Editor's Note: I offer this guest post today from my friend, Tom McFadden, which I received in my inbox. Are your children away from the faith? Do you wonder what influences damaged their belief in our wonderful God who loves them so much? What is the world telling them? How many have walked away because of scandal-mongers in the world and in the Church. I haven't read Tom's book, but I plan to. I have his earlier book, Creation, Evolution and Catholicism: A Discussion for Those Who Believe, which is well worth the time spent reading. I expect this book will prove the same. Macro-evolution is a myth with little data to back it up. It's the pernicious creed of humanists. Would God, Who sent His own Son conceived in the body of a woman and raised by human parents, make the first man and woman the children of apes? Use your common sense!
The book below is an attempt to explain why half of all the kids baptized and confirmed in the last 30 years have left the Catholic Church. As of 2016 the Catholic Bishops knew that 14 million American Catholics had left the Church just since 2000. The book is actually part of a trilogy I've published that helps to explain causes and possible solutions to the ongoing apostasy of Catholic youths.
This particular book was inspired by one written by a Polish Dominican around the time he was chaplain at Thomas Aquinas College in California. Fr. Michael Chaberek's Aquinas and Evolution, started by noting that "since the beginning of the 20th century, when evolution was soundly refuted by Popes and theologians of Vatican Congregations, neither evolution theory nor Catholic doctrine has changed. So how and why did belief in evolution, that was soundly refuted at the beginning of the 20th century, become mainstream in Catholic academia by the end of the 20th century?" He answered:
As we noted, it is not the understanding of Aquinas or evolution that has changed over the last century or so. It is rather the change in paradigms—from roughly speaking ‘Biblical’ or ‘creationist’ to ‘naturalistic’ or ‘evolutionary’. This change of paradigms explains why a great number of today’s Thomists greatly differ from those of a century ago. In our opinion, the ‘evolutionary’ as opposed to the ‘Biblical’ is not the proper context in which the problem of origins should be addressed. For this reason, we believe that not today’s, but the previous Thomists were closer to the truth regarding both—the interpretation of Aquinas’s metaphysics and the assessment of the evolutionary theory of origins…
I thought of Fr. Chaberek's book today because of the confluence of three things. First, there was Fr. Tom's outstanding catechesis at the 8:30 Mass [at St. John the Baptist in Front Royal on Sunday, August 21st] regarding the gospel "the Narrow Gate." When I got home, I found in my email's inbox a Youtube video entitled "How Many Will Be Saved?" - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon" from Barron's Word on Fire Ministry. Somebody must have subscribed me to Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermons. It was on "The Narrow Gate" gospel. I watched it and it was as bad as I expected. The opposite of Fr. Tom's homily.
Years ago I had seen one of Bishop Barron's Youtube videos in which, while he admits hell may exist, he doubts that anyone actually goes there. It's a "theology" he seems to have adopted from the late and famous Swiss theologian Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar.
The third item of the confluence was the notice a friend sent me yesterday that Bishop Barron was promoting a big event in January called "Faith and Science." At this event he and other "creation deniers" will preach to the ignorant that our origins are in cosmic and biological evolution (which is an unguided theoretical process) that was actually guided by God. Creation deniers, a.k.a. "theistic evolutionists" assert that the fudge-factor laden theory of the "Big Bang"and Darwin's 19th century speculations are a better explanation of our origins than Genesis. Just as the Humanist creed teaches, evolution explains everything except unbeknown to those atheists, it was God, acting as a quality control specialist over billions of years, sorting out those supposed "random changes" so that everything would turn out to look like it was purposely designed.
The practical outcome of that new theology is that the first book of the Bible is certainly false. One of the favorite retorts against the Bible's account of creation is that it must be false because it says the earth existed before the sun and that's nothing that could be true even if Someone who they say resurrected from the dead is responsible for both the earth and the sun. They "know" the sun must have existed before the earth because every high school student "knows" what "science" says: 4.5 billion years ago the solar system evolved from clouds of nebular gas and dust. Sad to say, many if not most priests may believe such nonsense.
So, my book helps to answer Fr. Chaberek's question of how it happened that, without a change to evolution theory or Catholic doctrine, evolutionary theories went from being rejected to being mainstream in Catholic circles. Going back to the title of this email, "what else in the Bible is false," the book shows that if Genesis is false, most books of the New Testament are riddled with falsehoods. Along the way the reader will be introduced to the actual texts of the Church's rejections and the characters such as certain Jesuits and a late 19th century Notre Dame professor who steered the Catholic education establishment down the path toward unbelief.
Today, some "scholars" resolve the apparent "errors" in the Bible by asserting (contrary to doctrine) that the Bible is only "conditionally inerrant." On the other hand, many of the professional Catholic educators are in a state of cognitive dissonance in which they simultaneously profess belief in two incompatibles.The kids, that half of all of the ones baptized and confirmed in the last 30 years who walked away, were not trained in philosophical rationalization. As Christian Smith, America's most expert researcher on the religious attitudes of America's youth indicated, they saw it plainly: if the first book of the Bible isn't true, who can believe any of it?
Contents
Chapter 1 Unbelief and Gen Z …………………………………………...……1
Chapter 2 Does Truth Matter? ..…………………………………………...…15
Chapter 3 What Else in the Bible is False?.......................................................18
Chapter 4 When Did Evolution Become Mainstream? ………………………26
Chapter 5 Supernaturalism and Naturalism.…………………………………59
Chapter 6 Can We Save Our Gen Z Catholics? ……………………...………65
Chapter 7 Bury the Zombies ………….….………………………………….71
Chapter 8 The War for Souls and Cultural Survival ……………………..…100
Chapter 9 Calling All Catholic Intellectuals ………………………………105
Appendix I Is Our Lady’s Ancestor a Beast?.................................................115
Appendix II Science and Catholicism Resources ……………………..……121
Available from Amazon as an ebook or printed paperback.
https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Catholic-Unbelief-Thomas-McFadden-ebook/dp/B07TYH9VXF/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&qid=1611503908&refinements=p_27%3AThomas+McFadden&s=digital-text&sr=1-3&text=Thomas+McFadden
Evolution is not science as it is not falsifiable.
ReplyDeleteIt is falsified. We didn't come from monkeys because that's stupid. There, its proven false.
DeleteWhat I mean is that evolution is not arrived at by a method that is falsifiable therefore it is not a scientific method.
ReplyDeleteEverything in life depends upon our base premises. We are frequently not even aware that there are premises involved, but guaranteed - how we live is based on what we believe; and what we believe derives from our base premise.
ReplyDeleteEvolution is a “hypothesis”, true, derived from the premise that there is no God; that there is no transcendent Law or meaning or purpose or control. Instead, everything is random and without purpose in which power alone determines outcomes as strength prevails over weakness - “naturally”.
Evolution, as a hypothesis, is the precise opposite in every permutation from the premise of Divine Government under God Almighty. Evolution is the premise of hell. Evolution is the premise of “I will not serve - Non Serviam”. Evolution is the premise of tooth and claw. It is the natural conclusion of the choice “You shall be like Gods”.
In the premise, derived from Divine Revelation, that we are all subjects in a system created and sustained from the Divine Lawgiver, God, change is not random chance but specific choice made by He who creates every moment forever. Change is observable and explainable in both “hypotheses”. But each explanation leaves you with diametrically opposed world views with the practical effect of determining how we live now and forever.
Check the premise, which is where science, philosophy and logic all meet.
Evolutionist's are loosing out in science. Have you heard of electric fossilization? I bet most all haven't. Guess why? https://youtu.be/ut0KH3h7JVs
ReplyDelete- This alone puts a big wrinkle on earth's age.
Black Holes cannot be found and data is continually at odds with their existence - yet another science write-up saying this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02222-9
These two things are big problems with modern day science of earth and our stars.
The Church Fathers distinguished between the Order of Creation and the Order of Providence. In the first Order, God Himself sustained Creation miraculously as He created it over six days. Once everything was created, God rested from creating anything new, and let His incomprehensibly beautiful and perfect creation operate under the laws that He established for it, and which we observe today. The idea that we can extrapolate back in time to the Beginning during this Order of Providence would be, and in fact, was, if I recall correctly, condemned by the Church Fathers for the tomfoolery that it is. Peter himself wrote in 2 Peter 3:
ReplyDelete"3 Knowing this first, that in the last days there shall come deceitful scoffers, walking after their own lusts,
4 Saying: Where is his promise or his coming? for since the time that the fathers slept, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation."
Deceitful scoffers that say all things continue as they were from the beginning is the most succinct description of evolutionists that has ever been written, in my estimation -- and written 1800 years before these scoffers arrived. But, for the God that turns water into fine aged wine, bread and wine into His body, and created everything out of nothing, it's no trouble at all to inspire Peter to write with such precision.
kolbecenter.org and creationtheologyfellowship.org are two excellent Catholic resources on the true doctrine of creation.
"How to Think Like a Christian During a Time of Secularism " look up this article!
ReplyDeleteTom sent me the following email. You can get all three of his books very inexpensively. Check out the website: scienceandcatholicism.org Check out the page on Our Lady. Can you really believe the Immaculate Virgin was descended from a non-human beast? Really people! It doesn't take much to see how ridiculous evolution is.
ReplyDeleteThe books bought from Amazon are very fairly priced for the size of them but shipping adds disproportionately to the cost. On my web page I offer all 3 for $20 which includes shipping. I get them for what they cost to print and consolidated shipping cost is about $4.77. It only costs me $14.38 to send all 3 to one address and the Institute makes something extra to pay for giveaways. Scroll down the homepage to see the offer. scienceandcatholicism.org. The "donate" button is connected to Paypal for ordering and payment by credit card.