A reader writes:
My son went to Mass on Christmas Eve. He’s big time into evolution and tho I’ve tried to get him to read Creator and the Cosmos he wasn’t interested. For Christmas I gave him the book The Science Before Science ( I think that’s the name) which he was hardly thrilled to get.
Anyway, at the beginning of Mass they read:
Proclamation of the Birth of Christ
from the Christmas Martyrology (Roman Rite)The twenty-fifth day of December.
In the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world
from the time when God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth;
the two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seventh year after the flood;
the two thousand and fifteenth year from the birth of Abraham;….and he took great exception to that. He said since we KNOW that the earth was not 6000 years old at the time Christ was born we shouldn’t be reading that. It only perpetuates a falsehood. (I wanted to say "well, were you there? How do you know it isn’t? Maybe the earth was created as a middle age earth….maybe mankind is only 6000 years old) Anyway, he tried to argue that just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean it’s true. I said that’s not out of the Bible. His arguments were based on science and religion don’t agree. When I said they do, truth is truth…science has proven that we all come from 1 set of parents…thru DNA research…he said he doen’st think the church should sit and wait till it figures out that science is right (ie Coprenican theory of the rotation of the planets etc.).
So….not that you can argue or win an argument with someone who’s mind is made up..don’t confuse me with facts…what do you say about the reading at church and the years of the age of the earth? Any suggestions?
It sounds to me as if you and your son have positions that are leading you into conflict unnecessarily.
From the Church’s point of view, there is not a problem with the idea that God used evolution as a means by which he accomplished his purposes in creating man and other species. Neither does the Church insist that the earth is only a few thousand years old. If your son feels that the evidence he has been exposed to points to the existence of an old earth and God’s use of evolution to realize his plans for the world then I would not fight with him about that.
If he believes, on the other hand, that evolution occurred but that God didn’t employ it and that it was a process not subject to God’s providence then I still wouldn’t fight with him about it (or give him books that he doesn’t want to read) but I would point out that at that point he is advancing a view that science has no way of proving. You don’t need to argue about that. It’s just a fact that would be worth pointing out.
I am afraid that I don’t understand completely everything that you recount your son as having said, so some of it I am not able to comment on. However, I would point out that it sounds to me as if he may be pitting science against Scripture in an unnecessary fashion.
For its part, the Church is quite open to the idea that the early material in Genesis is written in a symbolic fashion and thus that one should not expect it to pronounce on issues like the age of the earth or the specific means that God used to give rise to the creatures we now see in the world.
As to the specific issue of the dating of Christ’s birth that was read at Mass, your son should bear in mind the genre of the literature he was hearing. This was not a scientific treatise. It was liturgy, and liturgy is in significant measure poetic.
Those dates are not and were never intended to be rock solid and precise. They were just the best estimates that were available at the time the piece was composed, and even then it was known that they were just estimates and that we really can’t date the birth of Christ with precision. People back then knew that it wasn’t a certainty that Christ was born in the 42nd year of Augustus Caesar’s reign (in fact, he was probably born a few years before that), and they knew that we can’t date the creation of the world precisely either.
So take these numbers for what they are: Old fashioned estimates that were put together a long time ago to build up a poetic proclamation to convey a sense of the grandeur and majesty of the birth of God’s Son.
Not a scientific treatise.
Recognizing the nature of liturgy is important here. It not only involves poetry but it also involves tradition. In that way, it is much like Shakespeare. If Shakespeare had written that piece and incorporated it into one of his plays then it would and should continue to be performed today–e.g., by a college drama company, even if the school does not teach in its science classes that these dates are to be taken literally.
In the same way, the Church can include traditional/poetic material in its liturgy that is not to be taken literally and that the Church does not hold forth as literally true when discussing the age of the world in a catechetical text.
See the above-linked article for more on what the Church does hold regarding creation and evolution,
On the other hand, I LOVE hearing the Proclamation because it insists that this event (the birth of Christ) took place in REAL historical time, not in some vague “myth-time” like some of the pagan god-origin tales. Jesus was REALLY born in a real time and place – like saying my goddaughter was born in the second term of President Bill Clinton or something.
By the way, the version used at the Mass I attended was amended to say ‘unknown ages after the creation of the universe’ or something like that for the first bit.
As an aside, does anyone know when this tradition first started? I first heard it about 10 years ago. Also is there a link to the full version?
LINK TO FULL VERSION.
I believe our priest said “some millions of years after the creation of the world…”.
this reminds me of the Bloopers subpage devoted to Van Helsing (the Steven Sommers movies) on imdb.com, where someone had posted a Catholic character’s funerary cremation as an inaccuracy, and an annotation had been added to the effect that the Church does allow cremation in special circumstances (eg, risk of contagion) and in a world where dead bodies can be brought back to life, scavenged for spare parts, etc. (like the Sommers-verse), it might make such allowances.
What about the Bible verses that point out the difference between our time and “God’s time”, e.g., 2 Peter 3:8, “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day.” If the Creation occured in 6 “God days”, that’s thousands upon thousands of years to us!
In fact, the term “day” was not even invented until the first “day” when God defined it in Gen 1:5 as “light”. The actual Earth day (based on the sun) isn’t even mentioned until the 4th “day” (Gen 1:14-19), when it is finally determined what the “fixed” days are.
With God, time is relative. We are the ones who have this fixed notion of time. We cannot expect to have an exact one-to-one relationship between “God time” and “Earth time”. Most of our science relies on fixed measurements of time (try to describe speed or acceleration w/o time – how about anything related to light waves).
The text in the appendix of Msgr. Elliott’s book reads “Untold ages from the time…” I wonder where the variations come from? Is there a difference in the LOTH in the US and in England on this point?
Cardinal Schonborn, who has been deeply involved in this debate since his op-ed article for the NYT, has been discussing evolution/creationism particularly in reference to the liturgy in his ongoing catechetical lectures, so those might also be fruitful to read as well…
Thanks!
Jamie,
2 Peter 3:8 doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant to the issue. I don’t see how it impacts the correct intepretation of Genesis.
I proclaimed the Martyrology text at our Church from the Sacramentary Supplement, and the translation in that was “unknown ages.” Last year, I was given an OCP version set to standard notation (as opposed to chant), which had the year calculated. I’m under the impression that the supplement translation is more “official” per se, but I don’t know how much it matters.
When the Roman Marytrology was updated a few years back, the text of the proclamation was also updated to show more clearly that we do not know the precise date of events such as the creation.
The new Latin text (which was sung at the Midnight Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI this year) reads:
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has made available an English translation of the new Latin text which is available here (warning: PDF!)
Jimmy, great post. You write with such clarity and objectivity that difficult concepts become understandable. Thank you.
I understood it as 6000 years after the completion of creation – Adam and Eve, etc. The existance of an evolving and changing world for billions of years prior to that was the process of creation itself, which need not be fitted into 6 literal days.