Objection #4:

 YOUCAT Places greater weight on modern scientific speculation than on the Church Fathers’ unanimous interpretations of the first chapters of Genesis.

The Modernist bent continues in YOUCAT when it accepts Big Bang speculation as indubitable dogma, yet the authors scoff at “creationists” who:

naively take biblical data literally (for example, to calculate the earth’s age, they cite the six days of work in Genesis 1) ⁽²⁷⁾

In so doing, the authors of YOUCAT neglect to mention that all of the Fathers of the Church quoted in YOUCAT’s margins taught that God created the heavens and the earth and all they contain by divine fiat and that St. Augustine, the only Father who interpreted the days of Genesis 1 metaphorically, believed in an instantaneous creation of all of the different kinds of creatures — not in any kind of evolutionary development over long ages of time. Moreover, YOUCAT’s editors misrepresent the overwhelming majority of the Fathers who interpreted the days of Genesis 1 as natural days by implying that they arrived at this interpretation “to calculate the earth’s age.” To anyone familiar with the patristic writings, this implication is absurd, since the Fathers interpreted “yom” or “day” in Genesis 1 according to its literary context — not for the sake of calculating the age of the earth.

Finally, a note in the margin of page 37 defines “creationism” as “the idea that God himself by his direct action created the world all at once, as if the book of Genesis were an eyewitness account.” But the authors of YOUCAT do not tell their young readers that virtually all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church took this “naïve” view, including the greatest Doctors of the Church, men like St. Basil the Great, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Ambrose. St. John Chrysostom expressed the common view of all of the Fathers and Doctors when he wrote that:

All the other prophets spoke either of what was to occur after a long time or of what was about to happen then; but he, the blessed (Moses), who lived many generations after (the creation of the world), was vouchsafed by the guidance of the right hand of the Most High to utter what had been done by the Lord before his own birth. It is for this reason that he begins to speak thus: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” as if calling out to us all with a loud voice: it is not by the instruction of men that I say this; He Who called them (heaven and earth) out of non-being into being—it is He Who has roused my tongue to relate of them. And therefore I entreat you, let us pay heed to these words as if we heard not Moses but the very Lord of the universe Who speaks through the tongue of Moses, and let us take leave for good of our own opinions. ⁽²⁸⁾

YOUCAT’s editors’ misplaced faith in scientific speculation is further exposed in the margin of page 38 where the editors have placed a quotation from physicist Walter Thirring:

And that [the unheard-of precision of the processes associated with the “Big Bang”] is supposed to have happened by chance?! What an absurd idea!

The obvious implication of this quotation is that the Big Bang is a “fact” and that young Catholics should welcome this “fact” as a “scientific” confirmation of their belief in a Creator, and in a creation. According to the theistic version of the Big Bang hypothesis, God created the initial matter and energy at the moment of the Big Bang and then allowed them to develop naturally within the framework of the natural laws that He established at the beginning of creation. But, while this hypothesis allows God to create the matter and energy necessary for the universe to develop naturally, it denies the special creation of all of the different living things, including plants, animals, and man — in contradiction to all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. Moreover, in recent years numerous experts in astronomy and other relevant disciplines have rejected the Big Bang and biological evolution as hypotheses without evidence and against the facts. ⁽²⁹⁾