The John-Henry Westen Show - September 18, 2026


Billions of Years or 6,000? The Great Debate on Creation vs Genesis

Catholic Children in the Holy Land Suffer Persecution

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 49 minutes

Words per minute

148.16

Word count

16,157

Sentence count

606

People

Also mentioned:

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hello, my friends. Welcome to the John Henry Weston Show. This is going to be a first for
00:00:06.720 us here at LifeSite. We're going to host a debate. It's actually a debate in and around
00:00:13.940 creation, evolution. A lot of people talk about that, wonder about that, what's going on. Well,
00:00:20.880 the debate today is about this. It's about the appraisal that the universe is billions of years
00:00:26.520 old does not contradict a faithful Christian interpretation of sacred scripture. So, arguing
00:00:35.500 that point, first of all, is Dr. Ed Mazza, whom many of you already know from appearances on my
00:00:42.640 show, but I'll give you a little bit more about him. Dr. Mazza teaches online courses on Catholic
00:00:47.540 history, Marian apparitions, saints' lives, and the latest controversies at www.edmundmazza.com.
00:00:55.360 Dr. Maza is the author of Saints vs. Antipopes and the Third Secret of Fatima and the Synodal Church.
00:01:02.960 As a professor of history, he taught for 14 years at Azusa Pacific University.
00:01:10.320 Dr. Maza's latest peer-reviewed article on Pope Benedict's resignation appeared in the Archivio Giordizio Filippo Serafini.
00:01:21.040 He is a frequent guest on my show, as well as Tim Gordon's Rules for Retrogrades and Anne Barnhart podcasts.
00:01:29.800 Debating him will be Mr. Hugh Owen, who is also known to many of you because he's been on my show a couple of times before.
00:01:38.960 He is the convert son of Sir David Owen, the first secretary general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
00:01:46.060 Yes, you heard that right.
00:01:47.640 Mr. Owen directs the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, which provides a forum for Catholic
00:01:52.880 theologians, philosophers, and natural scientists all over the world who defend the traditional
00:01:57.700 Catholic doctrine of creation that was handed down from the apostles. He and his wife Maria
00:02:02.940 have nine children, including one who is a nun with the Benedictines of Mary, and 24 grandchildren
00:02:10.260 So far, I'm so jealous. And they live in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley near Mount Jackson, Virginia. We'll stop there. I will have another two guests to introduce to you after. But we'll start with Dr. Mazza. You have 15 minutes starting now.
00:02:30.660 Thank you, John Henry. So I'd like to start by just expressing my respect for Hugh Owen and the Colby Center. I think they've done fine work combating materialism, Darwinism, but an old universe does not equal evolution. Neither I nor Dr. Hugh Ross would ever advocate evolution.
00:02:54.440 That being said, I think I understand where Mr. Owen is coming from, and so let me lay out where I see his position.
00:03:09.380 Here's a quote.
00:03:11.140 God's revelation is contained in the 73 books of the inspired, inerrant Word of God and in sacred tradition.
00:03:20.120 It is infallibly interpreted through the authoritative teaching of St. Peter and the apostles and their successors in the unanimous teaching of the Church Fathers and approved theologians.
00:03:35.100 According to all of these, the entire universe and all the different kinds of spiritual and corporeal creatures were created from nothing by God less than 10,000 years ago.
00:03:50.120 Hey, my friends. I just heard about a great Catholic mobile phone company that gives
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00:04:01.220 media. And no, I'm not joking. They support traditional Catholic priests and religious.
00:04:07.300 Do you even know that every time you make a call, send a text, or use mobile data,
00:04:13.060 your provider earns revenue? Have you ever thought about where that money goes?
00:04:18.280 Many companies support causes that conflict with traditional Catholic values.
00:04:23.900 But now there's a traditional Catholic alternative.
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00:04:30.140 With iCatholic Mobile, you'll get dependable nationwide 5G talk, text, and data service on America's largest network.
00:04:39.240 You'll get also personalized customer support, and you can keep your current phone number.
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00:04:45.360 Call 802-988-6588 or visit iCatholicMobile.com.
00:04:52.460 May God bless you.
00:04:53.600 To this, we might add the Catholic Encyclopedia Dictionary from 1941.
00:04:59.900 Quote,
00:05:01.380 What they, the fathers, unanimously teach to be of the faith is of the faith.
00:05:08.400 What they unanimously reject as heretical is heretical.
00:05:13.520 They are the mouthpiece of the infallible teaching body of the church.
00:05:19.060 The church acknowledges them as witnesses of her own faith.
00:05:24.020 Or we could quote Adolf Tanqueray from 1930, from his Manual of Dogmatic Theology,
00:05:32.940 The morally unanimous agreement of the fathers declaring that a doctrine is de fide is a certain argument of divine tradition.
00:05:46.500 Three conditions are necessary that an argument be considered certain that it relate to a doctrine pertaining to the faith, that the fathers declare positively that the doctrine is a doctrine of the church, that the agreement of the fathers be not mathematically but morally unanimous.
00:06:09.240 With these conditions posited, it can be said that the fathers record the teaching of the universal church, but the church is infallible in teaching Christ's doctrine.
00:06:22.940 And so, as I understand the claim, both the six days of creation and the thousands of years of history are of faith, not natural science, and are infallibly taught, and so must be held.
00:06:43.780 Therefore, a scientific appraisal of billions of years would not be a faithful interpretation of sacred scripture.
00:06:52.440 However, if we consult the Reverend Joseph Pohl, his 1912 book, God, the Author of Nature and the Supernatural, he says natural sciences, astronomy, geology, paleontology, are able to furnish valuable aids to the exegete who undertakes to interpret the mosaic cosmogony, Genesis.
00:07:19.380 The respect he owes to the Almighty Creator, whose vestiges these sciences seek to trace, will prompt him to welcome their cooperation and pay due regard to whatever evidence they may have to offer.
00:07:36.580 God has set down an objective commentary on the Bible in the Book of Nature, to which the theologian can and should devote most careful attention.
00:07:52.240 Also, we could turn to the Reverend Charles Coppens, a systematic study of the Catholic religion from 1917.
00:08:00.660 team. Quote, as to the meaning of the six days of the creation, little is known for certain.
00:08:09.060 While the scripture is the word of God, the world around us is his work, and one is a commentary
00:08:17.980 on the other. The more we get to understand the world, the better we may understand the book.
00:08:25.720 The literal meaning of six days was, until recent times, generally accepted
00:08:33.440 and was supported by an immense amount of authority.
00:08:38.520 But there need be no hesitation in departing from it if good reason can be shown for so doing,
00:08:45.480 as it is taught by Pope Leo XIII in his Encyclical on the Scripture.
00:08:51.720 Geology and paleontology now appear to show such reason.
00:08:58.400 Most modern writers believe that they have deciphered portions of nature's commentary on the scriptures.
00:09:07.280 The encyclical that Father was referring to is Providentiamus Deus from 1893.
00:09:14.820 The unshrinking defense of the Holy Scripture does not require that we should equally uphold all the opinions which each of the fathers have put forth in explaining it.
00:09:27.220 For, in commenting on passages where physical matters occur, they have sometimes expressed the ideas of their own times, and thus made statements which, in these days, have been abandoned as incorrect.
00:09:41.720 Now, in his debate a couple of months ago with Timothy Gordon on rules for retrogrades, Brother Owens said the following,
00:09:50.240 For St. Thomas and all the fathers and doctors, any fact that is related in an historical book of the Bible is ipso facto, automatically, of faith, and we cannot, therefore, disagree with it.
00:10:12.480 Now we need to unpack, however, what St. Thomas says faith is.
00:10:19.320 St. Thomas writes in his commentary on the sentences,
00:10:22.260 What pertains to faith is distinguished in two ways.
00:10:28.780 For some are of the substance of faith, such that God is three and one,
00:10:37.120 about which no one may licitly think otherwise.
00:10:42.480 Other things are only incidental to faith.
00:10:48.800 In the Latin, it's per accident, as opposed to substantia.
00:10:54.960 Other things are only incidental to faith, insofar as they are treated in Scripture,
00:11:02.460 which faith holds to be promulgated under the dictation of the Holy Spirit,
00:11:07.460 but which can be ignored by those who are not held to know Scripture,
00:11:11.460 such as many of the historical works.
00:11:14.360 On such matters, even the saints disagree,
00:11:17.080 explaining scripture in different ways.
00:11:20.060 Thus, with respect to the beginning of the world,
00:11:24.200 something pertains to the substance of faith,
00:11:28.800 namely, that the world began to be by creation.
00:11:34.220 And all the saints agree in this.
00:11:37.440 On the other hand, how and in what order this creation was done pertains to faith only per
00:11:47.920 accidents, insofar as it is treated in Scripture, the truth of which the saints save in the
00:11:56.540 different explanations they offer.
00:11:58.400 For Augustine holds that at the very beginning of creation, there were some things specifically
00:12:03.680 distinct in their proper nature, such as the elements, celestial bodies, and spiritual
00:12:08.600 substances, but others existed in seed notions alone, such as animals, plants, and men.
00:12:15.520 Sacred scripture is not derogated when it is differently explained.
00:12:20.820 The faith being saved because the Holy Spirit made it fruitful with a greater truth than
00:12:26.700 any man can discover.
00:12:28.140 According to Augustine, Moses, in instructing the unlearned people about the creation of the world, divided into stages, things that were actually brought into being simultaneously.
00:12:42.740 On the other hand, Gregory and other saints, however, maintained that a chronological order was observed in the distinction of things.
00:12:50.560 And while this view is indeed more common, unanimous, and seems more in accord with the literal surface meaning, the former view of Augustine is more rational and better defends Holy Scripture against the mockery of unbelievers.
00:13:11.420 a matter Augustine teaches must be strictly observed, namely, that scripture should be
00:13:19.340 expounded in such a way as not to be ridiculed by unbelievers, and this opinion pleases me more.
00:13:28.060 St. Thomas Aquinas is perhaps the greatest theological genius in 2,000 years of church
00:13:33.780 history. The other disputant for that title would be St. Augustine of Hippo. Let's go to him
00:13:41.220 directly, he writes, it happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other
00:13:48.100 elements of this world, about the motion and rotation, or even the magnitude and distances
00:13:54.460 of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, etc., may be known with the greatest
00:14:01.840 certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful
00:14:12.120 and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he, the non-Christian, should hear a Christian
00:14:19.160 speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings. An
00:14:26.560 embarrassing situation in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to
00:14:31.720 scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside
00:14:37.580 the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinion and to the great loss of those
00:14:44.640 for whose salvation we toil. The writers of our scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned
00:14:51.080 men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him
00:14:58.120 maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in
00:15:03.400 matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of
00:15:08.060 heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have
00:15:13.480 learned from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy
00:15:19.460 Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their
00:15:25.900 mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of
00:15:31.680 our sacred books. For then to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will
00:15:36.940 try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think
00:15:42.240 support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which
00:15:47.820 they make assertion. And then Augustine writes, should one find something about these matters,
00:15:54.360 about the physical universe, in our books, that it seems to be at variance with the perception
00:15:59.240 of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things, about the physical
00:16:04.760 universe, are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures.
00:16:11.160 Our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the
00:16:16.640 Spirit of God who spoke through them to teach men anything that would not be of use to them
00:16:21.600 for their salvation. And this is why in 1909, under Pope St. Pius X, his Pontifical Biblical
00:16:30.360 Commission, acting with his magisterial authority, answered the following question in this way.
00:16:37.880 In the designation and distinction of the six days mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis,
00:16:43.260 May the word yom be taken either in the literal sense for the natural day or in an applied sense for a certain space of time, and may this question be the subject of free discussion among exegetes, answer in the affirmative.
00:17:02.560 Case in point, in 1951, Pope Pius XII did precisely this.
00:17:09.860 he said is science in a position to state when this mighty beginning of the cosmos took place
00:17:17.320 and secondly what was the initial or primitive state of the universe he talks about edwin
00:17:25.880 hubble and the expanding universe and he says um ultimately he concludes it would seem that
00:17:35.120 present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in
00:17:42.320 bearing witness to that primordial fiat lux, let there be light, uttered at the moment when, along
00:17:49.380 with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of
00:17:55.880 chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies. I will rest my case for the moment.
00:18:03.440 Hugh, Owen, now it's your 15 minutes starting now.
00:18:07.080 With God's help, I will now explain why every faithful child of God should be a DRAC, a divinely revealed age.
00:18:15.700 Catholic.
00:18:17.040 I'm sure that all of us want to give joy to the sacred heart of Jesus.
00:18:21.740 And there's only one place in the four Gospels where we are told that our Lord rejoiced.
00:18:25.640 According to St. Luke, he rejoiced in the Holy Ghost and said,
00:18:29.220 i confess to thee o father lord of heaven and earth because thou hast hidden these things from
00:18:34.960 the wise and prudent and hast revealed them to little ones our lord had told his disciples to
00:18:40.960 take him at his word that if they did they would be able to do the things that he had done and
00:18:46.080 against the advice of the wise and prudent they did take him at his word and worked the same
00:18:51.060 wonders that he himself had done and brought joy to his heart our lord is our heavenly bridegroom
00:18:56.840 who shed his last drop of blood to redeem us.
00:19:00.460 As members of his mystical body, we know that his every word is true.
00:19:04.860 Our heavenly bridegroom tells us that scripture cannot be broken,
00:19:09.500 that from the beginning of creation God made them male and female,
00:19:13.780 that Moses, by reason of the hardness of your heart, permitted you to put away your wives,
00:19:17.900 but from the beginning it was not so,
00:19:20.900 that Saint Abel, the son of Saint Adam and Saint Eve, lived at the foundation of the world.
00:19:25.860 And he said, if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me.
00:19:29.920 In the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, Moses gives us the information we need to determine the exact age of the universe.
00:19:38.940 In the words of Dr. Kurt Wise, of all the steps in biblical chronology from creation to Christ, only two steps require a genealogy.
00:19:48.280 The time between creation and the flood and the time between the flood and Abraham.
00:19:52.060 And guess what?
00:19:52.720 these happen to be the only genealogies that have chronological information.
00:19:58.560 Even honest secular scholars admit, with Dr. James Barr, Regis Professor of Hebrew at Oxford
00:20:05.020 University, that there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament, as far as he knows,
00:20:10.280 at any world-class university who does not believe that the author or authors of Genesis 1 to 11
00:20:16.020 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that creation took place in a series of six days,
00:20:23.340 which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience, and that the figures contained
00:20:28.320 in the Genesis chronologies provide by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the
00:20:32.840 world up to later stages in the biblical story. Now fathers, good fathers, orient their children
00:20:38.540 in time and space. And our Lord said, what man is there among you of whom if his son shall ask bread,
00:20:44.760 while he reached him a stone. So if Dr. Ross's first American ancestors arrived here from Scotland
00:20:50.620 in 1630, he would never teach his children or allow anyone else to teach them that they arrived
00:20:56.680 in 1730 or 1830. Well, our heavenly bridegroom was so determined to orient us correctly in time
00:21:03.640 that he wrote the Ten Commandments in tablets of stone with his own hand, with the finger of God.
00:21:10.040 And in those Ten Commandments, there is only one in which he commanded us to remember something.
00:21:13.820 And that is because the other commandments can be deduced from our experience, but there is
00:21:19.000 nothing in our experience of nature that can tell us when, how, and over what period of time
00:21:24.660 God created the heavens, the earth, the seas, and all they contain. The only way that we can know
00:21:29.600 those things is through a revelation from God. In the days of the apostles and church fathers,
00:21:34.880 there were plenty of influential pagan intellectuals like Lucretius who believed
00:21:39.380 that the universe had existed for millions
00:21:41.260 of years. So if our Lord
00:21:43.280 had actually used long ages of time,
00:21:45.200 he would have found a receptive audience for that
00:21:47.120 revelation. Instead, he
00:21:49.140 revealed that while he could have created
00:21:51.200 everything in 70 trillion years, in
00:21:53.180 two seconds, in any period of time that he chose
00:21:55.260 because he's God, he chose
00:21:57.460 to create the world and all it contains
00:21:59.320 according to the rhythm that we must
00:22:01.340 follow if we want to live a
00:22:03.260 happy, healthy, holy life.
00:22:05.380 Remember that I'll keep holy the Sabbath
00:22:07.280 day. In six days,
00:22:09.380 shalt thou labor and shall do all my works but on the seventh day is the
00:22:13.160 Sabbath of the Lord thy God thou shalt do no work on it for in six days the
00:22:17.660 Lord made heaven and earth in the sea in all things that are in them and rested
00:22:22.700 on the seventh day profession of faith of the Council of Trent requires all
00:22:28.220 Catholics to believe any unanimous interpretation of the fathers of any
00:22:31.500 passage of scripture it pertains to a doctrine of faith or morals and the
00:22:36.140 fathers were unanimous with saint augustine that genesis is a sacred history and that from the
00:22:42.140 inerrant sacred history of genesis we can know that the universe is much less than 10 000 years
00:22:47.300 old even the allegorically minded origin was not a church father but very influential with the
00:22:52.560 fathers taught that and that god created the whole world and all of the different kinds of creatures
00:22:58.480 in six 24-hour days as saint ephraim the syrian who could read the text of genesis in the original
00:23:04.660 Hebrew teaches. The only church father who opted for a different interpretation of day in Genesis
00:23:09.900 1 was Saint Augustine, and that is because he relied on the inaccurate Vedis Latina translation
00:23:15.780 of Genesis. And so he opted for an instantaneous creation of all things, which completely rules
00:23:22.520 out creation over long ages of time. N.C. flatly rejected the long-age chronologies promoted by
00:23:28.500 Plato and the pagan intellectual elite, stating, they are deceived by those highly mendacious
00:23:35.840 documents that profess to give the history of man as many thousands of years, though reckoning by
00:23:41.320 the sacred writings we find that not 6,000 years have yet passed. All faithful Catholics are also
00:23:47.860 bound by the principle lex orandi, lex predendi. The law of praying is the law of believing.
00:23:53.620 We know that the authentic liturgical prayers of the various traditions of the Catholic Church
00:23:57.720 are the work of the Holy Ghost and teach the truth.
00:24:01.660 Now, one of the church's greatest experts on the sacred liturgy,
00:24:04.440 the servant of God, Dom Geronje,
00:24:06.300 whose love for God and neighbor was so great
00:24:08.440 that our Lord has preserved his physical heart incorrupt.
00:24:12.560 Dom Geronje teaches that in the entire liturgical tradition of the Roman Rite,
00:24:17.500 the chronology upheld again and again
00:24:19.240 is the one derived from the genealogies in the Hebrew text of Genesis,
00:24:22.980 which tells us that 4,000 years elapsed
00:24:25.940 from creation to the nativity of our Lord,
00:24:28.560 and that the four weeks of Advent recall the 4,000 years of expectation
00:24:32.860 for the coming of our Lord.
00:24:35.240 Dom Geraget points out that in the entire liturgical tradition of the Roman Rite,
00:24:39.760 there is only one time when a longer chronology derived
00:24:43.160 from the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament is used,
00:24:46.860 and that is in the reading from the Roman Martyrology at the Midnight Mass for Christmas,
00:24:50.980 which gives 5,199 years from creation to the birth of Christ.
00:24:55.940 On this one day alone, Don Garaget writes, does the Church adopt the Septuagint chronology,
00:25:02.200 according to which the birth of our Savior took place 5,000 years after creation,
00:25:07.000 whereas the Vulgate version and the Hebrew text place only 4,000 years between the two events.
00:25:12.020 This is not a fitting place to explain the discrepancy.
00:25:14.840 We merely allude to it as showing the liberty which the Church allows on this question.
00:25:21.220 So, my brothers in Christ, that is the liberty that the Church allows us on this question.
00:25:26.640 Either 4,000 years from creation to the birth of Christ, as it is in the original Hebrew text,
00:25:32.300 or 5,000 to 5,500 years, according to the Septuagint.
00:25:37.940 Indeed, all the particular churches of the Catholic Church bear witness to the historical reality of the six 24-hour days every day of the liturgical year.
00:25:49.780 For example, why does our liturgical day begin in the evening with vespers?
00:25:55.100 Is it because the Big Bang took place in the evening?
00:25:58.160 No, it's because Moses tells us he called the light day and the darkness night,
00:26:03.840 and there was evening and morning one day.
00:26:07.320 That is why, for example, the official prayer book of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church
00:26:12.120 teaches right at the beginning that liturgical day begins in the evening with vespers,
00:26:17.080 because that is the order that God established from the first day of creation.
00:26:22.780 In fact, St. Thomas sums up the entire patristic tradition in the Summa by saying,
00:26:27.960 quote, the words one day are used when day is first instituted to denote that one day is made up of 24 hours.
00:26:36.040 Hence, by mentioning one, the measure of a natural day is fixed.
00:26:40.140 in monasteries all over the world for 1400 years consecrated religious have chanted
00:26:46.100 the vespers hymns attributed to pope saint gregory the great which at the end of each day give glory
00:26:51.720 to god for what he created on that particular day of creation week for example in saint gregory's
00:26:58.180 vespers hymn for tuesday the third day of the week the church prays benignant creator of the world
00:27:03.920 who didst divide the surface of the earth and driving off the troubled waters that's firmly
00:27:09.460 establish the land that it might bring forth appropriate produce, be adorned with golden
00:27:15.420 flowers, become prolific in fruits. St. Lawrence of Brindisi mastered all the languages of the Bible,
00:27:22.760 knew the entire Bible by heart, and is the last doctor of the church to write a detailed
00:27:27.580 commentary on Genesis. And in his commentary, he considers the traditional Vespers prayers of
00:27:33.900 St. Gregory so authoritative that they settled a long-standing theological question.
00:27:39.460 was the sun created on the fourth day, or was it merely formed from light that God had created on
00:27:45.540 day one? St. Lawrence answers. We must now see what is understood by the name light in Genesis
00:27:51.080 1-3. Some think that it is the sun itself that ought to be understood here. However, Holy Writ
00:27:57.600 denies this assertion, for the Bible says that the sun itself was created on the fourth day.
00:28:03.400 The Church also confesses such, saying in the Vespers hymn for Wednesdays,
00:28:09.800 Thou on the fourth day establishing the fiery wheel of the sun.
00:28:14.180 So according to the principle of Lex Arandi, Lex Credendi,
00:28:17.440 we can see that every faithful child of the Church should be a DRAC,
00:28:21.820 a divinely revealed age Catholic.
00:28:24.020 But that's not all.
00:28:25.580 The greatest public miracle since the resurrection took place in Fátima, Portugal,
00:28:29.660 on October 13, 1917,
00:28:31.480 when the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children
00:28:35.240 and obtained from God what we know as the miracle of Son,
00:28:38.920 which was witnessed by 70,000 people.
00:28:41.940 Our Lady emphasized the importance of what we know as the five first Saturdays devotion.
00:28:47.020 But that is because Our Lady was foreshadowed on the first Saturday of the world
00:28:52.380 when God rested in his perfectly beautiful, complete, and harmonious creation that he made for us.
00:28:58.460 a creation that was totally free not only from human death but from all disease and deformity
00:29:04.580 that is why the patron saint of europe saint bridget of sweden in the ancient office that
00:29:09.900 she composed for a bridgetine nuns phrase god's creation of the world and all it contains took
00:29:16.080 place in the instant of his will's expression and with that design and perfection foreseen by him
00:29:21.460 yet there remains still uncreated another work of creation which would surpass what he had already
00:29:26.940 done. Mary, we may see in God's act of creation an image of your creating. Dr. Mazza and Dr. Ross
00:29:35.460 claim that God brought all the different kinds of plants and animals into existence over hundreds
00:29:40.780 of millions of years, filled with deaths, death, disease, and deformities, as evidenced by the
00:29:46.880 fossil record. But St. Paul teaches in Romans 8 that it was the sin of Adam that subjected the
00:29:52.400 whole universe to a bondage of decay. That is not how it was when God created the world in the
00:29:57.320 beginning. Every Saturday, we celebrate what St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa calls the first
00:30:04.120 perfection of the universe, which foreshadowed the perfect beauty of our Blessed Mother Mary.
00:30:10.260 By the first perfection of the universe, the angelic doctor means that all the different
00:30:15.340 kinds of creatures, each one perfect according to its nature, existed with St. Adam and St. Eve,
00:30:21.820 and for them in perfect harmony at the beginning of time.
00:30:26.440 According to the Seventh Ecumenical Council,
00:30:29.480 the holy icons approved for use in our churches
00:30:32.180 also teach with authority in accordance with the Word of God.
00:30:36.720 The holy icons of creation clearly teach
00:30:39.000 that God created all things in six 24-hour days,
00:30:44.000 exactly as God revealed in the sacred history of Genesis.
00:30:47.680 In this icon of the fifth day of creation week
00:30:49.960 from Monreale Cathedral, for example,
00:30:52.380 we see that God is creating the creatures of the air and the sea at the same time,
00:30:57.460 whereas Dr. Mots and Dr. Roswald,
00:30:59.920 in millions of years, elapsed for these two creations.
00:31:03.720 Many people today object, well, Moses didn't have modern science,
00:31:07.960 and that's why God allowed him to believe the fairy tale of fiat creation less than 10,000 years ago.
00:31:13.940 But if God had used long ages to prepare the world for the first human beings,
00:31:18.540 he could easily have shown that to Moses.
00:31:20.960 And then on the walls of our cathedrals, we would have beautiful icons of one-celled organisms giving way to fish, giving way to amphibians, giving way to reptiles, giving way to mammals over long ages of time.
00:31:32.780 The reason we don't see such images in our cathedrals is that progressive creation is a myth based on the false assumption of Descartes that things have always been the same from the beginning of creation.
00:31:44.060 and that therefore we can explain the timing of the origin of the different kinds of creatures
00:31:49.340 by extrapolating from the material processes that we observe in this fallen world.
00:31:53.980 And that is why St. Maximus the Confessor, doctor of the Church, gave us this profound warning.
00:32:01.760 Try to learn why God created, for that is true knowledge.
00:32:05.500 But do not try to learn how he created or why he did so comparatively recently,
00:32:11.620 for that does not come within the compass of your intellect. Unbridled speculation, as one of the
00:32:18.760 saints has said, can drive one headlong over the precipice. So my brothers and sisters in Christ,
00:32:25.380 let us pray that our Lord and the Blessed Mother will bring us back from the precipice of unbridled
00:32:30.740 speculation and plant us securely on the rock of the traditional faith of the Catholic Church
00:32:37.100 so that we can all rejoice together in the knowledge
00:32:39.980 that God created everything for us perfectly in the beginning,
00:32:43.740 just as he said, and that we are the apple of his eye and not an afterthought.
00:32:48.240 In the name of Jesus, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
00:32:53.900 So, as I mentioned before, Pope Pius XII interpreted the six days of Genesis
00:33:00.840 according to a scientific appraisal of billions of years.
00:33:06.040 Now, remember what we said earlier, what Hugh is claiming is that the fathers are teaching unanimously that not only the creation but the how of creation is of faith, and what they declare to be of faith is of faith, that they are the mouthpiece of the infallible teaching of the church.
00:33:30.820 But the implication of this is that anyone who deviates from that is a heretic.
00:33:40.220 If the fathers unanimously teach that it is of faith that the universe is less than 10,000 years old, then this is an infallible teaching of the church.
00:33:52.240 To deny an infallible de fide teaching of the church is heresy.
00:33:58.180 Therefore, Pope Pius XII was at minimum a public material heretic.
00:34:05.880 Even merely material heretics do not belong as members to the visible church.
00:34:14.140 To be a valid pope or bishop, one must belong to the visible church.
00:34:20.280 Therefore, if Hugh is correct, Pope Pius XII was a public material heretic who lost his office and was an anti-pope from 1951 to 1958.
00:34:33.380 Hugh, I think you just started a new, I've heard of 1958 Sede Vicantus, but never 1951 Sede Vicantus.
00:34:41.500 again ludwig ott in fundamentals of catholic dogma says public heretics even those who err
00:34:52.120 in good faith do not belong to the body of the church that is the legal commonwealth of the
00:35:00.140 church so if he was right that the fathers of the church are unanimous that the six-day creation
00:35:07.400 and the less than 10,000 years of history is a matter of faith.
00:35:12.260 Anyone who would deny this is at least a material heretic
00:35:16.400 and not a Catholic and does not belong to the visible Church.
00:35:20.180 This is why, if we read a manual of Catholic theology from 1909,
00:35:26.280 the Fathers state,
00:35:28.520 the domain of doctrine covered by the authority
00:35:31.300 and infallibility of the Fathers is co-extensive with that of the Church,
00:35:36.080 whose mouthpiece they are.
00:35:38.920 Hence, it does not embrace truths
00:35:42.500 of a purely natural and philosophical character
00:35:46.200 or truths revealed only per accidents,
00:35:50.720 to use the expression of St. Thomas,
00:35:54.240 because these are not part of the public teaching of the Church.
00:35:59.020 the Reverend Christian Petsch
00:36:02.660 from his Dogmatic Manual of 1909.
00:36:06.620 Now for the consensus of the Holy Fathers
00:36:10.300 to have indubitable authority,
00:36:14.960 their testimonies must pertain to matters of faith and morals.
00:36:19.260 Therefore, in purely natural matters,
00:36:22.200 even if these are accidentally revealed in Scripture,
00:36:25.340 their authority is no greater than that of any other man well-versed in such questions,
00:36:32.240 and it is only as valuable as the reasons they offer.
00:36:36.720 The reason is evident.
00:36:39.000 Since the infallible authority of the Church does not extend to purely philosophical matters
00:36:44.760 or to things accidentally revealed,
00:36:48.160 the Holy Fathers cannot present in these matters any infallible teaching of the Church.
00:36:54.860 Or, as Dominic Palmieri writes in On the Roman Pontiff from 1891,
00:37:02.040 the common interpretation of the fathers must be followed when the matter concerns a dogma,
00:37:07.580 because they function as witnesses.
00:37:09.860 But, he writes, wherefore, it is not permissible to urge the authority of the fathers
00:37:15.520 in the same manner as is done in the former cases.
00:37:18.840 An example is found in the interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis,
00:37:23.980 regarding the sequence of time in which the world was made.
00:37:29.200 That is not a matter of faith.
00:37:31.280 I'm very happy to have the opportunity to clear up a terrible misunderstanding
00:37:36.860 on part of Brother Ed about the position of the Kolbe Setter.
00:37:42.660 We never have said that Pope Pius XII or anybody who embraced the Long Ages was a heretic.
00:37:50.700 And it is extremely important to understand what we actually hold, because what we actually hold is that the overwhelming weight of evidence from Scripture, tradition, and authoritative magisterial teaching supports the literal historical truth of everything in the sacred history of Genesis, which teaches us that God created everything in six 24-hour days or less, much less than 10,000 years ago.
00:38:19.760 That's all that we hold. And right in the source that Brother Ed quoted, Providentismus Deus, we're following the rule laid down by Pope Leo XIII, continued by Pope St. Pius X, that the commentator in Scripture must observe the rule not to depart from the literal and obvious sense, except only where reason makes it untenable or necessity requires.
00:38:43.440 And we're going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that nobody has come close to proving that reason dictates or necessity requires that we abandon the literal historical interpretation of Genesis 1.
00:38:57.280 Now, the other thing that we need to understand is that St. Thomas is categorical in the Summa.
00:39:05.740 That anybody who denies any factual statement in the Bible is undermining the entire Catholic faith, which is based on the authority of Holy Writ.
00:39:16.400 You can look that up and confirm that very easily.
00:39:18.840 But the major point that our distinguished opponents are missing is the distinction between the work of creation, which was supernatural, and the natural order, what the doctors call the order of providence, what we're living in now.
00:39:37.260 And this is the very error that St. Peter, our first poor, warned us about almost 2,000 years ago, because in 2 Peter chapter 3, he warns us that far in the future, scoffers will come into the church saying things have always been the same from the beginning of creation, from the moment of the Big Bang, if you will.
00:40:00.340 But he goes on to say they're going to have to ignore the fact that it was actually the Word of God that supernaturally created the heavens and the earth and all they contain.
00:40:11.680 And he says they're also going to deny the fact that there was a divine judgment on the whole earth with Noah's flood, which created the fossil record and happened and buried all the different kinds of creatures catastrophically.
00:40:26.000 Now, Descartes and the Enlightenment philosophers are the ones who came on the scene and argued
00:40:32.300 that it would be more reasonable to explain the origins of things in nature, like stars,
00:40:38.440 animals, plants, in terms of the same material processes that are going on now.
00:40:43.300 Well, his works were put on the index of forbidden books, because any theologian worth his salt
00:40:49.520 knew that that was nonsense.
00:40:51.480 It would be like reading the account of the miracle at Cana and saying, well, it seems as if St. John is saying that our Lord just willed to change the containers of water into wine instantly.
00:41:03.680 But I think it would be more reasonable to give a natural explanation.
00:41:08.720 Maybe there were some microbes in the water and they interacted in such a way as to make the water smell, taste and look just like wine.
00:41:16.600 Is that reasonable? It's absurd.
00:41:18.360 But every theologian worth his salt knew that it was just as absurd to hold that, well, we can see that every father of the church understood Genesis 1 to teach that God created everything by fiat supernaturally.
00:41:34.880 But I think it would be more reasonable to explain how everything came to be in terms of the same material processes that are going on now over long periods of time.
00:41:45.580 And there you have the direct quote from St. Thomas that it is unlawful to hold that any false assertion is contained in any canonical scripture because faith would be deprived of its certitude, which is based on the authority of Holy Writ.
00:42:00.560 And St. Thomas is adamant that we are not falling into the error that St. Augustine talked about that Dr. Matson mentioned.
00:42:08.880 he's talking about people who pontificate about natural science we're not doing that
00:42:16.400 we are defending what the god what god revealed about the supernatural creation of the world
00:42:22.200 in the name of jesus in the name of the father the son of the holy ghost and what we see in
00:42:28.640 psalm 19 is that god has revealed himself faithfully through two utterly trustworthy
00:42:34.260 books, the book of scripture, and the book of nature. And what we note is that both books
00:42:40.960 teach the immutability of the laws of physics. We've got passages like Jeremiah 33, where God
00:42:49.020 says he's immutable, contrasting himself with the Jews who are not, and says for proof, what do the
00:42:54.940 laws that govern the heavens and the earth? As they don't change, I don't change. Then you've
00:43:00.080 out in Romans chapter 8, speaking about the pervasive law of entropy or decay and how that
00:43:06.460 remains in effect until all the humans that God intends to redeem are redeemed. And in fact,
00:43:13.260 what I've written in my book is that these laws of physics play crucial roles in the redemption
00:43:19.240 of billions of human beings from their sin and evil, which is why they remain intact during the
00:43:25.320 entire human era and during the entire existence of the universe. The book of nature indisputably
00:43:32.900 affirms this. Every time we astronomers take a spectrum of a star or a galaxy, we're measuring
00:43:40.880 the laws of physics when the light left that galaxy or star. In response to Hugh Owen, we
00:43:47.880 astronomers are direct witnesses of past events. We don't see the present, but we do see the past
00:43:54.780 And God has placed us at just the right time in the history of the universe, just the right location in the universe, that we can read the entire history book of the universe from the cosmic creation event to the present moment.
00:44:09.020 One reason we get such powerful evidences for the God of the Bible is that we astronomers can directly witness, without assumptions, the cosmic creation event.
00:44:19.720 And this is actually acknowledged by young Earth creationists as being a problem for their model.
00:44:28.460 For example, you have the RATE study put up by a number of young Earth creationist organizations,
00:44:34.760 which makes a concession repeatedly that if the laws of physics are indeed immutable,
00:44:40.800 then the universe and the Earth must be billions of years old.
00:44:45.780 And so you got the example for argon in the atmosphere of the moon, argon in the atmosphere of Mercury.
00:44:52.520 And based on the gravitational pull, you can calculate how long it would take for potassium to decay into the argon to make up that amount of the argon.
00:45:06.460 It has been written in numerous books, The Problem of the Light Travel Time.
00:45:10.720 The fact that we actually see light coming from galaxies that are billions of light years away.
00:45:17.740 As we look at the spectrum, the reddening of the continuum, and the broadening of the spectral lines,
00:45:24.260 we can determine that the light actually left that particular star or galaxy.
00:45:29.640 We can measure the velocity of light.
00:45:32.320 And in spite of many claims by young earth creationists, we can prove that the velocity of light is rigidly constant.
00:45:39.460 If it wasn't, life would be impossible.
00:45:42.640 The existence of physical life critically depends on the velocity of light having not changed any time in cosmic history.
00:45:51.480 And today we have telescopes powerful enough that we can directly witness using trigonometric distance measurements,
00:46:00.280 namely assumption-free distance measurements, out to galaxies 470 million light-years away,
00:46:07.760 affirming that indeed our redshift distant measurements are accurately measuring the distances to those stars and galaxies
00:46:16.760 and therefore that it really did take millions or billions of years for the light to reach our telescopes.
00:46:25.000 The other thing we notice in astronomy is that we have a wide range of measurements for the ages of stars and galaxies.
00:46:34.720 We see stars that we know form literally just years ago.
00:46:40.120 We actually see stars that form thousands of years ago, stars that form millions of years ago, stars that form billions of years ago.
00:46:49.380 And so the challenge is, how is it that all these stars have a wide range of age measurements that go from zero to about 13.6 billion years?
00:47:01.140 and you could say well God artificially imposed those ages on those stars but to claim that
00:47:08.620 would make God a deceiver and a liar and eight times in the Bible it tells us it's impossible
00:47:15.040 for God to lie or deceive and we actually see millions of burnt out stars 20% of the stars
00:47:23.740 we see in the universe are stars that have completed their nuclear burning and we can
00:47:29.220 actually see them cooling down. A good analogy is what happens with an open fire where the fuel is
00:47:36.840 all consumed in the logs that are burning and what you do is you watch the slow cooling down of those
00:47:43.440 logs and it goes from a bright yellow color to an orange to a red and finally to black. Well we see
00:47:51.180 this happening with burnt out stars. We call them white dwarf stars but we can actually measure
00:47:57.460 are their luminosity and their spectral response, and that tells us how long they've been cooling.
00:48:04.420 And we actually see white dwarf stars with a range of cooling times that runs from zero
00:48:10.180 to about eight billion years. And again, why do we see this continuous range of cooling times
00:48:17.780 if indeed the universe is only 10,000 years old or less? Now I remember having a lunch with Henry
00:48:25.700 Morris, who founded the Institute of Recreation Research. And over that once, he realized he had
00:48:33.800 a huge problem with the astronomical evidence, especially since the evidence was directly coming
00:48:39.840 from the past. And he said, Hugh, how about if I say the universe is billions of years old,
00:48:45.640 but the earth is only thousands of years old? And I said to Henry, well, I think the best book you
00:48:51.160 ever wrote is a book where you explain why it's impossible to separate the scientific evidence
00:48:57.740 for the age of the universe from the scientific evidence for the age of the earth. You know one
00:49:03.280 example is we see the decay products of radioisotope decay in the specter of stars and
00:49:10.180 galaxies. We also see it here on earth. So for example we see the radioisotope daughter products
00:49:17.640 telling us that earth had plutonium well today there's no plutonium on the face of the earth
00:49:24.380 but the daughter products tells us that there was plutonium in the past on the earth and the amount
00:49:30.820 of these daughter products tells us how long indeed the earth has been upon the scene we also
00:49:37.600 see in a province of africa the remnants of a natural nuclear reactor and what's happening in
00:49:45.580 the past, there was more uranium-235 on the face of the Earth than there is today. Today, so much
00:49:52.280 of it has decayed away that natural nuclear reactors were no longer possible. But we've
00:49:57.940 been disputable evidence that in Okla, Gabon, Africa, indeed there was a nuclear reactor
00:50:04.120 running as recently as 2 billion years ago. Then we have the problem of the quantity of
00:50:12.820 biodeposits in the crust of the earth. And we're not just talking about oil, coal, and natural gas.
00:50:20.120 There's way more abundance of plathrates than there is of natural gas that we can mine. Then
00:50:26.180 there's the limestone, the marble, and the gypsum. It adds up to nearly 100 quadrillion tons of
00:50:33.280 biodeposits. And we have the isotope ratio signatures that tell us that this 100 quadrillion
00:50:41.760 tons indeed comes from biological sources, living plants and animals and microbes that have decayed
00:50:49.980 and produce these biodeposits. The sheer quantity of these biodeposits defies the energy flow from
00:50:57.740 the sun to the earth. I mean, if you're converting the energy flow of the sun to the earth
00:51:04.340 with 100% efficiency, you'd only be getting less than a tenth of a percent of the biodeposits
00:51:11.060 we see in the face of the earth.
00:51:13.460 But if the sun indeed is four and a half billion years old
00:51:16.860 and life has been on the earth for 3.8 billion years,
00:51:20.060 we can indeed explain that quantity of biodeposits.
00:51:25.160 And without that huge quantity of biodeposits,
00:51:28.760 human civilization simply would have been impossible.
00:51:32.580 There's no way we could have watched the civilization
00:51:35.400 and the technology we have today
00:51:37.520 unless God had planted life on planet Earth.
00:51:41.300 As it says in Psalm 104,
00:51:43.960 God has packed our planet with as much life as possible,
00:51:47.460 as abundant as possible, and as long as possible,
00:51:50.840 so we'd have this rich treasure chest of biodeposits
00:51:54.940 that we could use to launch civilization
00:51:57.340 and take the good news of salvation
00:51:59.800 to all the people groups of the world,
00:52:02.560 not in millions of years,
00:52:04.300 but we could actually do it in thousands of years.
00:52:07.000 we can even do it in centuries. So when Jesus said to take the gospel to all the people, groups of
00:52:13.220 the world, he in advance had created things in such a way that we could do that quickly, rather
00:52:19.220 than taking a long period of time to do that. There is the issue of what we see in Acts 15,
00:52:27.560 where it tells us we're not to put a stumbling block in front of unbelievers, an unnecessary
00:52:33.420 stumbling block in front of unbelievers. In Acts 15, you had Jewish believers saying you can't
00:52:41.120 become a follower of Jesus Christ unless you become circumcised. And basically their goal
00:52:46.940 is to stop Gentiles from joining the emerging Christian church. What I've noticed throughout
00:52:52.360 church history, there's always been unnecessary stumbling blocks put in front of undesirable
00:52:59.120 unbelievers. And today what I've observed, the undesirable believer are research scientists.
00:53:06.500 They tend to challenge everything they hear in church. This makes people uncomfortable. So how
00:53:11.900 do we keep these irascible research scientists from disturbing things in the church? Tell them
00:53:18.320 they have to believe that the universe is only 10,000 years old or less, and they recognize,
00:53:24.660 hey, there's no way I can accept that.
00:53:28.340 And notice that this is not in any of the creeds of the church.
00:53:32.560 The age of the earth and the age of the universe is missing from all the creeds,
00:53:37.300 from all branches of Christianity.
00:53:39.880 The creeds are basically focusing on the essentials of the church.
00:53:44.380 And therefore, I would argue there's no need to put this unnecessary stumbling block
00:53:49.920 in front of unbelievers.
00:53:51.080 And I would also add that, you know, the age of the earth is not a scientific debate.
00:53:58.920 If it was a scientific debate, you would find published research papers in the peer-reviewed literature actually saying, here's some evidence that I've uncovered that the earth or the universe may be young.
00:54:11.920 When you go to the exhaustive website of research papers in physical science at adsww.arbor.edu, you can do a search of literally hundreds of thousands of research papers.
00:54:27.760 you won't find a single one giving any evidence for a young earth.
00:54:33.860 And this explains why in the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the age of the earth,
00:54:41.120 where young earth creationists tried to argue that they had the right to teach their doctrines in public education.
00:54:48.620 Basically, the Supreme Court ruler said,
00:54:51.020 you already have the right to teach anything you want on origins or creation,
00:54:57.420 providing it has at least some documented scientific credibility or integrity.
00:55:03.000 And they challenged the young earth creationists to provide some.
00:55:06.700 So if you can provide some, you have the right.
00:55:09.760 But they're unable to provide any.
00:55:12.400 And then numerous Christians came up and said that the scientific case
00:55:17.200 for a young universe was no stronger than the scientific case for flat earth or for geocentrism,
00:55:24.800 which forced the U.S. Supreme Court judges to say we have to rule it on its religious merits
00:55:30.740 since it doesn't have any scientific merit. And they basically concluded if we rule in favor
00:55:37.180 of the young earth creationists, we're favoring several one young earth element against several
00:55:44.540 other elements, and that would violate the ruling of the separation of church and state,
00:55:50.120 forbidding the U.S. government from favoring one Christian denomination over another Christian
00:55:56.740 denomination. And last of all, I would encourage you to watch a debate between me and the Young
00:56:04.940 Earth creationist astronomer Danny Faulkner. It was on national television on the John Ackerberg
00:56:11.120 show. What was interesting about that debate, 13 Christian astrophysicists watched the debate
00:56:19.080 and gave an evaluation statement. And we asked them to make it somewhat brief, no more than one
00:56:26.480 page. After all, the Jerusalem Council reduced their statement on circumcision down to a single
00:56:35.940 paragraph, you can go to the Reasons.org website and you can see the statement of these 13
00:56:42.280 astronomers concerning the scientific case for the age of the universe. Thank you.
00:56:52.460 And where the truth is, there is God. The world is basically going the way of the church and
00:57:00.100 vice versa. Everyone who's being named a bishop is being named because he's a nice guy. Does he
00:57:07.340 have the Catholic faith? Well, that's not really important. He's nice. I started studying the
00:57:11.760 early church and I realized, wow, the church was all centered around the Eucharist. God has sent
00:57:18.780 again the Blessed Virgin Mary to ask us through an imploring and loving voice to convert while
00:57:25.920 there is still time. St. Peter the Apostle on the first Pentecost Sunday to tell these pious Jews
00:57:31.560 who came to Jerusalem in pilgrimage that they need to come into the church and be baptized.
00:57:37.480 And the faithful were crying out, blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord,
00:57:42.200 peace in heaven and glory in the highest. So the Pharisees complained, tell him to shut up.
00:57:47.660 And Jesus said in reply, I tell you, if they keep silent, the stones will cry out. In other words,
00:57:53.760 the truth will never be silence. My friends, we're inviting you to Fatima, Portugal, the greatest
00:57:59.020 place of prophecy since Christ himself walked the earth. Beginning November 11th, there will be a
00:58:04.320 once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage that combines some of the best Catholic prophecy speakers with a
00:58:10.420 chance to walk in the footsteps of the shepherd children in the land that Our Lady graced over
00:58:16.620 a hundred years ago. Her messages are being fulfilled in our time, so we hope you will join
00:58:21.680 us in responding to her call at this most important Marion Shrine. Seats are limited,
00:58:29.100 so please book right now. We will now go to Dr. Kevin Mark. Dr. Mark is the husband and father
00:58:40.100 of nine, is a dentist who lives in Bowman, North Dakota. Dr. Mark majored in biochemistry at the
00:58:48.280 University of Winnipeg before entering dental school at the University of Manitoba. Since his
00:58:53.380 university days, he has had a keen interest in the creation evolution debate. The false perception
00:58:59.560 that the Catholic Church favors billions of years in evolution deterred him from entering the church
00:59:04.980 until the Colby Center for the Study of Creation put down that hurdle and helped to allow him to
00:59:11.400 convert in good conscience. Dr. Mark, thank you for joining us. Please, your 15 minutes starts now.
00:59:17.560 In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
00:59:21.200 I want to start with Hilary of Poitier, Doctor of the Church, on the multiplication of the lobes.
00:59:27.780 He says,
00:59:47.560 does that he speaks and it happens he writes there is no deception in these miracles of god
00:59:55.240 no subtle pretense to please or to deceive he whom countless myriads of angels serve never
01:00:02.620 deluded man what was there of ours that he could need through whom all that we have was created
01:00:08.900 he the image of the invisible god created all their host in himself
01:00:13.620 made the worlds established the heavens appointed the stars fixed the earth laid the foundations of
01:00:21.440 the deep because in after time he was born he conquered death broke the gates of hell one for
01:00:30.480 himself a people to be his fellow heirs lifted flesh from corruption up to the glory of eternity
01:00:37.640 So this idea that there has been deception by God if he created in less than 10,000 years is, of course, absurd because he told us straight up in his scripture what he did.
01:00:52.640 and all of the church fathers and everyone who's honest can realize that through the early biblical
01:01:00.380 record we have these chronologies these genealogies that you can add up and throughout
01:01:06.180 christian history we've had various people that have done just that and added up the numbers and
01:01:11.680 it is impossible to get anything over 10 000 years by using scripture itself god of course
01:01:18.260 would be deceptive if he says one thing and does another. That is deception. When it comes to the
01:01:26.780 creation providence framework, this is what is missing from our opponents. Dr. Ross was saying
01:01:35.800 that the laws of physics haven't changed. Well, he's failing to distinguish that there was a time
01:01:42.980 in the beginning, the creation week, where this was a week of miracles. This was God working not
01:01:50.980 according to the providence, upholding things once he rested. This is a completely separate
01:01:58.660 time frame from everything that went on to follow. When you mix those two things up,
01:02:06.100 you're only going to have problems and of course even within the time frame now god can choose to
01:02:16.340 perform miracles and suspend nature whenever he wills though obviously that doesn't happen
01:02:25.440 in every instance it only happens in select instances now there's many problems with this
01:02:31.440 big bang model that our opponents are relying on in the big bang model we have the whole concept
01:02:39.660 of star formation where supposedly gases condense and form stars this is of course
01:02:47.900 not something that has ever been observed the origin of stars represents one of the most
01:02:56.560 fundamental unsolved problems of contemporary astrophysics so says harvard astronomy professor
01:03:03.560 charles lotta and harvard grad and astrophysicist frank shoe former cornell astronomy professor
01:03:10.200 martin harwitt writes in the journal science the silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is
01:03:16.440 that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form and if you think that
01:03:22.220 can't happen, then how is it possible that galaxies could be formed where there's millions
01:03:27.280 and billions or trillions of stars? We should be able to observe the distant past through
01:03:34.740 distant starlight, like Hugh Ross is saying. But of course, there is no unambiguous example of
01:03:41.740 galaxy formation. There's a problem. We don't see young galaxies. We see old ones. They have
01:03:47.200 pretty much the same range of stars as old galaxies. This is a quote from someone who's
01:03:50.820 not even a creationist eric lerner in the journal new scientist and of course when he says old ones
01:03:56.760 he simply means mature ones uh in another article 13 billion year old supposedly light was measured
01:04:06.000 and they found the formation of the first galaxies may have gotten underway earlier than previously
01:04:11.380 thought the real puzzle is that these galaxies seem to already be quite old when the universe
01:04:16.260 was already only about five percent of its current age why would that be if the big bang theory was
01:04:24.580 true they have this idea that planets can just form themselves they have this planetesimal
01:04:30.660 hypothesis unfortunately when you look in the literature you can read for instance in nature
01:04:36.100 dust grains coalesced into planetesimals objects of one to thousand kilometers in diameter through
01:04:41.980 an unknown process. The formation of planetesimals, the kilometer-sized planetary precursors, is still
01:04:49.180 a puzzling process. The process by which micrometer-sized protoplanetary dust particles
01:04:54.640 evolve to kilometer-sized planetesimals is still enigmatic, so says Juergen Blum and
01:05:03.140 Jardard Wurm from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. So just how did the planets in
01:05:09.660 solar system develop well we read in a astrophysical textbook once these planetesimals
01:05:16.060 have been formed further growth of planets may have may occur through their gravitational
01:05:20.840 accretion into larger bodies just how that takes place is not understood we have seen that we know
01:05:25.760 very little about the development of the solar system i'm quoting from martin harwick people
01:05:31.480 within the scientific community are questioning this big bang model that all of the cosmology
01:05:38.160 from our opponents rests upon we have them questioning it because of it relying on these
01:05:45.660 hypothetical entities they've invented this concept of inflation to supposedly solve their
01:05:52.020 horizon problem where you you can just read through the wikipedia entry on inflation and
01:05:58.920 see how ridiculous this is acting as though they are certain this thing happened when there's no
01:06:05.520 evidence of it other than they need it for their mathematical equations, claiming that this great
01:06:11.540 expansion happened where its volume increased by a factor of at least 10 to the 78, whatever they
01:06:19.100 say existed before the Big Bang. And it went from about the equivalent of one nanometer to
01:06:26.740 62 trillion miles long in about 10 to the negative 35 of a second. The next thing that is crazy
01:06:35.460 about uh what they're saying about the big bang is this the fact that they're ignoring that dark
01:06:41.040 matter which they need to um rescue the um effect of spiral galaxies and dark energy which they need
01:06:49.660 to rescue what they observe from supernovas supposedly makes up 95 percent of the known
01:06:55.480 universe's substance while only five percent of it is ordinary matter again these are just
01:07:00.980 hypothetical entities and all of the cosmology of our opponents rests upon this being true
01:07:08.460 when we're talking about biodeposits our model has a much more reasonable explanation for
01:07:14.540 biodeposits the giant amount of plant life that was there before the flood was consumed in the
01:07:26.120 flight it was destroyed and over time it became oil and natural gas and whatnot and so this is a
01:07:33.920 more coherent explanation than why do you even have all of these deposits in the old age theory
01:07:41.280 you have these ad hoc explanations of course but it's easier to have an explanation that
01:07:47.380 um kind of explains more our opponents are claiming that their theory the big bang works
01:07:55.840 with um believing in god but the um modernist liberal priest who invented the big bang george
01:08:05.380 lemaitre said that for the believer it removes any attempted familiarity with god it is consonant
01:08:13.040 with isaiah speaking of the hidden god hidden even in the beginning of the universe so he says
01:08:20.980 he mentioned radiometric dating rocks are not clocks all that can be measured from rocks are
01:08:26.960 amounts and ratios of chemicals and so if you're using chemicals to make definitive assertions
01:08:33.820 about ages you're relying on assumptions and this is commonly not told to people how many assumptions
01:08:40.400 have gone into this most people aren't aware that when they date the earth to
01:08:45.260 uh over 4.5 billion years old they're not even dating the earth they're dating meteorites which
01:08:51.540 this nebular hypothesis theory claims that it happened at the exact same time as the formation
01:08:57.960 of the earth i'll get into that later nebular hypothesis theory and its origins but um this is
01:09:04.620 a very dubious assertion that we certainly have no proof of and radiometric dating finally can be
01:09:11.400 valid but you need to test it against objects of known age uh such as um things that you can do
01:09:19.480 with carbon 14 and that's where we can see coal diamonds dinosaur bones and whatnot showing
01:09:27.600 measurable amounts of c14 clearly showing that they're not even close to as old as we're told
01:09:34.060 they are. Coal from strata allegedly ranging in age from 37 million to 318 million years
01:09:41.640 dates at 44,000 to 57,000 years with carbon dating. Diamonds allegedly one to three billion
01:09:48.700 years old date to 55,700 years with carbon dating. And carbon-14 has been found in dinosaur bones
01:09:56.140 and they all come back as 20-some thousand to 30-some thousand years old. Of course,
01:10:03.220 these findings are completely ignored and just dismissed by the scientific community because
01:10:07.840 they don't want to deal with it this is a letter that i don't have time to go through here but
01:10:12.000 showing that the um labs doing these testing they know that these samples were not contaminated
01:10:19.700 but only once they find that they were dinosaur bones that they're testing uh do they refuse to
01:10:25.800 do tests on them any longer so where did billions of years where did this idea come from it came
01:10:32.680 originally from the hindus next the um pagan greeks latched on to billions of years and then
01:10:40.620 for the christian era we completely rejected it we believed in the bible until the scoffers came
01:10:46.480 along which were mostly deists and unitarians and these were the ones that inflated the ages
01:10:52.960 if you look zoom in on the ones from the last 130 years you can see these uh many millions of years
01:10:59.920 billions of years um being inflated over time by a who's who of agnostics secular jews atheists
01:11:10.240 uh various people who have abandoned christianity you can throw in um yeah a couple of protest
01:11:16.500 liberal protestants in there but um is this really the cohort that we want to join in believing in
01:11:25.480 these long ages and rejecting what our fathers in the faith clearly believed the logical conclusion
01:11:32.360 why do you need god at all when you explain everything without god when napoleon bonaparte
01:11:38.040 asked why his multi-volume treatise on the solar system made no mention of god as the creator
01:11:43.400 laplace famously replied sire i have no need of that hypothesis saint hilary of poite doctor of
01:11:50.640 the church for there are many of those wise men of the world whose wisdom is folly with god
01:11:55.020 They pin their faith to certain conclusions which they have reached by the process of logic.
01:12:00.540 This is that wisdom of the world which was foreseen by God even in the prophet's days
01:12:04.400 and condemned through him in the words,
01:12:06.720 I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and reject the understanding of the prudent.
01:12:10.920 And the apostle says, where is the wise, where is the scribe, where is the inkler of this world?
01:12:15.040 Yeah, what I know this is that both of our opponents brought up the biblical genealogies.
01:12:20.300 But what's interesting, if you look at the biblical genealogies
01:12:23.940 and start from Adam and go forward in time, you get a date for Noah's flood that's 110 years
01:12:31.460 different than if you start from Moses and go back. So the irony is even on Young Earth
01:12:37.320 Creation's websites, they can't make the genealogies work if they assume that there's
01:12:43.120 no gaps or that there are no gaps in the genealogies. So I would argue the genealogies
01:12:48.820 are not biblical clocks for when events took place.
01:12:53.180 And I would agree that God is not subject to the laws of physics,
01:12:57.400 but his creation is.
01:12:59.120 The universe and everything in it indeed is subject to the laws of physics.
01:13:03.480 God transcends the universe, so of course he's not subject to the laws of physics.
01:13:08.480 He can come into our creation and violate the laws of physics,
01:13:12.380 but we human beings, the stars and galaxies, the earth cannot.
01:13:16.780 They're subject to those immutable laws of physics.
01:13:20.800 The claim about star formation not being observed is not true.
01:13:25.580 What is true is that no astronomer has looked at a single star
01:13:29.660 and see it go from the time of being a dark collapsing cloud
01:13:34.620 to becoming a fully luminous star.
01:13:38.000 And the reason why is that takes a very long period of time
01:13:41.100 for that process to take place.
01:13:43.720 On the other hand, they've observed tens of millions of stars in different stages of star formation.
01:13:51.020 And the observations of all those tens of millions of stars leaves no doubt that star formation is taking place today
01:13:58.640 and has occurred throughout the entire history of the universe.
01:14:02.460 And I think it's worth pointing out the physics of star formation is much simpler than the physics of raindrop formation and snowflake formation.
01:14:11.820 We believe that snowflakes and rains form through the natural processes God set up.
01:14:19.280 Well, star formation is actually physically quite a bit simpler.
01:14:23.780 And likewise, we do see galaxies at all different stages of formation.
01:14:30.480 Many young Earth creations have claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope
01:14:34.980 has proven that galaxies in the early universe look just as old as galaxies in the present
01:14:41.600 universe. That is simply incorrect. When we look in what's called the cosmic dawn,
01:14:48.160 the first 800 million years of the history of the universe, we note that we see the cores of
01:14:54.080 emerging galaxies, but not fully formed spiral galaxies. The earliest one we see is when the
01:15:01.360 universe is about 800 million years old. And what we do note, however, is that these emerging
01:15:08.920 cores of galaxies are forming differently than galaxies we see today, which has ruled out a
01:15:16.140 number of Big Bang creation models, but has proven the validity of many other Big Bang creation
01:15:21.900 models. Basically, what James Webb is telling us is that the firstborn stars, many of them are
01:15:28.360 hundreds, even thousands of times the mass of our star of the sun. And this proves why we see
01:15:34.540 early galaxies with supermassive black holes that weigh almost a billion times the mass of our star
01:15:41.360 of the sun. In all the research papers, none of them are denying Big Bang cosmology. Rather,
01:15:48.280 what they're doing is they're saying, of the 20 Big Bang creation models we have, these ones are
01:15:53.820 not fitting the observations, whereas the rest of them are fitting the observations. Now with
01:16:00.020 respect to planet formation, the papers cited are a little bit out of date because we now actually
01:16:06.420 have seen earth clouds of planetismals and dust and, you know, comets and asteroids orbiting other
01:16:15.300 stars. And we see them in different stages of formation. So this has really affirmed the planet
01:16:21.560 of formation models that have been theoretically around for several decades. With respect to
01:16:27.660 inflation, it's a mistake to say it's not been observationally affirmed. When we look at the
01:16:34.740 polarization of maps of the cosmic background radiation, we can measure something called the
01:16:41.320 scalar spectral index. If that's less than 0.95, that means inflation did not occur. Likewise,
01:16:49.360 if it's more than 1.0, inflation did not occur. But if it's between 0.95 and 1.0, inflation
01:16:57.600 definitely has occurred. And the latest measurements show that it's about 0.9638,
01:17:04.700 which actually tells us not only that inflation must have occurred, it tells us what kind of
01:17:10.320 inflation must have occurred. When I was thinking of how to share these with you, I was considering
01:17:17.300 sharing Mount St. Helens how it erupted and 10 years later samples were sent in and it turns out
01:17:26.720 the samples came back 350,000 to 2.8 million years old even though they were only about a decade old
01:17:33.900 you can look at various other volcanic eruptions of known ages and when samples have been sent in
01:17:43.480 they come back hundreds of thousands or millions of years old even though they're only decades
01:17:49.780 hundreds or a thousand years old approximately again we mentioned the c14 that's been found in
01:17:57.600 cold diamonds and dinosaur bones that puts an upper limit on their age at a hundred thousand
01:18:03.800 years they can't possibly be older than that because of the amounts of carbon 14 that have
01:18:09.080 been found in them mitochondrial dna differences have been studied in various organisms like fruit
01:18:16.440 flies roundworms water fleas and even humans and if their history had been uh exceptionally long
01:18:25.160 we would have expected way more mitochondrial dna differences instead the dna differences
01:18:30.460 in the mitochondria um in fact fit very well with a less than 10 000 year old birth when you look at
01:18:39.540 the miracles of jesus he spoke and they were made he commanded and they were created in all of the
01:18:44.720 miracles that where he speaks the miracle happens right away in fact the other miracles show the
01:18:52.500 same thing but this parallels the creation god said and it was made he's showing that he is the
01:19:00.920 creator this is so obvious that this is what he was doing for the jews because the jews when they
01:19:08.360 saw him doing this they knew that god created all of those miracles of creation in the beginning
01:19:14.080 in six days and they knew that only god could do this of course only the believing jews that have
01:19:21.020 been given that gift of faith could believe such a thing the other scoffers refused to believe it
01:19:25.760 the speed at which these miracles happened showed his power saint chrysostom doctor of the church
01:19:33.660 says nature obeyed the word of the purifier with proper speed whence it follows and straight his
01:19:38.380 leprosy was cleansed but even this word straight away is too slow to express the speed at which
01:19:44.980 the deed was done of course we could give you plenty of quotes from church fathers where they
01:19:51.940 clearly express the speed at which creation event the creation event happened but god created
01:19:59.200 everything in the beginning perfectly who was free from disease deformity and it this only
01:20:06.460 happened after original sin this is the problem with progressive creationism it makes god
01:20:11.820 responsible for deformity, disease, all of this before original sin, making God the author of
01:20:19.640 these things. The fossil record contains cancerous tumors and dinosaur bones, showing that this
01:20:25.500 happened after original sin, not before. And this is a major problem for theology, making God the
01:20:34.160 author of all of this disease and deformity. Now the appearance of age is a part of most
01:20:42.160 miracles. Adam was created a man. He wasn't created a child. Surely this doesn't make
01:20:46.520 God a deceiver. God told us he made a man supernaturally. So too when he made the earth,
01:20:52.140 the firmament, the sun, moon, and stars, and the rest of creation. Since he told us he did
01:20:55.980 that, surely he's not a deceiver and that they did not have a natural history. A deceptive
01:21:01.040 God would have been one who told us one thing and did another. It's foolish to look at chemical
01:21:05.740 signatures in rocks and to attempt to claim that this proves a history that never existed. How do
01:21:10.800 we know when any historical event occurred? We know this because of written or inscribed records
01:21:18.220 authenticated by an authority of repute. Look at anything that we know about history. This is how
01:21:25.480 we know it why would we not believe a document given to us where we are taught by holy mother
01:21:31.980 church that god is the primary author now it's important to know that cosmology is into science
01:21:39.680 so says professor of astronomy at princeton university james gunn cosmology may look like
01:21:44.940 a science but it isn't a science a basic tentative science is that you can do repeatable experiments
01:21:49.880 and you can't do that in cosmology when it comes to the speed of light no one has ever measured
01:21:56.220 the one-way speed of light and it's perfectly valid to assume that the one-way speed of light
01:22:02.120 is instantaneous and that means we actually are seeing things in real time when we look out into
01:22:06.940 space so this is a fantasy this idea that we're looking backwards in time okay what you see in
01:22:13.820 Romans 5.12, it's death through sin came upon all people. Here Paul makes two distinct qualifications.
01:22:23.320 It's the death you get through sin, the only species of life on planet earth that can sin
01:22:28.820 are human beings, and he says death to all people. He does not say death to all life.
01:22:35.180 He repeats that qualification throughout Romans 5, and again at 1 Corinthians 15.
01:22:41.440 So Adam's sin brought death to humanity.
01:22:44.340 It did not bring death to the microbes, the plants, and the animals.
01:22:49.040 The Bible is actually silent on that point.
01:22:51.800 But the record of nature, of course, is not.
01:22:54.460 Yeah, just to add, unless Dr. Ross wanted to add something more,
01:22:57.360 I wanted to say, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, he writes,
01:23:01.280 in the opinion of some, those animals, which now are fierce and kill others,
01:23:06.040 would, in that state of innocence, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in
01:23:13.040 regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable, for the nature of animals was not
01:23:19.940 changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others would
01:23:27.460 then have lived on herbs as the lion and the falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1.30
01:23:34.120 say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds but to some
01:23:38.260 thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals. It's very interesting that
01:23:46.960 in that passage St. Thomas can only find the gloss on bead to support his position
01:23:56.160 Because if you study what the fathers taught on animal death before the fall, you will not find one single case where they unequivocally argue that there was animal death before the fall.
01:24:13.120 The overwhelming majority of the fathers who left commentary on that point say there was no animal death before the fall.
01:24:22.600 So, for example, St. Ephraim the Syrian teaches that when God clothed St. Adam and St. Eve in animal skins, he was communicating to them that they had not only brought death to the human race, but they had brought death to the animals, because you can't get animal skins from animals without sacrificing them.
01:24:48.120 and it's important to notice that St. Thomas is not using Scripture to make his case.
01:24:55.840 He's making a philosophical argument.
01:24:58.700 He's saying that sin only affects the nature of the person committing the sin,
01:25:05.440 which is basically what Dr. Ross is arguing.
01:25:07.880 But that is not scriptural, and that is not Catholic tradition,
01:25:11.860 because Romans 8 clearly teaches that the sin of Adam subjected the entire universe to a bondage to
01:25:22.180 decay. So we're not only talking about death, we can make an overwhelming case that there was no
01:25:30.940 animal death before the fall. Holy Mother Church has never come down and defined that one way or
01:25:38.860 the other. But the overwhelming majority of the fathers told that there was no animal death
01:25:44.980 before the fall, and that animal death was a direct consequence of the original sin.
01:25:51.620 But what our opponents are missing is what Dr. Kevin brought up in his presentation,
01:25:58.380 which is that the bondage to decay entails also things like deformities, cancerous tumors,
01:26:07.380 harmful mutations and in progressive creationism these things are attributed to god before the
01:26:16.960 original sin and every father of the church would have considered that a blasphemy and saint thomas
01:26:23.940 himself is emphatic that all god's works are perfect and there was no defect or deformity
01:26:33.020 in the first created world so that is a very very serious problem for both progressive creationism
01:26:40.680 and theistic evolutions i just wanted to basically say that the scripture itself makes it very clear
01:26:47.500 the thorns and the thistles only came into being after god's curse i mean and if you look into
01:26:54.200 romans 8 what we're all referring to it clearly says the expectation of the creature waits for
01:27:00.340 the revelation of the sons of god the creature was made subject to vanity not willingly but by
01:27:05.700 reason of him that made it subject in hope because the creature itself also itself shall be delivered
01:27:11.600 from the certitude of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of god for we know
01:27:16.280 that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain even until now does anyone think that the
01:27:23.740 creatures that groan and travail in pain that that pain came because of god's original creation no
01:27:29.700 It came because of original sin.
01:27:32.700 St. Augustine has that for an authority.
01:27:39.520 For Adam, before he sinned, can be said to have had a body that was in one way mortal, but in another way immortal.
01:27:48.500 This immortality was provided him by the tree of life and not by the constitution of his own nature.
01:27:59.700 When he sinned, he was separated from that tree so that he was able to die, who, if he had not sinned, had been able not to die.
01:28:10.160 He was mortal, therefore, by the condition of his body, but immortal by the kindness of the creator.
01:28:17.480 So St. Augustine maintains that not only were animals capable of sin before Adam's sin, but Adam himself was capable of decay before in death before he said.
01:28:31.060 But that doesn't mean that Adam had any defect. And the fossil record, which you attribute to the hundreds of millions of years between the Big Bang, the formation of the Earth, and the emergence of man, the creation of man, is full of things that St. Augustine would never have accepted as being part of the original creation.
01:28:56.820 saint ambrose said moses did not look forward to a late and leisurely creation of the world
01:29:04.220 out of a concourse of atoms and fittingly moses added he created lest it be thought that there
01:29:11.200 was a delay in creation furthermore men would see also how incomparable the creator was
01:29:17.520 who completed such a great work in the briefest moment of his creative act so much so that the
01:29:24.920 effect of his will anticipated the perception of time now if you find yourself in any movement
01:29:32.840 for instance a philosophy or system of thought and you find out the fathers of your movement
01:29:37.600 were wicked it's a good idea to get out of that movement let's look at a famous astronomer and
01:29:42.860 pivotal figure from the late 1800s who helped cement the idea that scientific and mathematical
01:29:48.380 reasoning can and must determine the age of the earth and see where this reasoning leads remember
01:29:53.920 those lists that i briefly showed he's from that list of men who invented these ages the canadian
01:29:59.920 american astronomer simon newcomb was the most authoritative student of the solar system in the
01:30:04.740 last years of the 19th century he calculated the time it would take for the sun to condense down
01:30:10.080 to its current diameter and brightness from the nebula of gas and dust from which it was supposedly
01:30:15.100 be born 18 million years he wrote that the nebular hypothesis was the doctrine of cosmic evolution
01:30:24.120 note that the nebular hypothesis is what day-agers or progressive creationists ascribe to therefore
01:30:31.060 they are evolutionists newcomb was not only an astronomer but while raised christian he became
01:30:37.120 a militant anti-christian due to what he saw as the progress of science the church says newcomb
01:30:42.320 is moving toward the mind of a skeptic like a drifting ship the passengers of which see no
01:30:47.220 change in the ocean are unconscious of their change of position because of modern science
01:30:52.500 he says men have ceased to demand doctrines not necessarily because they have ceased to believe
01:30:57.560 in them but because they have taken the first step toward unbelief by losing interest in them
01:31:01.960 their faith is dragging its anchor without knowing it few now believe in the punishment of the wicked
01:31:07.300 doctrines are now seen as less literal more mystical and poetical if not done away with
01:31:12.220 altogether church doctrines are now quote silently modified under the influence of a current of
01:31:17.500 thought peculiar to our time to an extent with to which it is difficult to define newcomb said
01:31:23.420 the best example of the readiness of theology to temporize with the irreligious thought of the day
01:31:28.820 and to explain away doctrines it once held dear is seen in its attitude toward the now fashionable
01:31:34.240 theory of evolution no other theory says newcomb is so directly opposed to the doctrine which lies
01:31:39.480 at the basis of our orthodox system of theology newcomb says one cannot remain religiously
01:31:44.860 orthodox while accepting evolution according to newcomb christian orthodoxy will die because of
01:31:49.800 those believers willing to accept orthodoxy adapt orthodoxy to modern thought newcomb says a new
01:31:55.900 religion will replace christianity one which bears one which fears no false teaching sets no limit
01:32:01.560 on the freedom of human thought and views with perfect calm the subversion of any and every form
01:32:06.280 of doctrinal belief confident that the ultimate result will tend to the elevation of the human
01:32:11.160 soul and the unceasing progress of spiritual development the great progress which the last
01:32:17.080 three centuries have witnessed has been wholly in the field of phenomena the progress here alluded
01:32:21.780 to has been rendered possible only by entirely rejecting the mode of thinking about nature which
01:32:26.980 was prevalent in former ages and into which the untrained mind is almost sure to fall at the
01:32:31.860 present day newcomb sees contemporary men of science as the new prophets of the people and
01:32:38.300 the new religion that arises out of modern science will have quote humanity as its god i invite the
01:32:44.920 audience to do a deep dive into the lives of the revolutionaries who helped lay the foundation of
01:32:49.740 long ages like millions and billions of years and see if this is a group you wish to number yourself
01:32:55.480 a part of the fathers of the old age revolution were wicked revolutionaries the apostles
01:33:00.740 and the church fathers were saints choose your doctrine of creation wisely adulterers know you
01:33:08.140 not that the friendship of this world is the enemy of god whosoever therefore will be a friend of
01:33:13.160 this world becometh an enemy of god i heard about the one-way speed of light it has now been measured
01:33:20.660 We actually see supernova erupting in distant galaxies that are gravitationally lensed,
01:33:26.660 so that a single supernova eruption is actually seen multiple times on separate pathways with significant angles.
01:33:34.660 This establishes that indeed the one-way speed of light is the same as a return path speed of light.
01:33:41.660 Adam's appearance of age.
01:33:44.660 He did not come from the womb of a woman.
01:33:48.220 So his size when God created him would not be an indicator of his age.
01:33:52.640 I would argue that God made him brand new, but made him full size because he wanted to be able to communicate with him quickly,
01:33:59.960 which would not be the case if he made him as a baby.
01:34:04.240 And what's unique about Christianity, it's a two-creation model.
01:34:08.540 God creates the universe to be a tool in his hands to eradicate all evil and suffering.
01:34:13.780 And once that happens, he'll replace the universe with a brand new creation where evil and suffering will never exist again.
01:34:21.940 And what you see in Romans chapter 8 is that the entire creation is subject to this pervasive law of decay,
01:34:29.860 meaning that throughout the whole history of the universe, this law of decay has been in effect.
01:34:35.520 As Jesus told his disciples in John 16, in this world you'll have tribulation, but take heart, I have overcome the world.
01:34:43.780 Basically promising there will be a new creation that will follow the very good creation where there will no longer be any gravity, thermodynamics, decay, and indeed there will be no suffering.
01:34:58.060 So this creation leads to the next creation.
01:35:02.500 There's been a lot of talk here about fiat instantaneous miracles.
01:35:05.980 What the Bible teaches is God creating millions of instantaneous miracles, but they're time separated.
01:35:13.780 Indeed, Genesis 1 tells us that they're time-separated, so the debate is really over what are the time-separation times, and again when we look at Genesis chapter 1, we old earth creations do believe that God created in six literal days, but the Hebrew word for dayom has four distinct literal definitions, including a long period of time,
01:35:37.920 And we note is that the Bible tells us there's no evening and morning for God's seventh day,
01:35:44.500 meaning that that day is still ongoing.
01:35:47.480 The other six days have a definite start time and a definite end time
01:35:51.680 indicated by the evening was, morning was phrase.
01:35:55.520 And we see in Psalm 95 in Hebrews 4 explicit statements that we're still in God's seventh day.
01:36:02.560 And we see in Genesis chapter 2 is a lot happens between God creating Adam and God creating Eve.
01:36:10.780 And yet Genesis chapter 1 tells us both of them were created on this sixth creation day.
01:36:17.060 In fact, we have Adam exclaiming when he first sees Eve at long last.
01:36:22.480 We have God commenting on the fact that he was lonely.
01:36:25.520 And look at the three careers he had to go through before God created this person Eve for him.
01:36:32.560 so the sixth day and the seventh day literally are long time periods the grammatical structure of genesis chapter one tells us all the days are long periods of time
01:36:44.280 with respect to the sun the sun was not created on the fourth day it became visible to creatures on the surface of the earth on the fourth day
01:36:54.220 the key to interpreting genesis one is to correctly establish the frame of reference that's in genesis one two is from the point of view of an observer on the surface of earth's waters looking up at the clouds not looking down through the clouds
01:37:10.300 earth began with opaque clouds we know that because the earth's initial atmosphere was much thicker than it is today that's affirmed in job thirty eight where it tells us that god blanketed the early waters of the earth with clouds that kept the seas dark
01:37:26.540 The sun was there, but the light of the sun didn't make it to the surface of the Earth,
01:37:31.280 at least not the visible light, and it took a burst of oxygen to clear the haze in Earth's
01:37:36.780 atmosphere so that animals in the face of the Earth for the first time could see the
01:37:41.900 sun, moon, and stars in the sky and use them to regulate their complex biological clocks.
01:37:49.120 And with respect to the statement about the biodeposits, no matter how much plant and
01:37:54.020 animal matter you put on the face of the earth. It simply can't explain the huge abundance of
01:38:00.080 biodeposits on the face of the earth. And again, God intended that we use those in order to be
01:38:06.100 able to take the gospel to all the places of the world. Thank you. The character of God
01:38:11.420 is at stake in this debate. We have seen that God's Genesis revelation, as understood in his
01:38:19.960 church from the beginning tells us that he created everything for us out of love in six
01:38:26.200 days or less much less than 10 000 years ago dr ross's exegesis is not catholic it's protestant
01:38:37.160 exegesis which pays no attention whatsoever to the entire tradition of the church it cannot
01:38:44.600 possibly be sound. And we know from the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, the constant tradition
01:38:54.060 of the Church, that the first created world was completely free, not only from human death,
01:39:00.720 but from any kind of deformity or disease, and that all of those natural evils came into existence
01:39:07.200 because of the original sin of Adam. In the words of St. Augustine, shown here,
01:39:12.140 in this creation that no one sinned, the world would have been filled and beautified with nature's
01:39:18.440 good without exception. So from this perspective, we know that God's original creation reflected
01:39:24.720 his perfect goodness, wisdom, and love, that deformity and disease were not part of his
01:39:30.820 original plan for us, and that the cause of all these evils is not God, but our sin. And from this
01:39:37.840 perspective we can appreciate even more deeply the love that our lord showed for us when he took a
01:39:42.660 human nature suffered and died for us so that after his glorious resurrection he could found
01:39:48.700 the holy catholic church and invite us to become new creations in him and as members of his mystical
01:39:54.680 body work with him to restore all things back to the beauty that they had in the beginning
01:40:00.020 and to an even more wonderful perfection at the end of time sadly dr massa and dr ross
01:40:06.100 make God responsible for introducing hundreds of millions of years of death, deformity, and disease
01:40:13.440 into his creation before the original sin. And even though they do not intend it as such,
01:40:18.560 that is a blasphemy against the perfect goodness of God. In 1909, when the PBC was an arm of the
01:40:25.960 magisterium, in its answer to eight questions about Genesis 1 to 3, in the reply to question 3,
01:40:34.400 after teaching in answers to one and two that everything in the first three
01:40:39.980 chapters of Genesis is historical objective truth the answer to question
01:40:44.840 three teaches no one may deny facts related in the first three chapters of
01:40:49.760 Genesis which pertain to the foundations of the Christian religion for example
01:40:54.440 the creation of all things brought by God in the beginning of time so all
01:41:01.220 All things created in the beginning of time is totally incompatible with all things being created over hundreds of millions of years.
01:41:09.820 So in its last authoritative teaching on this very point, the magisterium requires us to hold fast to the truth that all things were brought by God in the beginning of time.
01:41:21.700 Not just some things like hydrogen, helium, and lithium at the moment of the mythical Big Bang.
01:41:27.740 so in closing my brothers and sisters throughout the world watching this like saint joshua in his
01:41:35.340 time i exhort you to choose this day whom you will serve the true god of creation who made a
01:41:42.860 perfectly harmonious universe for us at the beginning of time free from death deformity
01:41:47.960 and disease who formed adam body and soul on the first friday of the world who created saint eve
01:41:54.320 from sleeping at Adam's side on the first Friday of the world as a foreshadowing of the birth of
01:42:00.840 the church from the wounded side of Christ on the Friday we call good, and who placed St. Adam and
01:42:06.220 St. Eve over all creatures as the king and queen of a perfectly beautiful, harmonious, complete
01:42:12.500 universe marred only later by their sin? Or will we continue to allow our children and grandchildren
01:42:19.320 to be indoctrinated into the false idol of progressive creation, who created many kinds
01:42:25.880 of plants and animals only to destroy most of them over hundreds of millions of years
01:42:29.820 before the creation of man, who created the bodies of the first human beings in a world
01:42:34.740 that he himself, the God little G of progressive creation, had filled with death, violence,
01:42:41.020 deformity, and disease, who allowed his church to teach a false account of the history of the world
01:42:47.000 for 1900 years and finally enlightened her, not by raising up saints and scholars from within the
01:42:53.940 church, but by raising up godless men outside of the church to correct her, like Ernst Teckel and
01:42:59.580 Charles Lyell. I invite everyone in the audience to join with us and all the holy angels and saints
01:43:05.540 in saying, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord, for thou hast formed me and hast laid
01:43:11.540 thy hand upon me. Thou hast protected me from my mother's womb. I will praise thee for thou art
01:43:16.860 fearfully magnified. Wonderful are thy works. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
01:43:23.240 Ghost. Amen. I want to thank you all for participating in this, and I think this is a
01:43:28.320 great grace and an opportunity to pursue the truth. My brother Hugh Owen cited St. Maximus
01:43:35.420 the confessor, that just as we would not be able to understand the water that was subsequently
01:43:45.140 turned into wine by our Lord's miracle, by studying the wine, certainly we could study
01:43:54.180 the wine for the sake of the wine. The miracle of creation, as St. Thomas says, the substantial
01:44:03.140 part, the part that we have to accept as of faith, is that God made time, matter, space, energy,
01:44:10.960 everything from nothing. No scientist, especially no Christian scientist, would claim that they can
01:44:18.780 go back and actually understand how God took nothing and made something. But certainly,
01:44:26.420 once the something is here we're free to study it we can't get back to the creation event we can
01:44:36.300 only get near to it so just as we can study the wine we who knows if they drank it all there was
01:44:43.680 there might have been something left over it could have gone on for a week uh you could study that
01:44:48.340 so too not only can scientists today have theories about the how but saint thomas says that the how
01:44:56.400 is open for interpretation, that that's not a matter of faith, that we would not be a heretic
01:45:02.880 if we denied the specific how of things unfolded. And so I would like to turn to an example of this
01:45:12.940 from Father Poole, who I quoted earlier. An example is found in the explanation of the
01:45:22.800 first chapter of Genesis, where the dogma about the creation and formation of the world is handed
01:45:29.840 on, creation ex nihilo. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa explained this creation according to the
01:45:36.840 philosophical notions of their age. They explained it according to the philosophical notions of their
01:45:44.460 age. And afterwards, the scholastics did the same, and their explanations prevailed for many
01:45:50.200 centuries. Nowadays, the explanation differs somewhat in accordance with fuller knowledge
01:45:55.780 of natural things. Neither of these different creation explanations has the church judged to
01:46:01.780 be necessary for belief. And in fact, if we look at a quote from our friend and father,
01:46:11.120 St. Basil the Great, he explains why there was darkness on the face of the earth,
01:46:18.440 using the physics of his day he says that uh the shadow of heaven forms the darkness of the wine
01:46:30.320 and he compares it to a tent and that uh you mustn't think that darkness was an actual thing
01:46:38.220 it was the result of the light being blocked so my brother in christ uh dr hugh ross
01:46:45.980 is uh not giving a false interpretation he in his own book is giving a similar interpretation
01:46:53.660 as saint basil the great again these are scientific matters and the church has said
01:47:00.200 that we may disagree on these scientific matters again uh i quote for example um ludwig ott
01:47:11.220 he says in these scientific matters there is no value in a consensus of the fathers since they
01:47:19.800 are not here acting as witnesses of the faith but merely as private scientists and again if you talk
01:47:28.740 to any theologian before Vatican II if you picked up any book of theology or dogma before Vatican II
01:47:36.100 they would tell you that the consensus of the fathers on a matter of faith is infallible.
01:47:43.240 You can no longer remain Catholic and go against it.
01:47:46.760 And therefore, your position is making Pope Pius XII a material, a public material heretic, which he certainly was not.
01:47:56.020 Thank you.
01:47:59.880 Hello, I'm Frank Wright for LifeSite News.
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