Time was when it was common to see exchanges between Protestant Fundamentalists and Catholics that went like this:
Pretty standard stuff. The Church, for the most part, tends to let the sciences do their thing and the thing the sciences have done pretty well over the past century is build up an evidence-based picture, both cosmological and biological, that makes an overwhelming case for a universe that is about 13.5 billion years old, an earth that is about 4.5 billion years old, and a history of biological evolution on that earth. The Church is fine with that and Rome has held conferences on evolution in recent years with actual scientists–and they have pointedly snubbed biblical fundamentalism.
However, as more and more conservative MAGA fundamentalist members of Dunning-Kruger Club have come to dominate the US Catholic Church on social media, cocky and certain that they know, not only more than the whole scientific community about Science, but more than the Pope, the Magisterium, and the theological community about the Church’s teaching, we have in recent years started to see folly such as this response to the above:
Or grifting MAGA weirdos and, worse, grifting MAGA priests making spectacularly ignorant pronouncements like this:
It was all, alas, warned about by Augustine long ago when he wrote about interpreting Genesis:
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
Reckless and incompetent expounders of holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although “they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
But these days, the marriage of crazy right-wing Protestant Fundamentalism and crazy right-wing American Catholicism in the MAGA cult of proud ignorance has bred a super-potent strain of crazy right-wingery, but not much that is recognizably Catholic. So we find a lay spouting popinjay and self-appointed Defensor Fidei rebuking a priest for not believing the earth is 6000 years old and instead accepting the overwhelming evidence of the science. For entirely related reasons, MAGA grifter Owens, the oil of chrism still damp on her forehead, displays her ignorance to the applause of Fr. Dave Nix’s cult of personality and earns their applause. And Nix, having driven a young gay woman to suicide, is no more qualified to pronounce on this stuff than he was to subject his victim to his ministrations. (By the way, it’s “ark”, not “arc”, Padre, And neither crocodiles nor Komodo dragons are dinosaurs.) Avoid this dangerous nest of vipers and stick with the Holy Father and the Magisterium they hate and malign.
The thing that always cracks me up about the fringe creationist nonsense is that they then always turn around and point to the fact that the Big Bang (which they love because they imagine it confirms Genesis) was formulated by a Catholic priest and therefore proves the Faith (which they deeply oppose) and Science (which they also deeply oppose) are not in opposition. That’s true, but it’s not their position because they oppose both the Faith and Science.
Msgr. Georges LeMaitre was always extremely careful to point out that the Big Bang does not and cannot prove creation ex nihilo because that is, in the end, not something science can prove. It is supernatural revelation from God. More than this, however, the cosmology that Lemaitre proposes is nothing other than the theory of evolution writ on a cosmic scale. Biological evolution is solely about evolution as it is confined to the one dust mote in the universe we know of that has life on it. The Big Bang is about the evolution of the entire cosmos. Denying evolution and then embracing Lemaitre is the ultimate example straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
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9 Responses
“No significant denomination except the Seventh-Day Adventists insisted on such a reading until the mid 20th century”
So “seven days, 6000 years ago” was first adopted by a Protestant (using the term extremely broadly) sect that pointedly rejected “sola scriptura”, even in principle, and insisted that God had appointed a divinely-inspired prophet to lead them.
Interesting.
I get a similar feeling when I hear these same kind of Catholics assure me that they follow an objective moral standard, backed by an infallible authority, while also unironically being all-in for Trump and the GOP.
The Bible is a collection of books written by many different people over centuries. It is not a textbook. To attempt to assign to it literal accuracy, such as the earth being 6,000 years old is to miss the point.
Biblical Fundamentalists are searching for absolute certainty. They are not going to find it.
Don’t disavow the literal meaning of the creation passage. Mark had a series on this two months ago less a week.
In “The Literal Sense of Scripture, Part 2” on June 19th, Mark says:
«Likewise, as we saw in Chapter 2, the author of Genesis uses various linguistic devices (such as measured Hebrew poetry and the image of six “days” of creation) to convey a literal meaning, but many modern readers mistake the device for the meaning. The literal sense of the author was “creation is the orderly act of a loving Creator God.” What the modern reader often hears, however, is “The universe was made in six 24-hour days.”»
It’s more that assigning modern expectations to the Bible and completely ignoring the literal genres of the Bible, treating all of it as reportage, misses the point entirely.
It’s interesting that while science cannot prove creation ex nihilo, it’s known that it’s no longer possible for conditions at T-1, just before the Big Bang, to recreate themselves because matter can be irreversibly destroyed (or, more precisely, for matter to undergo particle decay and for decay energy to be radiated away). The destruction is irreversible because that energy radiates away as photons and when they radiate away into nothingness, they cannot be recaptured. This matter that’s radiated away is not coming back, so it cannot reconstitute the singularity just before the Big Bang.
The “Timelapse of the Future” (youtube video id uD4izuDMUQA) shows the ultimate fate of the universe: nothingness, ignoring the lumps of iron floating through space which is all that remains from collapsed stars that were not swallowed by black holes.
It’s interesting to note because it inevitably results in the question, what was there before the Big Bang, what led to it, and why is our universe the last one (and this question can’t just be shrugged off by saying “anthropic principle”).
Good God, yet another celebrity priest. Somehow I think his bishop is messed up too though.
“Francis, go and rebuild my church which, as you see, is falling down” indeed.
On that David Nix character: some signs of his florid psychosis must have been showing a long time ago. What clown-college seminary missed, or ignored, them and allowed him to graduate and be ordained?
A consequence of declining vocations is to focus on quantity over quality.
Especially odd for someone to run the “take the Bible literally” argument while claiming for himself the title of “Father” as a religious leader.