Xavier's M.O.

[Mono no aware]

It would be a heresy if one was required to believe that faith and reason can conflict, and when that happens, one has to ignore facts.

But the teaching is that faith and reason don't conflict.

As I understand that teaching, it means that in cases where reason and faith conflict (or appear to conflict), you would have to consider that the deficiency is with your reason, which is the fallible faculty of a mortal human, and not with the faith, which is divinely revealed.  In other words, you're not reasoning correctly if you're conflicting with the faith.

These two condemnations from the Syllabus of Errors seem to indicate that reason is always to be kept subservient to revelation, and that a Catholic cannot go with their reason alone, or use their reason to judge or overrule doctrine.

Condemned: that all the truths of religion proceed from the innate strength of human reason; hence reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at the knowledge of all truths of every kind.—Allocution "Maxima quidem," June 9, 1862, and Encyclical "Qui pluribus," Nov. 9, 1846, etc.

Condemned: that all the dogmas of the Christian religion are indiscriminately the object of natural science or philosophy, and human reason, enlightened solely in an historical way, is able, by its own natural strength and principles, to attain to the true science of even the most abstruse dogmas; provided only that such dogmas be proposed to reason itself as its object.—Letters to the Archbishop of Munich, "Gravissimas inter," Dec. 11, 1862, and "Tuas libenter," Dec. 21, 1863.

[John Lamb]

To creationists, the scientific community is a part of a Hebraic- / Freemasonic- / Illuminati-type cabal, and evolution is an instrument of Satan to lead souls to perdition.

Sort of. I would say most of the scientific community are more or less in good faith, but only inasmuch as an international community which is corrupted financially and politically can be in good faith. I think the "cabal" is an inner-circle, not the community at large. Much like the Church, which has plenty of corruption among its members and especially its inner-circle of hierarchs, but the average member is more or less of good faith.

Also, it's not only an instrument leading to perdition, but even in this life it's a tool of political control and cultural warfare.

To evolutionists, biblical literalism is deemed the height of willful ignorance and unthinking cult-like devotion to a patently wrong text.

More than that, it's an attack upon the very principles of their naturalistic worldview. To think that there might be a source of knowledge (divine revelation) of higher importance and higher authority than their own is a scandal to them. If the world is not just matter then there is an area of study (the spirit) which is beyond them, and that's offensive to their epistemologically totalitarian attitude. They mock the Bible the way a king would mock a pauper claiming to be the true heir to the throne: not just because it appears ridiculous to them, but because it presents the greatest possible threat.

[Quaremerepulisti]

It would be a heresy if one was required to believe that faith and reason can conflict, and when that happens, one has to ignore facts.

But the teaching is that faith and reason don't conflict.

As I understand that teaching, it means that in cases where reason and faith conflict (or appear to conflict), you would have to consider that the deficiency is with your reason, which is the fallible faculty of a mortal human, and not with the faith, which is divinely revealed.  In other words, you're not reasoning correctly if you're conflicting with the faith.

Any religious authority is always going to make that claim.  They wish to protect their doctrine (and authority) from rational and reasoned objections to it and thus take this type of preemptive action.  It's a bit of a shell game.  They of course start with the perfectly fine idea that their doctrines cannot be deduced from reason alone; otherwise this would be science or philosophy, but not religion.  But then they go from there to attempting to exempt their doctrines from the judgment of reason.  And that simply can't be done.  We simply can't be asked to believe something irrational.  Yes, I know the argument will be made that it is only our fallible faculty of reason judging something irrational.  It doesn't matter.   We can't believe something we think irrational; we simply aren't made that way.

These two condemnations from the Syllabus of Errors seem to indicate that reason is always to be kept subservient to revelation, and that a Catholic cannot go with their reason alone, or use their reason to judge or overrule doctrine.

It's impossible that Divine revelation should be false, granted; but it's impossible that Divine revelation (or any claimed doctrine deriving from it) should be irrational - should that be the case, the claim of doctrine or revelation is false.

And that's what the YECs don't understand.  The claim is made that Biblical literalism is irrational, based on our current scientific knowledge.  It is not an answer to that to thunder about the authority of the Bible and how evil the scientific community is. It is not an answer to that to thunder about "evolutionists" and man being "beasts".  It is not even an answer to point out problems with the modern evolutionary hypothesis.  The only answer is to attempt to show how it is in fact rational to believe in a young earth, given the data we have.

[John Lamb]

The only answer is to attempt to show how it is in fact rational to believe in a young earth, given the data we have.

Right, so the evolutionists get 99% of the funding and backing in politics & media, and then you mock creationists for not having epistemological control over the "data". I tell you what, hand over all of the political, media, and educational institutions over to creationists, and I guarantee you that the data will show that the earth is young.

[GloriaPatri]

The only answer is to attempt to show how it is in fact rational to believe in a young earth, given the data we have.

Right, so the evolutionists get 99% of the funding and backing in politics & media, and then you mock creationists for not having epistemological control over the "data". I tell you what, hand over all of the political, media, and educational institutions over to creationists, and I guarantee you that the data will show that the earth is young.

All of the collected data is right at your fingertips, a mere Google search away. Go ahead, prove that the evidence actually shows that the Earth is a mere 10,000 years old. I'll be waiting.

[Mono no aware]

We simply can't be asked to believe something irrational.  Yes, I know the argument will be made that it is only our fallible faculty of reason judging something irrational.  It doesn't matter.   We can't believe something we think irrational; we simply aren't made that way.

Of course we can; what are you talking about?  "Fools for Christ's sake," credo quia absurdum, "the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God," "the foolish things of the world hath God chosen, that he may confound the wise," &c.  When the Church, however, concluded that faith and reason are actually compatible, it was the ultimate arrogant stance against the future: she was saying that not ever in the centuries to come could the philosophers (or "natural philosophers") ever falsify doctrine.  And in case they somehow managed to, then the perfect escape hatch was concocted: only where reason supports the faith is it true reason. 

But whichever you chose, foolishness for Christ or fides et ratio, you make a submission of the intellect.  Anything else, such as what you and Greg seem to prefer, is just secular rationalism.  There is little point in religion anymore at such a juncture.  Xavier, at least, has a religion which is true and revealed by God.  You two appear to have a religion which, well, may or may not be revealed by God on certain points, depending on whether things conform to your reason.  There's a reason why creationists thump the bible; they must.  The moment you start to reinterpret things "in light of new knowledge," it becomes immediately obvious that you (or the Church) are shamelessly making this stuff up as you go along.  It's an insult to the generations who believed these things in the past, as well as an insult to the omniscient creator who somehow couldn't see the future well enough to tailor his revelation to accord with eventual discoveries.

[Quaremerepulisti]

Of course we can; what are you talking about? 

So let me get this straight; you are saying that faith can, in fact, be irrational.  Or are you saying that, no matter how convinced we are it is irrational, we must simply assume that it is not.

When the Church, however, concluded that faith and reason are actually compatible, it was the ultimate arrogant stance against the future: she was saying that not ever in the centuries to come could the philosophers (or "natural philosophers") ever falsify doctrine.  And in case they somehow managed to, then the perfect escape hatch was concocted: only where reason supports the faith is it true reason. 

Well, of course.  Which makes it a tautology and of little practical value.

But whichever you chose, foolishness for Christ or fides et ratio, you make a submission of the intellect. 

Of course you do.  But I am denying that such a thing is really possible for an irrationality.  It is the equivalent of submission to Pravda.  It is not a true submission, it is a tyrannical obeisance.

This is exactly the kind of argument you gave when, while still a trad, you wouldn't follow and make a "submission of the intellect" to Francis.

Anything else, such as you and Greg seem to suggest, is just secular rationalism.  There is little point in religion anymore at such a juncture. 

Insofar as religion can make a claim to have the absolute truth, perhaps so.

Xavier, at least, has a religion which is true and revealed by God. 

Right, and part of this revealed truth is that Pope Francis has authority to make a binding judgment on the morality of the death penalty, contradicting the other binding judgments made on the matter.

You two appear to have a religion which, well, may or may not be revealed by God on certain points, depending on whether things conform to your reason.

That's religious apologist BS lingo, sorry.  As though things could conform to "my" reason without conforming to "reason", period (meaning they are rational or irrational), or as though I am incompetent of making such a judgment.

There's a reason why creationists thump the bible; they must.  The moment you start to reinterpret things "in light of new knowledge," it becomes immediately obvious that you (or the Church) are shamelessly making this stuff up as you go along. 

Which is just what Francis did, and just what the Church did way back when after the Galileo affair.  But wait, who are you to judge that me, or the Church, making this stuff up as we go along is "irrational" or unacceptable in some regard?  You're subjecting things to your own judgment of reason, right?

It's an insult to the generations who believed these things in the past, as well as an insult to the omniscient creator who somehow couldn't see the future well enough to tailor his revelation to accord with eventual discoveries.

So maybe, the notion of religious "truth" needs to further investigated.

[Quaremerepulisti]

The only answer is to attempt to show how it is in fact rational to believe in a young earth, given the data we have.

Right, so the evolutionists get 99% of the funding and backing in politics & media, and then you mock creationists for not having epistemological control over the "data". I tell you what, hand over all of the political, media, and educational institutions over to creationists, and I guarantee you that the data will show that the earth is young.

Until one of the students raises his hand and asks about Lake Suigetsu.  Or ice cores.  Or the starlight problem.  Or SN1987A.  Or why molecular clocks are all way off.  Uh, well, this is just "data" with scare quotes will be your response.  Good luck with that.

[Mono no aware]

So let me get this straight; you are saying that faith can, in fact, be irrational.  Or are you saying that, no matter how convinced we are it is irrational, we must simply assume that it is not.

No, I am just pointing out that faith varies, from person to person, sect to sect, theological school to theological school, church to church.  Some people clearly can believe in a faith that would otherwise appear irrational to them, as history demonstrates.  As soon as anyone has a "road to Damascus" illumination, as St. Paul did, their human rationale must necessarily pale in comparison: the gnosis they now possess comes from heaven itself and is therefore perfect.  After that, it's the most logical thing in the world to prefer revelation to any other source—even science.  Every discipline of man must, in this scheme, to some extent be fallible, so you will always plump with scripture over any competing claim.

Some people can swim with this sort of thing better than others.  Obviously I myself couldn't hack it, and there came a final straw that broke the camel's back, when the cumulative mass of contradictions, problems, and clerical faggotry strained credulity so thin it snapped.  But when you believe, even when it's difficult, you still believe.  "O Lord, I believe—help thou my unbelief!"  Some people find their faith not even tested by the crisis, but actually strengthened.  They're able to see it as "the passion of the Church," a dolorously beautiful eschatological trial of chastisement and purgation, a Catholic kali yuga, and in spite of the mass apostasy, they are thankful to God for so far being given the grace to stay in the faithful remnant.  A lot of this stuff comes down not just to rationality, but to psychology and temperament.

It's possible, I concede, to try to have it both ways.  We can look to the communions that have tried to harmonize faith and science, such as the Anglicans and the Novus Ordo Catholics.  Unfortunately, they have been abject failures.  It seems axiomatic that the more you try to "interpret things in light of new knowledge," it inevitably ends in rainbow sashes and theological equivocation: the kinds of things that are unlikely to convict people that you have a true religion on your hands.  It's a smokescreen anyone can see through.  Fundamentalism may not be a formula for success either, but at least it has its teeth.  Despise them if you must, but there is a fierce and feral sublimity to the stubbornly unyielding doctrines of the Russian Old Believer, or the Jansenist—or the creationist.  Even if it can't survive the science classroom, there is an inner fire: "FEU. Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob, non des philosophes et des savants. Certitude, certitude, sentiment, joie, paix. Dieu de Jésus?Christ."  But I'm not trying to criticize you too hard if your project is to re-evaluate what you mean by "religious truth."  Go liberal if you must.  In this day and age, religion basically comes down to whatever any individual gets out of it for themselves, from Kabbalah to Catholicism.  I just want you to have peace.

[John Lamb]

Until one of the students raises his hand and asks about Lake Suigetsu.  Or ice cores.  Or the starlight problem.  Or SN1987A.  Or why molecular clocks are all way off.  Uh, well, this is just "data" with scare quotes will be your response.  Good luck with that.

No, because like I said, the creationists will be in charge so the student will be lampooned and penalised for questioning creationism, you know, like evolutionists lampoon and penalise creationists now.

And if that's the best evidence there is for the old earth I'm feeling more confident about YEC.

[John Lamb]

You have too much of an active imagination Pon. For me, and I'm sure for many other creationists, it's much more prosaic than that. It may sound like we're fanatical when we're forced to defend our position, but the earth's youth is little more than a matter of fact reality, and the Bible's authority is just another fact of life like the State's authority. The trick is getting myself to see the world as created, when I've been trained to think of it otherwise. But you wouldn't know I was a "Young Earth Creationist" unless I told you; it's not like I'm standing here with a "God Hates Fags" sign.

[Mono no aware]

I should qualify that not all forms of Christian fanaticism are equally compelling.  Ken Ham's theme-park approach is fairly bland and embarrassing.  One imagines gooey modern Christian pop music piped in.  I was thinking of people more along the lines of the family that went off into the Taiga forest for forty years.  They were most assuredly not theistic evolutionists.

[GloriaPatri]

Until one of the students raises his hand and asks about Lake Suigetsu.  Or ice cores.  Or the starlight problem.  Or SN1987A.  Or why molecular clocks are all way off.  Uh, well, this is just "data" with scare quotes will be your response.  Good luck with that.

No, because like I said, the creationists will be in charge so the student will be lampooned and penalised for questioning creationism, you know, like evolutionists lampoon and penalise creationists now.

And if that's the best evidence there is for the old earth I'm feeling more confident about YEC.

The difference being that there is ample evidence for both evolution and an old Earth/Universe, while the only evidence for a young Earth amounts to "the Bible says so, so it must be true!"

YECs treat the statement "the Bible is inerrant" as their axiomatic premise, when it is anything but. It is a claim that relies on more fundamental premises, premises which I find to either be lacking or outright non-existent.

[Quaremerepulisti]

No, because like I said, the creationists will be in charge so the student will be lampooned and penalised for questioning creationism, you know, like evolutionists lampoon and penalise creationists now.

And if that's the best evidence there is for the old earth I'm feeling more confident about YEC.

As I said, good luck with that.  The student will know you are just running your mouth, as will everyone else in the class, and as I know you are now.

You lose the debates on the merits, so you have to resort to claiming how "unfair" everything is, how "oppressed" you are, and frankly admit you would attempt to punish anyone raising any uncomfortable questions if you were in charge.  That's the m.o. of ideologues.

I'm interested to hear your explanation of why it is rational to believe in a young earth with the evidence from Lake Suigetsu.  Just take that for starters.  If you feel so confident, that is.  Why should I believe that C-14 decay rates were much faster in the past, which coincided with lake varves being formed much faster than once per year?

[Jayne]

The main point I'd make to Catholic ("theistic") evolutionists is that they ought to step back from the scientific question for a moment, and try to take in the sheer Satanic darkness of billions of souls, made in the image of God, believing that they are spirit-less beasts, and that God's creation is actually a crudely and wastefully formed accident. It's so sick and twisted for a human soul to imagine that it's just a beast, that you have to seriously consider whether a theory which has led many into this gross error can be trusted. As my sister once said to me, "I don't believe in God, I believe in the Big Bang and Evolution," i.e. she believes life and the entire order of the cosmos are accidental effects of particle interactions, that there is no (spiritual) substance to our lives.

The lack of suspicion towards the theory of evolution on the part of Catholics shows that they have been swept up in the Enlightenment project and the momentum of human progress, and that they are embarrassed about or afraid of the Church seeming to be against this project or lagging behind its progress. At the very least, evolution should be regarded with suspicion: a theory that started with the ancient Hindus, was modified by the ancient Greeks, and was picked up again in the era of anti-Catholic revolution to cement the greatest apostasy in Church history. Do you not suspect the devil's involvement at all?

If the evolutionary account of creation is true, I cannot see why God wouldn't have put it into the book of Genesis. I find the idea that "the ancient Hebrews were ignorant, and it was written in a way adapted to their understanding" insulting. The ancient Hindus were "intelligent enough" to come up with the idea of evolution all by themselves, apparently, so why couldn't God have told the Hebrews, "I made the earth slowly over many eons"? What's difficult to understand about that? If God created the world and sent the prophets to tell us about it, why couldn't He have made his prophets tell the truth, and spare us the calamity thousands of years later of the scientists apparently discovering that the biblical cosmology is a hoax? It doesn't make sense. This is why I share with the fundamentalist Protestants the principle that the Bible should be our first text or "interpretative lens" for understanding the world and its history, and that human science ought to follow it and not the other way around. At the end of the day I trust God and His prophets more than these modern scientists, who want me to believe I'm a hairless ape and that I'm a "homophobic" bigot for thinking there's a divine & natural law.

As I understand Genesis, it does not make much difference how long God took to create everything.  The point of the creation account is that God deliberately made everything and that He made it good.

When Genesis was first written, the surrounding pagan cultures believed that creation was random.  Their myths tell of battles between gods and monsters casting drops of blood and pieces of bodies about to create the world and what it contains.  Creation just happened by accident and nobody much cared.

Genesis is for letting us know how wrong the pagan understanding is.  Whether the lengths of time given in Genesis are literal or figurative,  God made a considered decision to create and a judgment of creation as good.  This fact is equally important as a response to current secular evolution as it was as a response to ancient pagan myths.  Creation is not random.

I am open to the possibility that Genesis used figurative language to make that point.  I am also open to the possibility that the account is literal.  I don't see this question as particularly important.  The point of the story - the purposefulness and goodness of creation - is the part that matters.