Mark Shea\'s Muddled Liberal Thinking 3

SAVE OFFLINE

Mark Shea’s Muddled Liberal Thinking Mark Shea is still on the warpath against alternatives that challenge his treasured views of science and politics. Let’s take a look at his one-sided, muddled liberal thinking. By Robert Sungenis

DECEMBER 18, 2019 BY MARK SHEA https://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2019/12/magicalthinking.html?utm_medium=Push&utm_source=WebPush&utm_campaign=Push_CAT H_MarkShea

Mark Shea: Both St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas are spinning in their graves: Ohio lawmakers are weighing in on how public schools can teach things like evolution. The Ohio House on Wednesday passed the “Student Religious Liberties Act.” Under the law, students can’t be penalized if their work is scientifically wrong as long as the reasoning is because of their religious beliefs. Instead, students are graded on substance and relevance. Every Republican in the House supported the bill. It now moves to the Republicancontrolled Senate. No. No. No. No. NO! This is not Christian. This is stupid gnosticism. There are not two truths, scientific and religious, in opposition. Faith and reason are not opposed. Grace build on, not destroys, nature. Truth is one. If something is scientifically wrong, all the religion in the world cannot make it true. If a student declares that his religion decrees 2+2=5 or water is not H2O, that does make those statements true. It makes him either a fool or a liar. R. Sungenis: Do you know any first grade students, Christian or nonChristian, who believe that 2 + 2 = 5? Do you know any high school students who believe that common water is not H2O? Do you know of any Christian students who, knowing that 2 + 2 = 4 and that water is H2O, ever tried to wish it 1

away by calling on God in prayer? Do you know of any comparable students who believe, or religious people who teach, that two truths can be contradictory, or that a true fact and a false fact can be true as a unit? I thought so. Welcome to the world of Mark Shea where exaggeration is as common as H2O and making straw men is as common as straw; where calling your opponent a fool or liar is more important than trying to understand what your opponent is saying and why he says it. It’s the same MO as always from Mark Shea: Shoot first, ask questions later. To demonstrate this MO, let’s see what House Bill 164 titled, “The Ohio Student Religious Liberties Act of 2019,” really says. I will underline the more relevant parts. Sec. 3320.02. (A) A student enrolled in a public school may engage in religious expression before, during, and after school hours in the same manner and to the same extent that a student is permitted to engage in secular activities or expression before, during, and after school hours. (B) A school district, community school established under Chapter 3314., STEM school established under Chapter 3326., or a collegepreparatory boarding school established under Chapter 3328. of the Revised Code shall give the same access to school facilities to students who wish to conduct a meeting for the purpose of engaging in religious expression as is given to secular student groups, without regard to the content of a student's or group's expression. Sec. 3320.03. No school district board of education, governing authority of a community school established under Chapter 3314. of the Revised Code, governing body of a STEM school established under Chapter 3326. of the Revised Code, or board of trustees of a college-preparatory boarding school established under Chapter 3328. of the Revised Code shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework, artwork, or other written or oral assignments. Assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any 2

legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of a student's work. Sec. 3326.11. Each science, technology, engineering, and mathematics school established under this chapter and its governing body shall comply with sections....3320.02, 3320.03... Now, do you see anything in the Ohio bill that seeks, as Mark Shea claims, to condone views that are “scientifically wrong” or that religion can make right something that is scientifically wrong? Do you read anything in the bill that promotes “gnosticism” or claims that it’s acceptable to hold “two truths, scientific and religious, in opposition” or that “faith and reason are opposed”? Ah, no, but that is what Mr. Shea wants you to see so that he can make the Ohio Republicans look like a bunch of country bumpkins who just fell off the turnip truck. The Ohio Republicans are concerned, as they always have been, especially in the American society we have now in which the way godless liberals try to win the culture war is to shout down, silence, or beat up their conservative opponents. They continue to insist that those of religious convictions don’t have a right to voice those convictions in public institutions even though those institutions are supposed to be neutral in all things concerning God. So what’s the rub? Well, poor Mr. Shea feels threatened that his particular views on science are going to be preempted by this Ohio bill, since, according to Shea, the Ohio house wants to allow students to express their religious convictions without being preempted by certain “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics” issues. This is hardly new, but leave it to a reactionary like Mark Shea—who makes his living off of sensationalism—to make it sound as if Ohio is going back to pagan Gnosticism and making people think that 2 + 2 can equal 5. Everyone who has lived in the US since the Scopes Monkey trial, and probably from the day that Darwin published his Origen of Species in 1859, there has been a controversy about one thing—the theory of evolution, not whether 2 + 2 = 4. It’s an ongoing debate and it’s not going to stop anytime soon. But Mark Shea would like it if 3

the Creationists and conservatives would just shut the hell up, and either capitulate to evolution or go find some place else to live. Mark Shea is the ANTIFA of Catholicism—do it my way or I’m going to beat you into submission by either clubs or words, whichever works. Unfortunately, the problem regarding evolution persists in the general consciousness of the US because most US scientists ignore the word “theory” in the phrase “theory of evolution,” and have made evolution into a virtual fact; and then work in the local legislatures across the US to require evolution to be accepted as the only model of origins and be taught as such in all public schools. To cover their tracks, they reintroduce the word “theory” back into the academic nomenclature only when they are accused of making evolution a fact, pretending to mitigate all concerns from their opponents by pointing out the word “theory” in the phrase. Meanwhile they work overtime behind the scenes to make sure no anti-evolution theories can be taught in public schools. Mark Shea wouldn’t get so hot and bothered if he had stopped for a brief moment and realized that in every one of his sensationalist diatribes he consistently confuses scientific truth with modern science. Mr. Shea starts from the presupposition that basically anything modern cosmogony tells us today is either true or cannot be questioned (e.g., the Big Bang, evolution, polygenism, heliocentrism, billions of years, the multiverse, dark matter and energy, expanding universe, relativity, etc). If you happen to question it, or, heavens to Betsy, oppose it, then you might as well walk around with a scarlet F for “fool,” or D for “deplorable” or perhaps a W for “Walmart shopper.” Where have we seen this before? It’s the intrinsic arrogance of liberals all over the world. They know so much more than you gun-toting, Dixie-Chick-hating, apple pie conservative Americans. And because they are so smart, liberal elites alone can determine what the correct interpretation of the scientific data is— regardless how godless it turns out to be—and then self-righteously castigate anyone who reaches a different conclusion. Bottom line: Don’t you dare attempt to interpret the data differently without the expert elites to guide you.

4

Climate change is another good example. Did you ever wonder why it’s mostly the godless Soros liberals who insist on it, or wonder why the god-fearing Walmart shoppers who breathe too much air are blamed for it? Well, since the elites don’t believe God exists, they don’t have anyone who can design the Earth well enough to hold itself together and keep the CO2 at survivable levels. For the godless Henny-Penny liberals, it’s likely the world can fall apart by chance just as they believe humans got here by chance (i.e., evolution). The two go hand-inhand, and thus they live in constant fear that something terrible is going to go wrong with the world. Evolution, by definition, is mindless and unsympathetic, and thus so is the demise of the world whenever it comes. They created this boogeyman but they don’t want to live with it. According to AOC (godless liberal that she is), we only have 12 years left! So convinced that they are intellectually superior, morally untouchable, and more logically sound than their conservative opponents, after they arrive at their predetermined “truth” by disallowing any alternatives, they seal and insulate their “truth” by doing exactly what Shea does above—by appealing to the axiom that truth cannot contradict truth, which smart conservatives, seeing right through the ploy, otherwise know it as the logical fallacy of “using as proof the very thing one is trying to prove.” In other words, one cannot assume evolution is fact without first proving that it is a fact—a basic rule of Science 101. For Mark Shea, an Ohio student cannot, under any circumstances, believe Creationism on a scientific basis, only as a “religious belief.” When someone turns the tables and insists that: (a) Creationism is, indeed, scientifically based, and (b) that evolution has no scientific support, Mr. Shea has a myocardial infarction. How could it be, Shea barks, that the very evolutionists who preach science are the very ones who don’t know science and consistently misapply it? Well, let’s ask one of the most trusted and famous secular evolutionists on the face of the Earth. His name is Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard who admits that science hardly knows anything solid about the origins of the universe, much less how man arrived on Earth by time and chance, yet he admits that evolutionists like himself will keep preaching evolution from the housetops. He writes: 5

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.1 So why does Mark Shea want to be a lap dog to this kind of solipsistic, atheistic thinking? He clearly sees their godless motivations. Does he think that blessing it with Catholic holy water is somehow going to change this pig into a prince? Why would God want to dirty himself with these cockamamie theories if the very human inventors themselves admit the whole thing seeks to get God off the stage of history and is unscientific at its roots, to boot? Evidently, Mark Shea wants to live in a dichotomous world in which, on the one hand, the inventors of evolution can reveal its godless essence and “patent absurdity” of its science, on the other hand, one in which Shea can baptize it with Catholic words and shout it from the housetops of Patheos, claiming that God was the first cause of such “just-so stories.” How pathetic. “Why,” his opponents ask, “can’t you just accept the way the inspired text of Genesis 1 has written God’s detailed role in the creation? Why do you insist on ignoring the order that Genesis 1 lays out? Is it really that hard to believe the 1

“Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, pp. 28, 31. 6

Earth came before the stars? Is it really that hard to believe that, after he made the Earth, God then made a great Light, and then after dissipating it made smaller lights on Day Four? Is that too hard for God to do? After all, as a Catholic, you believe the bread of communion is turned into the body of Christ. So which is harder to believe, that the Earth came first or that Jesus replaces the bread? Hence there is no logical reason why you can’t accept what Genesis literally says. Something else is afoot here. What is it?” As it stands, Mark Shea does the very thing he accuses the Ohio Republicans of doing—allowing a true fact to be allied with a false fact. He takes Genesis 1, which he believes is false narrative of origins, and combines it with evolution, which he believes is the true narrative of origins. He packages them up in a box called “theistic evolution” and sells it to the public as something God ordained. In reality, it is nothing but a stinking mess of Gnosticism. Everyone knows that Genesis 1 cannot be combined with evolution, since the former says the Earth came before the stars while the latter says the stars came before the Earth. If combining them is not an attempt to make 2 + 2 = 5, then what is? Yes, Albert and Thomas are turning over in their graves, but it’s because of the utter silliness of Mark Shea’s Gnosticism. Apparently, the Republicans of Ohio saw right through Mr. Shea’s contorted logic. The Republicans didn’t presume, as Mark Shea does, that evolution is a scientifically proven fact, nor did they presume to say that Creationism is a mere religious belief that has no scientific support. Much to the chagrin of Mr. Shea, the Republicans believe Creationism is true because they have seen with their own eyes that the facts of modern science support it very well (e.g., the geologic column can be very young since science has shown that horizontal strata can form in a matter of days or weeks in rapidly moving water; dinosaurs bones contain blood, blood vessels, soft tissue and collagen, which would not be possible if dinosaurs were older than 5,000 years, much less the 65 million years required by evolution; that the time spans required for the evolution from hominids to humans to the present day should have filled the Earth with trillions in the living population and even more trillions in their graves, but we see no evidence of such extremes). 7

They have also seen, as even Richard Lewontin has seen, that the truths of modern science totally dismantle the theory of evolution (e.g., genetic mutations cannot account for upward progression of species; the archeological record contains no transitional fossils; radiometric dating is not reliable since its results are wildly inconsistent; that organic organisms have an irreducible complexity that prohibits them from evolving, etc). These scientific facts then leads these same Republicans to acknowledge the same axiom held by St. Albert and St. Thomas, namely, that scientific truth never contradicts religious truth, since Creationism is supportable by modern science and does not contradict the Creationism taught in the first chapters of Genesis. But if one has already decided—as Mark Shea has—that he will not support Creationism by science, then, of course, one is going to think there can be no compatibility between a literal interpretation of the Bible and science. Mark Shea: The incredible thing is Catholics are now starting to go for this junk. Bad theology and science for crank conspiracy theorists used to be a Fundamentalist Protestant thing. R. Sungenis: If Mr. Shea had any scientific facts on his side, you can bet the farm he’d be spouting them with the same frequency he spouts his insults. He won’t do so because he knows that every presumed fact he brings to the table will be shot down in about two seconds by the Creationist scientists who have been studying this field a lot longer than Mr. Shea. Mark Shea: Sensible Catholics listened to the Magisterium for their theology and let the sciences do their work. R. Sungenis: As any Catholic knows who has read the encyclicals of the 19th and 20th century popes, when scientific theories transgress the facts of religion, science must take a back seat and change. If it were up to Mark Shea, religion would take a back seat to science. Be that as it may, the real test is who has the better science, the evolutionists or the Creationists? Mark Shea, contrary to Richard Lewontin, keeps assuming the evolutionists do, but Mark Shea knows next to squat about science and Richard

8

Lewontin has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology. Ironically, the atheist Lewontin is much more honest with the science and his motivations than the Christian Shea. Mark Shea: Now such nuttiness is becoming fake orthodoxy for not a few conservative Catholics who regard the Magisterium as the enemy, who regard the sciences as a liberal plot, and who get most of their formation from crank conspiracy theorists who are Fundamentalist Protestants with a taste for Latin, smells, and bells. R. Sungenis: Mr. Shea has to create enemies, otherwise known as straw men, in order to make it appear that his opponents are on the wrong side of the fence from the get-go. This is done before any scientific arguments are brought to the table. It is classic Mark Shea. But let’s look at the reality. Conservative Catholics do not regard the “Magisterium” as the enemy. They regard liberal elitists, the “know-it-alls” of the world, as the enemy, wherever they are found. Interestingly enough, the only time the “Magisterium” made hard and fast decisions regarding the claims of science was when it decreed, twice in two decades (1616 and 1633), that scientific opinions claiming the Earth went around the sun are wrong, not only because they had no scientific proof (and still don’t), but because Scripture and the Fathers said the opposite. The only thing the “Magisterium” has said about evolution is that it can be studied by Catholics, but also said that it cannot be believed by Catholics since the Magisterium has not decided one way or the other (Humani Generis, 1951). But, of course, elitist know-it-alls like Mark Shea are cock-sure that evolution and long ages are true, so he and his cohorts transgress the very words of the “Magisterium” and decide for themselves that evolution is true. And to condone his disobedience and keep his critics at bay, Mr. Shea will refer to them as “conspiracy theorists.” The real conspiracy monger is Mark Shea. He creates a conspiracy theory that claims his opponents are creating a conspiracy theory. Mark Shea: So we have absurdities like Michael Voris platforming quack science like The Principle and lobbing softballs to geocentrist cranks.

9

R. Sungenis: We can tell Mark Shea doesn’t know any of the science and just wants to blurt out as many insults as his fingers can type. He’s the Don Rickles of Catholicism; the Svengali who tries to intimidate everyone into submission. Anyone who believes something different than what Mr. Shea believes about science (which is not much) is automatically a “crank.” In reality, anyone who calls The Principle “quack science” is himself a quack, especially since the very participants in the movie who previously disallowed any possibility of a geocentric universe, declared in the movie that a geocentric universe is possible based on the scientific evidence with which they were confronted in the movie, even though they preferred not to go in the direction (e.g., Max Tegmark and Lawrence Krauss). So what does this tell us? It tells us the debate is not over, and that when people like Mark Shea insist it is over, they are creating a false narrative for their own agenda. Mark Shea: The logic? Some churchmen five centuries ago accepted geocentrism, therefore it is Sacred Tradition and we have torque our brains into believing that heliocentrism and relativity are liberal (and, by the way, *cough* Einstein *cough* Jewish) conspiracies. R. Sungenis: Notice how Mr. Shea tries to minimize the prestige of the Catholics of “five centuries ago” who accepted geocentrism. He calls them mere “churchmen.” How convenient. This is what someone does when he doesn’t want to the audience to know that the so-called “churchmen” were actually the highest authorities in the Catholic Church, that is, the Pope and his Holy Office. The first pope, Paul V, took the advice of his 11 Consultors (all cardinals and Dominicans), and the advice of his Holy Office led by Robert Bellarmine, that heliocentrism was a “formal heresy” because it denied the clear words of Scripture. Paul V then censored Galileo and gave him an injunction never to teach heliocentrism again. But Galileo disobeyed the injunction and proceeded to write the book, The Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems, which taught heliocentrism. The next pope, Urban VIII, called Galileo to trial and reiterated the “formally heretical” findings of Paul V; declared that Galileo was “vehemently suspect of heresy,” and then punished Galileo for his disobedience. 10

He then sent letters to all the papal nuncios and universities of Europe requiring their obedience to the anti-Copernican decrees officially established by the Catholic Church, under pain of discipline. So much for the “churchmen of five centuries ago” that Mark Shea would rather you forget. He would rather accuse his opponents of being anti-liberal and antisemitic than deal with the historical facts. Somehow Mr. Shea is of the opinion that the Holy Spirit took a vacation “five centuries ago” and, even though Jesus promised he would guide the Church into all truth (Jn 14:16; 16:13), allowed the Church to fall into gross error, even allowing her to call something a “formal heresy” that wasn’t even a doctrine in the first place. But this is a perfect example of the “cafeteria” Catholicism of Mark Shea. He classes the magisterium as mere “churchmen” when it decrees things Shea doesn’t like, but the “infallible Pope” when it say things Shea likes. Mark Shea: Likewise, cranks like from the Kolbe Center for Creation Research are increasingly treated as something beside the fringe group they are. Here is their state of the art scientific and theological institute that single-handedly overturns centuries of science and centuries of theological development by the Church. R. Sungenis: Unfortunately for Mr. Shea, he can’t hold a candle to the shining lights of the members of the Kolbe Center. They are humble to a fault, unlike the pride and arrogance that consistently oozes from the mouth of Mark Shea. More importantly, the Kolbe Center has been studying the issue of Creation and evolution for the last two decades, gathering reams of scientific evidence in dozens of books that show conclusively that evolution cannot be supported by the raw science, just like Richard Lewontin says. This evidence has been gathered and analyzed by a number of Kolbe members who have Ph.D.s in their fields, including genetics, paleontology, embryology, cosmology, biology, chemistry, physics and other disciplines. Conversely, Mr. Shea hasn’t read one of their books or written anything substantive defending his views; has no science background in his education; and refuses to debate the

11

issue in an open and public forum, yet continually cranks out insult after insult on his keyboard against his presumed opponents. Mark Shea: Strangely, they were not invited to the Vatican by Benedict XVI when he held a conference on Creation and Evolution in 2008. R. Sungenis: Pope Benedict XVI does not do the inviting. The inviting is done by the elitist liberals around him, the same ones who run the Pontifical Academy of Science and, since its inception, has disallowed any Creationists in the ranks of its 100-member society, yet accept atheists like Stephen Hawking. As for Benedict XVI’s views on creation and evolution, he has always been on the fence. But in his speech he agrees that the theory of evolution is not a scientifically verified position. He is as aware of the problems with the theory as was his predecessor, Pius XII, especially in pointing out that genetic mutations are mostly negative and thus could not account for the upward progression required by evolution. To put it lightly, Pope Benedict XVI is not as enamored with the theory of evolution as Mark Shea is. Incidentally, since Mr. Shea brought up The Principle and called it “quack science,” it would be good at this point to visit the last words of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he became Pope Benedict XVI, on the topic of geocentrism. In a speech he gave in 1990 in Parma, Italy, the Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith said these amazing words: Today, things have changed. According to Bloch, the heliocentric system—just like the geocentric—is based upon presuppositions that can’t be empirically demonstrated. Among these, an important role is played by the affirmation of the existence of an absolute space; that’s an opinion that, in any event, has been cancelled by the Theory of Relativity. Bloch writes, in his own words: “From the moment that, with the abolition of the presupposition of an empty and immobile space, movement is no longer produced towards something, but there’s only a relative movement of bodies among themselves, and therefore the measurement of that [movement] depends to a great extent on the choice of a body to serve as a point of reference, in this case is it not merely the complexity of calculations that renders the [geocentric] 12

hypothesis impractical? Then as now, one can suppose the earth to be fixed and the sun as mobile.”2 There are literally dozens of other scientists who have admitted the same truth over the last hundred or so years, a few of them as participants in The Principle. But according to the self-presumed expert in these matters, Mark Shea, we can just ignore them. Unfortunately, Mark Shea has a bad habit of calling anything he doesn’t understand, “quack science.” Mark Shea: But in the world of Reactionary social media mini-popes, that only proves that the Deep Science/Deep Church/Deep State Conspiracy has its tentacles everywhere and the only salvation is for Catholics to listen to their favorite social media crank, dismiss all outside the Bubble, and soldier on with Me and My Bible. R. Sungenis: Here we clearly see the motivations of Mr. Shea. They are all political. He is typical of the Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden “holier-than-thou Catholics” who condone heinous sins like abortion and homosexual marriage, but put on public displays of “prayer” for people like Donald Trump to capitulate to their new-world-order policies. Mark Shea: The result is Magical Thinking: the diabolical parody of (ironically) the Catholic doctrine of creation by the Power of the Word. R. Sungenis: The only one guilty of “Magical Thinking” is someone like Mark Shea who thinks that a big explosion billions of years ago developed all by itself into a man. It is the rejection of “Realistic Thinking” that it takes a Divine, allpowerful Being to create a man, with all his parts, at once, just as Genesis 1 says. Not only does Mr. Shea ridicule “Me and My Bible” people who appeal to Scripture for academic truth concerning origins (and do so, obviously, since no human was there to see it), he also ridicules the very essence of creation ex nihilo in which Genesis says that things, in their whole substance, came into immediate existence by the word of God, the very thing our Catholic councils said was Catholic dogma. Here they are: Lateran Council IV: “…who by His own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time created each creature from nothing, spiritual, and corporal, 2

From a speech given in Parma, Italy, March 15, 1990, titled: “The Crisis of Faith in Science,” partly reported in Il Sabato, March 31, 1990, pp. 80ff, and in the Corriere della Sera, March 30, 1990, and cited in 30 Days, January 1993, p. 34 13

namely, angelic and mundane, and finally the human, constituted as it were, alike of the spirit and the body… (1215 AD, Denz. 428). Vatican Council I: If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing…let him be anathema. (1870 AD, Canon 5, Denz. 1805) The “Power of the Word” is what Jesus used to create, instantaneously, wine from water—a carbon based substance from one that didn’t have carbon. It is the same Word that Jesus used to change the bread into his body at the Last Supper, and what priests do by the same Word at every Mass. It is how the priest absolves someone from sin in the confessional. It is same Word which allows a priest to join a man and a woman in holy matrimony, and disallows the word of man to put it asunder. It is the same Word in the baptismal formula that changes a person from a creature of Adam to one of Christ. Our whole Catholic faith is based on the “Power of the Word” to create new things, in their whole substance, at once. But Mark Shea denies this “Power of the Word” and calls it “magical thinking.” So Mr. Shea’s problem is not with Creationism, per se, but with the whole notion that things can be called into being by the Power of the Word, which means that Mark Shea is not the Catholic he claims to be. Mark Shea: Magical thinking insists that we can create alternate reality by the power of the human word known as the Lie. We can simply declare that proven facts don’t exist, that the world is flat if I say it is, that all of reality is simply and solely determined by our will. Civilizations that adopt this way of thinking are doomed. R. Sungenis: The only “Lie” being told is the one from Mark Shea that insists that the chronology of Creation in Genesis 1 is false, and that the “word of man” that declares the Big Bang and evolution is true. Mark Shea thinks that he can “solely determine by his will” his own set of “evolution” facts, even though all of them are unproven ideas of men; that he can dismiss the words of Genesis because he “says” the chronology is all wrong. Civilizations that adopt that way of thinking—trusting the word of man rather than the word of God—are doomed. Mark Shea: You can see it deployed by people like Stalin, shooting “counterrevolutionary weather forecasters” for predicting weather that did not fit his Five Year Plans. You can see it with Hitler, moving around imaginary armies as

14

the Soviets closed in on Berlin. You can see it with climate science denialism. You can see it with nearly everything the Cult of Trump now says. R. Sungenis: And what would Mark Shea rather us have, the Cult of Hilary? Shea’s reference to Stalin and Hitler is nothing more than his typical demagoguery, the ploy of picking the biggest and baddest bogeymen he can find and associating you with them just because you disagree with him. Mark Shea: And you can see it with the false claim that something scientifically wrong magically becomes true if their religion declares it to be so. It can only end in disaster to pit faith against reason this way and it assaults both faith and reason to do so. R. Sungenis: Again, it is Shea who is the liar. No one in Ohio, and no one in the other 49 states dealing with this subject, believes or teaches that “something scientifically wrong magically becomes true if their religion declares it to be so.” They believe and teach that true religion will back up true science, every day, all day. The problem, of course, is that Mr. Shea has already declared by his own “power of the word” that the Big Bang, evolution and long ages are true, and that anyone who disagrees with those theories is a fool. Mark Shea: All truth is God’s truth. That this needs to be said to Catholics– and above all to Catholics who regard themselves as the last best hope of the Tradition–only makes clear how little so many people who call themselves “Traditionalist” actually know of the Tradition. R. Sungenis: If all truth is God’s truth, then why does Mr. Shea refuse to accept God’s inspired truth as it is written in detailed and precise chronology in Genesis 1? The Tradition tells us that the early Catholic Church accepted this chronology as literally as it was written, and none of them were seeking to replace that chronology with evolutionary models, even though the Greeks before them were pushing evolution-type scenarios.3

3

See my paper: “A Critique of Catholic Answers Tract, ‘Creation and Genesis’” at robertsungenis.org. I show that all of the Fathers of the Catholic Church, as well as all the medievals, accepted the precise chronology of creation written in Genesis 1. Of the three dozen or so Fathers and medievals who wrote on Creation, there were only two possible deviations: Origen who allegorized almost everything in Scripture, and Augustine who, although he had some spiritual interpretations, tried his best to interpret Genesis literally. Even among those two possible exceptions, no one in the Patristic period taught that the days of Genesis for the Creation were any more than six literal days. 15

In the end, Genesis 1 is the real test for those who claim to follow “God’s truth.” But this is exactly where most modern men fail, since they can’t get over the fact that Genesis 1 puts the Earth first and the stars last in the order of the cosmos. Those who don’t accept it as written, do so at their own peril. As Jesus said, “you shall know them by their fruits.”

Robert Sungenis December 18, 2019

16