I'm Tom menya and you're listening to CVS podcast [Music] a two-way q a with David Ross and Tom Benya [Music] this is part one of the five part Series in which David and Tom discuss each other's questions on matters of theological and cultural concern foreign q a part one questions on the Big Bang and monotheism [Music] Big Bang Age of the Earth Dave what is your view on the Big Bang and the age of the Earth Big Bang is hogwash and the age of the Earth is roughly 7 000 years the whole universe roughly seven thousand years okay so what leads you to think this well I don't feel familiar with my uh content on my podcast but I talk about it a lot the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is what led me to believe that Fiat creation uh less than 10 000 years ago is the case and there are not millions of years of disease and death proceeding Adam and Eve I never believed in evolution even as an atheist for 25 years I never believed in evolution I suspended judgment on the question it repulsed me the idea that I am an ape repulsed me I never accepted that and uh when I became a Christian I stumbled upon the idea that there's a connection between the dogmas which I give complete Ascent of mind and will to the doctors of the Catholic church that I embraced in 2009 there's a connection between that and the basic metaphysics of these so-called evolution theories and that evolution is philosophically untenable and that this sort of avalanche of uh Discovery came about just when I discovered the connection between the metaphysics and the dogmas of the church and the Dogma that did it for me was the Immaculate Conception okay now uh let's pretend for a minute that I'm not a Catholic okay that I am a typical World instructed believer in evolution and this believer of scripture how would you go about convincing me of your position Principle of Proportional Causality the principle of proportionate causality you can't give what you don't have so you can't get life from non-life first of all so abiogenesis is part of the question metaphysically because of the principle of proportion and causality and you can't go from a fish or an ape to a human because there are more Perfections in the human than there are in the fish or in the mitochondria and a less perfect being cannot be the cause of a more perfect being and the Perfections in order to subscribe to the notion of Perfections you have to subscribe to the metaphysical notion of natures is there a human nature if you believe in human nature that it's distinct from and more perfect than an ape nature then you will reject outright all forms of evolution period so you don't need religion you need Aristotelian metaphysics that's all you need um the thing is now I'm just gonna play devil's advocate here why 7 000 years or whatever you say that's the tradition of the church okay if you go back to the early church fathers they all knew about these Notions of Eternal past or long great ages they know about Hinduism and the claims of Hinduism they knew about all this and they rejected it I don't know if their basis was metaphysical or divinely inspired or was the dogmas or there was no Dogma conception at that time that was explicitly declared defined but they had the Dogma that God created a good world that was well defined and it's not a good world if there's millions of years of disease and Death Before Adam and Eve okay I hear your argument loud and clear and I'm pretty much on the same page maybe a quibble about the the details of the length of time and the actual age I will quibble with that but I am in agreement with your principles now my problem is how are you going to get over this hurdle of well to be frank everything you said to me which makes sense in essence is still going to come across as hogwash to a person steeped in materialist instruction the Achilles heel of the materialist is Free Will if they're willing to admit that they're an ape they're also willing to admit that they do not have free will if you press any ape on this issue I never use ad hominem attacks with these people I use ads okay because they're Apes yeah so these people are what I call Monkey Bots because they believe they're Apes with no free will Monkey Bar okay so if you don't believe in Free Will guess what happens to your reasoning process it becomes mechanical it's automatic yes so kiss bye bye to your love of science because your love of science is arbitrary it's just one configuration of matter energy among others there's no basis there's no philosophical basis much less a scientific basis for saying this configuration of brain cells is better than that configuration of brain cells so when an atheist calls me a doesn't mean anything has no weight has no value has no impact it's not an insult it doesn't mean anything it is what it is because they're nominalists that hurt they don't believe in the human nature they don't believe in universals they only believe this configuration is what it is and that configuration is what it is and when they call you stupid or uneducated or unscientific or anti-vaxxer or whatever it means nothing it has no weight it has no value so the materialist position undermines itself they're sawing off the branch in which they think they're sitting and so they they can't say anything with any meaning ever Natural Selection what I would say to that as a Catholic who is trying to reach my materialist brothers and sisters out there is that I do believe there is one part of the science in Darwin that is correct and that's natural selection the big error is that they conflate the two the natural selection with the Origin of Species with the origin of life and they're two different things and even Darwin made that explicitly clear uh so that uh that um life forms do change according to the necessities of the environment this is called natural selection this contradicts in no way whatsoever God's creation uh also to the problem of the age of the Universe I will not attempt to speculate how old the universe or the Earth is but I would say with quite a lot of conviction that the manifestation of reality of the universe and of life on Earth and who knows elsewhere happened quite suddenly so I liken existence to something that's a kind of an inevitability in the way that an acorn becomes an oak tree and I see life on Earth as something that manifests that suddenly relatively speaking I don't know how suddenly can be defined whether it was in a single day or a mere thousand years but in cosmological uh frame of time it happened pretty damn quickly like something emerging from an egg or a seed so this is my view of it I think that the theory of gradualism and chance has very little to go on it doesn't stand on Solid Ground because um no one was there to see it first of all and secondly the idea that things came out of a single cell and then so what happened what caused the Single Cell these are conjectures these are not founded on the real the principles of scientific inquiry these are philosophies uh so that's how I would try to approach someone who is stubbornly clinging to this theory of gradualism and uh the idea of Life evolving from nothing or very little by chance it doesn't seem to be a game of chance to me for the reasons I stated so Cold Dead Universe I want to say something about I want to challenge you on the potential of the cold dead universe that may have been very hot but I'm just using the word cold in the sense there's no life the cold dead Universe if the Big Bang is true and the big bang by the way is uh proof of God first and foremost even if yes if it is the case yeah I'm not hugely antagonistic towards I just don't think that it works and I'm explaining to you why okay it has to do with act and potential so there's no potential in God God is pure act but his creatures have potential to actualize and human nature is a real thing ape nature is a different thing Apes have potential for ape things humans have potential for human things and the difference between an Essence and an accident is another important Aristotelian distinction and we have transubstantiation in the Catholic church as a Dogma that dogmatizes the Aristotelian concept which is a god-given truth but Aristotle discovered this truth of hylomorphism there is Essence and there are accidents okay and Aristotle knew that only in essence can cause another Essence and the human Essence can only cause a human Essence because of the yes principle of proportionate causality so if you want to say that there is a God and that things change from non-living to living and from less complex life forms to humans then you're going to have to explain how there was a potential in these molecules which we're not even living to become Not only living but to become human and so this violates many metaphysical principles not least of which is the principle of proportion of causality which I keep harping on about but it's very important to understand this so the idea of potential the potential of a bunch of molecules to become man what they call molecule to man evolution is completely absurd it's completely unfounded there's no philosophy ever that has made any foundation for that belief it is just a religious belief it's just a story it's just a fantasy and it's a satanic atheistic fantasy at that so that's why if you want to invoke God and to say that basically it's the secular view of evolution plus God and miracles it's going to be a lot of Miracles that you're forcing on this atheistic satanic story to make it work because the metaphysics isn't there to support the story so you're going to have to invoke God at every step to bring life from non-life and to bring more and more complex life so that's my argument against your vision okay some sort of seed that's growing with the potential because the acorn seed I'm sorry to tell you it is an old it is an oak in potentiate and it has the potential to be coming up that's why it hasn't opened but that's what I meant but that's what I meant by the the uh inevitability of of a particular seed to become what it's going to be um that it's not going to become something else yeah right [Music] how do you know that monotheism is true how do you know that there's one and only one true God and that he is omniscient omnipotent omnipresent that he is infinite in every pure perfection which means every Perfection that it's better to have and not to have because a circle is perfect but God is not a circle because it's not better to be a circle than not and so this is the definition of a pure perfection and God is the source of every pure perfection he he is every pure perfection and all of the attributes of God are identical among themselves and identical with but so how is it that you believe in that Why do you believe in God God and not some other false god why is it and how do you justify that belief to yourself okay uh well I will um ask you and our listeners to forgive me if it sounds like I'm beating around the bush but I will begin with the um the problem that I have with this uh very popular atheist versus theist debate uh circuit that's going around with the new atheists and I think that unfortunately uh to varying degrees but most of the theologians that uh that step up to that later every bit as foolish as the atheists because they're walking into a trap um they're the focus here and no one wins this argument uh you know maybe maybe some of the better debates converted some hard-hearted people maybe I and I'll I'll give it that who knows I don't know um but I think that it probably does more harm than good and it's for this reason the debate is framed in a way more or less framed in a way that misses the point and what uh this is for a modern audience that is looking for a scientific proof of God and uh and they will assess the power of the argument based on this uh on these sets of parameters at what constitutes a a logical and scientific uh evidence-based conclusion uh this is no way to approach God now I could refer uh our listeners to uh the arguments uh of Aristotle uh I could refer them to Thomas Aquinas it's all out there if you care to look into it there are very powerful logical arguments uh that uh lead to a compelling conclusion that there is a singular Eternal immaterial Divine source of everything um but I'm not going to try to persuade my listener and I'm not going to enter into this logical debate um because this is the same as sort of Imagine having public debates about love is love real and trying to approach it from a scientific angle and then so you'd have neurologists coming in talking about certain brain chemistry and what what's activated when the person feels this or that and it's like well love seems to be centered in this part of the brain and of course you know when we study the brain we're looking at uh uh we're we're focused on the uh the physical the senses okay so the feelings the things about pain and pleasure uh we're looking at uh if we can see any insights into psychology uh uh anger uh repressed guilt what what part of the brain is activated here but everything sort of reduced to chemicals and feelings and um and this is um this is all fine and good in its own place uh but if you're trying to get to the actual essence of life and the truth of God you will never find it through these means um you cannot prove love love is predicated on trust and faith period uh love is sacrificial if it's not sacrificial It Isn't Love at all and and so God um even though there are some compelling logical uh arguments that suggest a source that is immaterial to all being um and fine if you want to look at it I know of many people that started that way as as real Skeptics uh C.S Lewis is an example who came out of atheism through study and meditation on logical arguments for God but it didn't transform him until he really took that on and took the leap of faith and experienced God so you cannot love something logically that you can logically come to the conclusion that this and that is true but then if you do not take that leap from Mere uh knowledge or recognition of of logical constructs if you don't take that leap to a deeper understanding and therefore a deeper love of the thing itself then it really doesn't count for much so Christ's first commandment is to love God because all virtues and all Pathways to full spiritual health is predicated on this first commandment to love God with your whole heart your whole mind your whole strength and your whole being so long uh answer but to finish with the short answer um that I am uh convinced of the arguments first of all it's also intuitive uh I've never believed that uh that the universe is nearly matter uh certainly not chance and uh I think it's laughable to think that the Universe was a collaboration of Gods uh this God does this and the other God so um no um to me it just uh intuitively I I I and I know that's no excuse we're looking for how do you know God exists um this is really how I want to wrap it up you have to experience love to know it's real you have to experience the supernatural to know that it's real you cannot uh you can maybe argue yourself closer to it and then take that leap but you will never be able to logically argue to someone who is uh hardened their heart against this idea you will never get them there logically unless they they really listen with an open mind and maybe you can push them closer to that that threshold whereby they might take that leap on their own and experience it for themselves so uh so either there is absolutely no God and no spiritual reality at all but if there is it has to be one Divine eternal immaterial source of all being of perfect truth perfect Beauty perfect Justice perfect mercy and perfect and total love Catholic dogmas there are three dogmas that come to mind and these are Catholic dogmas these are all given Eternal unchangeable truths about the existence of God the first Dogma is that we can know God by the light of natural reason and we can know in particular through causality okay that's number one the second Dogma is that that knowledge is not sufficient we need to have faith that we can know with certainty yeah but it's not sufficient we have to have faith there you go it's the same thing with it's the difference between hiring a prostitute and getting married okay you can know the prostitute in that kernel way it's not the same thing as the loving self-giving self-sacrificial love of marriage it's not the same thing that's right so we we can know God and we have to know God we have to know him and love him in the right way which it requires Faith you cannot go to heaven without Supernatural faith hope and love that's right yeah and then once you're in heaven it's just love there's no more faith that's right there's no more hope the consummation of that marriage that's it precisely [Music]