Bishops Need to Intervene on Unscientific Teaching

Sixteenth century cosmology is not Catholic teaching

May 03, 2025

Recently, a well-known self-proclaimed exorcist here in the United States claimed that devils want you to believe in evolution. Of course, he is teaching the ancient version of creation and cosmology which you can find in the Bible. These are not scientifically accurate. The concern is that if we choose to accept the scientific understanding of creation then we will turn from God.

I will respond simply: That is silly.

Truth is truth. God exists period. What if science disproves the existence of God? It can’t. Some scientists may not believe in God but science cannot disprove God because God exists. What science can disprove is a false understanding of God.

This is my retort to atheists. They do not believe in God, however, since the existence of God cannot be disproved then this is their belief. What they actually do not believe in is a false concept of God. If God’s existence could be proven to them as real as the existence of protons and neutrons they would accept God’s existence immediately.

Our whole race seeks to find a true understanding of our existence and God is part of that understanding. Our comprehension of God evolves over time. Our ability to understand the material and immaterial over generations grows because our perception of the world is limited by our own biology.

What we perceive is less than actually exists

Jesus teaches that God is spirit (John 4:24) and he speaks of the spiritual world. We cannot see the spiritual world unless God grants us an ability to get a glimpse, however that does not mean it does not exist. Our ability to perceive the world around us limits our ability to know it fully. We can only hear, at best 20 hertz to 20 thousand hertz. We can only see what we call the visible light spectrum and the deaf, the blind, the color blind perceive even less.

That does not mean that what we do not see does not exist, it does mean that we cannot perceive it. There are sounds above 20 thousand hertz but we cannot hear them. There are light properties beyond the visible (to us) spectrum but we cannot see them.

Over centuries our human understanding deepens and evolves. If you and I went back to seventeenth century Massachusetts and started sharing our knowledge of the future, we would be burned at the stake as witches. What is worse is most of those, if not all, who would condemn us would have been graduates of Harvard College.

People then did not have the capacity to understand the science or for that matter the theology we understand today. Over the centuries our capacity to understand grows because our knowledge is built upon those who came before us. We learned what they knew and we accepted or rejected it and built upon it as well. Our knowledge is greater than theirs. Our knowledge of God is not complete nor our knowledge of the material world. It is greater, however, than what went before us.

All of this is a form of evolution. Human knowledge increases over time and our understanding of the world around increases as well. So how does this affect our faith?

The universe is larger than our ability to understand it. We also know there is a spiritual element and a material element. Science by default is only able to understand the material reality because everything must be observable and all that is observable is in the material realm. This does not mean the spiritual realm does not exist. I believe in the spiritual realm and I take that as fact. However, just as we are learning more and more about the material realm, so we are learning more and more about the spiritual realm.

The danger comes when theologians will pontificate about the material realm and connect it to the known world of the spiritual realm. In other words, when theologians command that we must believe in young earth creationism or geocentrism (The Sun revolves around the Earth) while observable science clearly refutes them.

We do not accept the cosmology of the sixteenth century

The last parts of the Bible emerged around the end of the first century and the beginning of the second A.D. Those who wrote it, like John of Patmos, worked out of the known cosmology at the time. Even if they had visions of a greater cosmology as St Paul did in 1 Corinthians 12, they would have to communicate it in ways that their readers would understand as St. Paul does.

I know that this man was caught up into Paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter
Catholic Biblical Association (Great Britain). (1994). The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Catholic edition (2 Co 12:3–4). National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA.

These priests and their lay followers are trying to force a fake science into an undeveloped theology and that is when they are off the rails.

Jesus came to teach us what we could not understand on our own. His life shows us a truth of who we are and who God is as we could best understand it. We can only learn what we can ultimately understand within our current knowledge. The people of Jesus’ time could understand the concept of atoms because Aristotle understood atoms. I do not believe you could explain to them protons, neutrons and electrons as well as valences and other nuclear structures because they did not have the sufficient knowledge to understand the concepts.

“At the Easter Vigil, the journey along the paths of sacred Scripture begins with the account of creation. This is the liturgy’s way of telling us that the creation story is itself a prophecy. It is not information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man himself came into being. The Fathers of the Church were well aware of this. They did not interpret the story as an account of the process of the origins of things, but rather as a pointer towards the essential, towards the true beginning and end of our being.” Pope Benedict XVI Homily Easter Vigil 2011

Priests and laity who teach young Earth creationism and geo-centrism as truth preach falsehood. They force people to believe a false cosmology and biology under the pain of sin. This is unacceptable. It undermines the naive from understanding real truth.

We need to discourage the faithful from listening to them as we would discourage people from reading a book from a graduate of Harvard University teaching us that electricity is from the devil because it leads us down dangerous paths.

I would even suggest such priests must not receive faculties in a diocese not their own because they are teaching what is false. It is up to their respective diocesan bishops to oversee their teaching and their ability to preach.

Remaining silent when we see this kind of preaching is also unacceptable.

Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA

The parish podcast is at CatholicAudioMedia.com

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