense" have two meanings, one which we have just indicated, which tries to find what the author meant to assert, taking into account genre, differences of language and culture etc. The other would treat the text as though written by a modern American and ignore genre and all such things. The Fathers instead preferred allegory, in which one thing stands for another. When they did seek the proper literal sense, they often were not at all fundamentalistic. For example, St. Augustine, in his De Genesi ad Litteram 6.12.20 (Literal Sense of Genesis) wrote: "That God made man with bodily hands from the clay is an excessively childish thought, so that if Scripture had said this, we should rather believe that the writer used a metaphorical term, than to suppose God is bounded by such lines of limbs as we see in our bodies." St. John Chrysostom made a similar comment on the episode of the creation of Eve from Adam's rib in Genesis 2:21-22. He said, in his Homily on Genesis 22.21: "See the condescendence [adaptation to human weakness] of divine Scripture, what words it uses because of our weakness. 'And He took', it says, 'one of his ribs.' Do not take what is said in a human way, but understand that the crassness of the words fits human weakness." St. John did not suggest what was the sober way to take the text. A fine suggestion was made by Pope John Paul II in his Audience of November 7, 1979. He said putting Adam to sleep could stand for a return to the moment before creation, so that man might reemerge in his double unity as male and female.

Evolution of the human body:

That evolutionistic notion was a further projection from belief in the evolution of the human body from primates. Science News, Research Reports of November 21, 1980, pp. 883-87 reports on a meeting of 160 of the world's top paleontologists, anatomists, evolutionary geneticists, and developmental biologists held at the Field Museum in Chicago. The majority of those scientists concluded that Darwin was wrong - not in those words, but they rejected Darwin's idea that there were many intermediate forms between, for example, fish and birds. They recognized that the fossil record does not provide even one clear case of such forms. This did not lead them to reject evolution itself. No, they opted for what they called "punctuated equilibria", the idea that a species might stay the same for millions of years, and then by a fluke, leap up to something much higher, in the same line. If any evidence for the view was offered at the meeting, Science does not mention it. Nor does the report in Newsweek, of November 3, 190, pp. 95-96. They might perhaps point to the high vertical columns exposed in the Grand Canyon, in which low forms, such as Trilobites, appear at the bottom, and higher and higher forms as one goes up. But there is no evidence that the higher came from the lower by a fluke or leap. Further it is admitted that the Grand Canyon was once a sea bottom: naturally the lower things would be found farther down.

The related theory of polygenism has had an inconclusive but impressive blow recently. Allan Wilson of the University of California at Berkeley (Science News, August 13, 1983, p. 101) from a study of mitochondria worldwide, concluded that all existing humans came from one mother who lived 350,000 years ago. At first Wilson received little acceptance, but now, as Newsweek of Jan 21, 1988 reports, his view is getting widespread acceptance, except that the age of the mother is now put at 200,000 years ago. As we said, this does not conclusively disprove polygenism - for there could have been, for example, 6 original pairs, but the lines from all but one died out.

Still more recently, investigation of X chromosomes has led many scientists to think all existing humans also had one common father. Same reservations of course as above.

What of the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, who thought just before the return of Christ, most of our race would be joined closely in a union like a totalitarian state, but by love.

This theory is a fine example of a mind suffering from a block by many preconceived ideas. We can hardly imagine Teilhard, a Jesuit, not having read Scripture. But Scripture could not be more contrary to him. In Lk 18. 8:"When the Son of Man comes do you think He will find faith on the earth?" St. Paul in 2 Thess. 2 paints the same picture. And 2 Timothy 3 gives a horrid picture of human character in the final age.

Nor does history support the notion of early dim-witted persons. Discover magazine of January 1996 displays two full pages of large paintings on cave walls. They were found on cave walls near Avignon, France, in 1994. The paintings of horses are splendidly artistic, as are also images of bears, mammoths, wooly rhinos and other Ice Animals, done in red, yellow and black pigments. There are 300 paintings. Earlier caves near Lascaux that rival these were found earlier. In the previous Spring pictures of two rhinos and a bison have been dated by Carbon 14 to about 32,000 years of age. Even allowing for errors in Carbon 14, these are very old, and of the ice age and show animals of that period that are now extinct.