what's up everybody thanks for joining the stream tonight i've got with me catholic versus david how you doing dave i'm doing very well thank you uh thank you so much uh converse contender really nice to meet you see your face finally and uh thanks for having me on yeah no problem um i really have been enjoying your content for sure i know a lot of um there's a lot of protestants that um maybe wouldn't enjoy it so much obviously from the catholic perspective but i actually i one thing i really like about david is his sincerity right i feel like you're super like you're really sincere uh and genuine i get that from your discussions i feel like whenever i hear you have a conversation i don't feel like you're trying to win or anything like that um but rather uh you you're trying to just have the conversation and find out um where the other person is coming from yeah and then also i feel like you do actually do really well so i could tell that you're you're pretty bright why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself uh where you're from like you don't have to go into as much detail as you want but also how did you come about the beliefs that you have and maybe just lay out a little background for us sure i'll give a super quick version and you can uh come begging for more um basically i was raised in a very liberal protestant uh denomination in canada the most popular denomination in canada is the united church of canada and they have atheist ministers today officially you might look up greta look up grete of osprey she's the one who spearheaded the right to have atheist ministers in the united church of canada so it's sounding like this is not going to be a super short version if i'm already rambling this much about my childhood but basically i was raised protestant i lost my faith at age 14 i had a beautiful dream about jesus i you know i said my prayers before bed as usual at age 14 had a beautiful dream about jesus and woke up and said i've lost my faith i've lost my faith in jesus christ and of course i've lost my faith in god and the whole shebang and i was an atheist i was i was entering into puberty and the rebellion began i painted my room black listened to crazy music got into crime uh drugs i would i would have liked to have gotten into sex also but i was too shy so it was more just uh embarrassing masturbation but um a lot of guys go through that so i like to be open about that because it's something that guys don't talk about a lot chronic masturbator for years and years and years and decades and uh so that was embarrassing but you know a lot of frustration i went into crime like i said i ended up leaving home 17 joined the mafia and just had a really crappy you know mediocre life and then i always i always love philosophy and i love truth so i was reading a lot i i sort of settled into a hippie-dippy pantheistic nice sky agnosticism for most of my life but at age 39 i'd been studying philosophy pretty intensely as a hobby and i discovered i started at the beginning of the western tradition and i just plowed my way through an overview of all the different schools and uh you know i fell in love with the the pre-socratics and socrates especially in plato and to a lesser extent uh i put up with aristotle um but then when i when i went through you know neoplatonism i went through the the western history of of philosophy by the time i got to modern times with rene descartes i was a satanist i was an explicit atheistic satanist i was also a herd solipsist meaning that i thought i was the only being because i passed through all sorts of idealism in my reading and i ended up questioning uh you know the existence of the material world and the other and so i was a hard solipsist and that was very a sad and lonely place to be um but rene descartes pulled me out he's not an orthodox catholic but he did believe in some sort of god and uh he firmly believed that and he pulled me out of solipsism in a very nonchalant way with a waving of the hand of course god exists of course he's good don't be silly and that that was enough to pull me out of solipsism and to believe in god uh god the father i was desperate at that point to find god the father anyway so uh long story short i ended up being a generic monotheist for a couple of weeks but a book fell into my hands the confessions of saint augustine and that made me fall in love with saint augustine first and foremost and then his christian religion and i said it's the same god anyway i may as well worship the christian god even though i don't believe in jesus christ the incarnation the trinity but a monk walked into my store and i said can i talk to god with you and he invited me to the monastery and he gave me private instruction because he brought me to a mass and i said i want to worship god in your mass even though i'm not christian and he said sure i'll give you instruction and if you accept the teachings you can become a christian and if not no pressure you can walk away and you can become a muslim or whatever because that's what i thought i was on my way to being a muslim so that's the that's the long and the short version wow it's very interesting story you know it's uh similar to me in some aspects you know i mean not all but obviously i went through some rebellion um i didn't have a whole lot i mean whenever i was young i had um i didn't i don't mean i didn't have a whole lot of rebellion i meant to say that i don't have i didn't have a whole lot of religion whenever i was young actually what if you look at the picture my twitter um here's a picture of me can you see that yeah there's a picture of me as a little guy how old are you i was uh i don't even know probably in ninth grade uh okay i've got skateboard pictures all over the wall i've got a picture of blink 182 up there and uh a guitar and a bunch of amps and stuff and that's kind of like that was my uh my i guess you could say what i wanted to do you know whenever i was younger i just wanted to skateboard and play guitar and that kind of thing and and while i was rebellious um i actually wasn't too bad you know i wasn't i kind of i always had in the back of my mind that that whenever i was younger my grandma had me in church was giving me candy to keep me quiet i always had the back of my mind like she was always like the person i looked up to so i always thought man you know i don't want to get straight off too far from from her you know because i felt like she was kind of like grounding but i did get go through a period where i was not a christian and so i can i can relate to you but it's not like you went so far away way farther than i ever went to all the way into solipsism and you know i want to ask you about a couple of things you said um one you said that you joined the mafia i wonder i wonder about that can you talk about that well i i you know my at age 17 i dropped out of high school my father said look you can you can live here but you either have to you know go back to school or start paying rent so i just i just moved out you know i was not interested in school and uh i dropped out with like a year and a half remaining or something in high school and uh so i was always close with my sister so i went and lived with my sister and she took care of me and so she was like my second mom and uh really generous and giving to me and i was just a selfish little brat you know and uh eventually she started saying well maybe you should get a job you know so i uh i looked in the newspaper and uh in the local city and uh the city that i'd moved to with my sister and it was like a sales job and i went down and they interviewed me and they gave me the job the same day and i i worked that week i worked three uh four hour days so it's three times four 12 hours i made close to 900 doing sales because it was a complete scam you know just ripping people off ripping off businesses so nothing glamorous but i had the gift of the guy when i was good at sales and so i made a lot of money uh very quickly but my nature is i don't really uh like working so if i made a bunch of money i would just slack off and not go to work and just bum around play pools hanging out with pool halls and stuff like that i didn't hang out with them off you guys like some once in a while they would uh come down from montreal which is where i currently live and so it was the montreal mafia that was running it and uh they brought me at a certain point they brought me into a an outfit in montreal and i went to toronto i went to vancouver i moved around i got uh i got arrested once but the cops felt sorry for me so i was so young and uh you know i had rented out a room in a hotel uh like a conference center and i was like ripping people off in the comp conference center and the cops came and said look just uh you got to change your lifestyle because you're going to end up in jail so uh i you know i had been running around for a couple of years doing this sort of thing and i thought okay maybe it's time for a change so i went back to school completed my high school went to university and uh sort of i didn't become completely on the straight and narrow but uh took a step in the right direction all right do you have uh did you finish your degree no i i dropped out because i met my wife and we moved to europe and traveled around and wow yeah europe well i kind of did the same thing i dropped out i'm just now i'm 31 years old now i'm just now finishing my degree okay cool yeah i'm just now able to go back on so but yeah that's really interesting so where you you lived in europe for a little while yeah in greece and in belgium and in england scotland uh just uh traveled around we were art artists you know right that's nice it's just a fun lifestyle that's interesting you said that uh you you fell into solipsism for a while so yeah you you basically thought you were the only mind that actually existed yeah the only the only being you know the only being interesting it's interesting that you as a psalm says i don't know if you ever thought about this how arrogant that position actually is but like you've created in your mind you've created every most beautiful piece of artwork there is every great song you created it all in your mind yeah well i mean solipsism makes the solipsist god right so it is it's the most popular religion in the world it's just most people have a have a soft solipsism where they haven't really dug into it too deeply but they they do think most people do in some on some level i think uh worship themselves adore themselves serve themselves makes make sacrifices for themselves uh self-seeking self-serving it's a love of self unto contempt of god and the only way you can do that is if you think you're god because if you know that you're not god that god is god you're not gonna you're not gonna serve uh the idol that is yourself right well that's an interesting way of putting it yeah do you agree with you there so i would just say that um um is there anything else along your path that really helped structure you like what what got you from there to catholicism um well it's uh which part do you want to zoom in on like the the solipsism to theism was in a heartbeat it was reading rene descartes i think therefore i am right um i guess from yeah i guess from there to catholicism is it just because you're reading the saints and and the um the early church fathers or no did it have did it have something to do with uh an experience you had no my my perspective is unique i've never heard it before but i'll share it with you again even though my my listeners are sick of hearing it but i'll repeat it again for you um i was compelled to worship god publicly and this was counterintuitive because i hated ritual i hated religion i hated god you know as an atheist i hated all of the uh display of ceremony and the ritual and rights and uh you know certainly the catholic mass is the last thing i would want to attend as an atheist because i just i hated the catholic church above all religions you know among all religions i hated christianity the most and within christianity i hated catholicism the most and i i hated all the ritual and all that but i was compelled when i found god the father i was compelled to worship him publicly i can't explain to you why but i just had to it's like i guess it's kind of like when you're in love you want to shout it from the rooftops you want to tell everyone when you're in love right so i think it's sort of it's a it's analogous to that and um i wanted to worship god publicly and i said look i i'm a generic monotheist i think islam is probably my final destination because christianity i hate it and it's stupid and overly complicated and the trinity what the hell is that uh you know one plus one plus one equals one that's from morons only and um you know islam i i was watching a lot of uh uh videos on youtube about islam and i really liked it you know i really i've i know i know muslims i love muslims i still to this day i'm close with muslims here in montreal i love the muslim people and there's a lot of good in their culture and their religion i know that's not politically correct for a lot of people to say that um there's a lot of controversy around that that topic on the left on the right all this nonsense about islam right um but uh and for the record i'm neither left nor right i'm i'm a christian okay but um i thought i was heading towards islam and uh i just said well i want to worship god i'm in a christian culture and i'm in a province of canada which is catholic and from what little reading i had done um you know you know having read the history of the church uh inadvertently through the history of western philosophy and then having read um just history generally and uh having dug a little bit into christianity i knew that uh catholicism historically had the best claim to be the the fullness of the christian religion no offense to anyone that's not catholic but that was my opinion from my reading and so i said well look i don't believe in christianity but i i want to worship god publicly so i'm just going to join uh christianity and uh and then i'll find out which religion is true later but at least i'll be a christian in a christian world and it's going to be a lot easier to worship god that way and then i'll sort of make that painful transition into into islam later once i've uh you know got my feet wet with pr worshipping and praising god and once i have educated myself about uh which of the three monotheistic religions really has the best claim uh to be the one true religion so that's the short the long and the short of it okay interesting you know um because i did i didn't really have that experience you know whenever i first became a christian again like i i say again because i feel like i wasn't a christian necessarily when i was a young man right because i mean i don't know if you can really grow up being a christian when you're seven eight nine years old you know i mean some people say yeah but um i i guess um whenever i really started believing and looking into um christianity um i i guess that that was kind of the opposite of my take like i had grown up in church and things like that um as a young man until i was a little bit older and so i didn't think i want to go worship in a church you know i thought you know i find myself justifying not going through christ's words like where he says don't go pray in the synagogues like the hypocrites do right and things like this you know don't don't pray in public and don't don't have the best seats in the synagogue and you know all these things where the prey in your closet you know and i found myself taking these words and saying that sounds more reasonable that sounds like something i you know i pray in my home i you know i'm i'm so that's interesting that you that you that you went that way that you desired yeah i just wanna i just wanna let you know that uh it wasn't an either or for me it was both and okay there's there i i actually prefer the the quiet time at home praying to um you know i gotta like put on clothes and go outside in the freezing snow to go to church i mean yeah it's refreshing and once i'm there i'm very happy to be at church but i mean i'm i'm an introvert i'm a loner i'm you know eccentric i'd rather just be at home praying alone you know it's it's it suits me better but there is a component to my faith journey that i have to do this public worship is very important and it turns out it turns out that it's very important for the church too if you read the catechism of the catholic church one quarter of the book is dedicated to the public prayer and another quarters dedicated to private prayer okay and then you've got another quarter about morality and another quarter about the ten commandments what do we believe so it's an interesting breakdown that's pretty much that's pretty much how i came as a generic monotheist to christianity i already had that basic breakdown of four quarters like that pretty much that represented my uh my outlook intuitively anyway what well interesting um yeah so i have a few friends that are routinely on my shows that show that um are catholic well one is um a catholic named dry apologist are you familiar with him no okay well he's routinely on my show good friend of mine and then i have another person that's on my show a lot uh nicholas strode now he's not a catholic anymore um he is a theist now right and he basically just takes his own experience with god as a um you know as his kind of proof for god or his you know he just uses his experience he doesn't but it's so funny that you'll be talking to him and and and if you don't hold up like the cat like like i don't hold to a lot of the traditions yeah and he'll be like what why don't you hold to the traditions you know like you got to do that like that's part of the thing why would you not hold to this you know and we start talking about solo scriptura and these kind of things and and uh and the more i think about it i guess i'm not solo scriptura in the sense that i look at nature as revelation right and so i look at both what nature and the revelation that god gave but i don't put a whole lot of my confidence in the popes or church fathers right and uh i know that you as a catholic you you take the all of the catholic um you think that the pope is the vicar of christ that they're all authoritative and that they can trace their lineage all the way back yeah so why don't you tell us a little bit about that and tell and and maybe elaborate on why i should take the traditions more seriously you know well it all has to do with uh the basic underlying issue that i'd like to press with you and with every non-catholic christian is authority where do you get the authority to say this is the canon of scripture where do you get the authority to interpret scripture where do you get the authority to say that this tradition is valid the other one's invalid uh to say that this council was ecumenical and that one wasn't like where where do you get the authority i mean i get it from the church right and so i this is the underlying authority i mean i i'm a bit of an oddball um among catholics i mean it's not like i represent the quote-unquote normal average catholic i'm a bit of a weirdo and that's um you know that's on me as a character defect but um you know i'm a young earth creationist which is very odd these days i'm uh you know i i but i believe the church obliges us to believe that that's that's my interpretation of tradition i'm not gonna i'm not going to push it too hard i mean i push it i do push it adamantly but only because i'm excited by it i mean if you're a catholic and you don't believe in young earth creationism if you believe in some sort of theistic evolution i think it's absurd and i think that tradition and even pure reason and philosophy can show that it's untenable it's completely untenable so let's start there yeah sure um so first of all like there are catholic apologists that are old earth creationists older frictionists yes yeah like i believe uh if i'm remembering correctly i believe trent horn yeah maybe one of those uh dinesh de souza may or may not be i can't remember specifically i was thinking he was but i could be wrong about that i should say um what do you think about them like i don't see i don't recall any dogma of the catholic church that says that you're not allowed to believe in the the old earth position there there's no explicit dogma saying um for example the eve was created from adam's side okay but there's so much tradition that i think it's i think it's uh i think it's a traditional teaching that can't be overturned certainly not by some offhand comment by a recent pope you know at the uh pontifical uh whatever it's called the pontifical academy of sciences like just some offhand comment that during a speech at the pontifical uh academy of sciences that's not going to overturn two thousand years worth of tradition and uh you know in cyclicals by popes they talk about eve being formed from adam's side and this sort of thing and uh the iconography and uh you know there's so much even in the liturgy uh in the liturgies of the catholic church we have reference to the earth being well under 8 000 years old and stuff like that there's a lot of tradition so um i mean and there are dogmas there are infallible dogmas that support young earth creationism and which make old earth creationism untenable one of the one of them is that god created a good world right and that sin and uh the evil entered the world through sin original sin and these are antennae these are completely incompatible with old earth creationism uh from what i've understood um and then there's that uh famous um dogma infallible dogma that the human soul is the form of the human body that that makes absolutely impossible any sort of um um evolution of the human body from a non-human parent it's absolutely impossible and there's some misconceptions in the catholic church they think oh well in you know in 1950 or whatever it was uh pope so and so i forget who it was maybe pope pius xii uh or some i can't remember the dates and the exact popes but recently someone said uh maybe was leo the 13th i'm not sure but someone said uh let's examine the possibility that the that adam's body uh was created out of pre-existing living matter right but there were many many caveats on that many cautions were expressed in this papal bull or whatever it was encyclical and it wasn't a free-for-all it was one very narrow and specific form of special transformism over against special creation i believe in special creation boom from the dust adams made boom from the rib eve is made boom you know and like uh god you know he he might have you know if it's six literal days i'm not fully committed to that but it seems reasonable if it's six literal days and i made this he made that he made the other thing he made the humans whatever and uh special transformism uh says that it's a very narrow form of theistic evolution that talks about how the body was molded by god out of pre-existing living matter and that particular pope in history i'll have to look up who it was said that we can investigate this but we need to always um we are not allowed to treat evolution any form of evolution as an established fact and we have to always submit to the final um teaching of the church you know the approval of the church or the the teaching of the church so it was a very very narrow scope that was given to a very very narrow form of theistic evolution and but people have gone to town in the catholic church and they've just given themselves license to believe in all kinds of wild things that don't agree with scripture and with tradition and i think the reason they're doing that is because it's just embarrassing to look like a complete tin hat wearing uh when we have all this fancy science today that everyone's on board everyone everyone's completely convinced that the consensus in biology and cosmology and everything is overwhelming and that there's absolutely no way that we can believe in a young earth but i uh i ha i subscribe to a hierarchy in the sciences where god is science itself capital s and then there is uh you know divine revelation and then there's theology based on that and then there's philosophy and then there's uh natural science beneath that so i don't get excited about natural science i get excited about god revelation theology philosophy and natural science is mildly interesting but i don't get excited about it and i certainly don't bow down to it the way a lot of catholics unfortunately seem to be doing today here well um thanks so much for that answer and uh so i guess there's a lot of stuff there i'd like to um talk about um first i guess i would say that i can see why you would come about it the way you do um i feel like and i've said this before on my show that i feel like um a lot of times when people are against uh an old earth it's because they think that people are trying to not um that people are trying to justify modern science in light or the the bible in light of modern science and that people are are not keeping true to the word so you mentioned the sixth day you mentioned the traditions and you mentioned the six days so uh i don't know if you're familiar but um a lot of the catholic and protestant uh theologians that hold to an old earth they uh typically cite augustine because or augustine however you want to say um because he actually said um now i don't necessarily agree with the way he's coming about it but he said this may not be six literal days because the sun wasn't created till the fourth day and so he he gave this kind of um he gave some some room there and he's not just you know some modern day bishop obviously you know and so he gave some room there for people to go maybe he's right about that and but then the other the other question comes up is is when you're looking at literature you want to ask um what is what are they trying to say literally and what are are we interpreting it literally or literalistically so what i mean by that is that there could be a reading where you're taking something literally for example if christ says i am the door does he mean that he's a door literally well yeah he does in a way right but if you mean literalistically as in every component that the text says is the exact thing that he means yeah then you're gonna take it out of its context but somebody could do the same thing and go well hold on a second but let's not try and uh water it down maybe you know maybe he was a door or something you know what i mean i'm just saying like that that's some of the um the rationale can i interject here for a second just to make a very uh important distinction i did not come to young earth creationism through scripture uh as saint augustine famously said uh i would not even believe in scripture were not for the authority the holy roman catholic church so i came to young earth creationism via the infallible dogma that there is one and only one immaculate conception so adam because he was sinless when he was created by god he hadn't fallen yet so he was sinless so if he were in the womb of some beast he would have been necessarily immaculately conceived so that's what triggered me to say okay there's only one immaculate conception that's a dogma of the church and so therefore uh adam was not conceived in the womb of a beast now i've since uh you know i've since come to stretch my mind to the point where i could find a solution where uh adam was conceived in the womb of a beast but he was still not technically an immaculate conception because uh because of the the the we're in a different world now like we're in a fallen world now that's what gives the immaculate conception its meaning and so you know pre-fall and post-fall they're two different uh contexts and so we can't we can't make that we can't we can't rule out the fact that he was conceived in the womb of a beast but since um having my ears perked by that dogma and digging into young earth creationism i've discovered uh these other dogmas which don't explicitly out rule old earth creationism but which imply they have logical implications which i think are uh very clearly uh incompatible with any form of atheistic evolution and then like i said looking at the iconography of the church consistently looking at the liturgy of the church looking at the tradition of the church and the the overwhelming weight of authority and the authoritative and infallible pronouncements uh about the literal historical meaning of the first 11 chapters of genesis it's it's unbelievable i mean it's it's like there's a mountain of weight on my side of the of this question and a few a handful of ambiguous comments by a few recent popes on the other hand it's really embarrassing if you start to look at it that way objectively and so that's why i continue to be a young earth creationist but it had nothing to do with reading genesis and saying oh i've got i'm going to like use private judgment to interpret this and i'm going to take it all literalistically and that's why i'm young earth creationist no i think that's absolutely ridiculous i i i would not believe in the scriptures at all where not for the authority of the holy roman catholic church and that's why i'm a catholic that's and that's why i emphasize authority so strongly and uh um but uh yeah i guess i'll end that my thought there okay sure so um obviously i mean i've even used um um augustine's quote before you say that like well maybe genesis wasn't talking about a literal six you know day period but maybe what this is getting us into is the more deeper or more foundational question about tradition rather than about a specific like that so let's talk about tradition and um a lot of my catholic friends are very heavy on catholic tradition uh as as a as a fact most would believe that the pope is actually infallible right that there's an infallible rule of the pope the stand-in for god we take as well he's the victory of the god man jesus christ uh but you you need to understand i hope you do already understand i hope your listeners and watchers do understand that infallibility is a negative power it's like the pope is a human he's fallible he's a sinner but when he goes to teach something for all the faithful to to believe he will be prevented boom by the holy spirit from teaching error concerning faith and morals um there are four manifestations of infallibility in the in the holy roman catholic church one of them is the ex-catholic statements where the pope acts without the consent of the church so the assumption of mary is one example the immaculate conception is another then we have the ordinary magisterium of the church and then we have ecumenical councils of the church and then we have the sense of the faithful the census fidelium which is a passive form of infallibility but it's a form of infallibility nonetheless it says that whenever i as a faithful catholic believe and regurgitate the dogmas of the church i can't i can't be wrong and whatever whatever the entire church from the pope all the way down to the little do we be catholic like myself whatever we unanimously believe cannot be wrong so that's a form of that's a form of infallibility that's manifest in the church at all times now if you if you try to dig into that and examine that too closely you're going to end up with some paradoxes like well how how is it that every catholic that i've met disagrees about almost everything i mean that's that's a fact that's a manifest fact i've never met anyone on the planet that agrees completely with me about anything that was when i was an agnostic when i was an atheist when i was a satanist when i was a generic monotheist and now that i'm a catholic people don't agree unanimously right so uh if you zoom in too closely you're gonna run into some paradox there but i believe because the church teaches me that it's a fact that the census fidelium is that form of infallibility i believe it i don't understand it but i think there's a truth there that will be revealed by god at the general judgment okay um yeah so um that's an interesting take and and i guess what i would ask is um so one of my big questions is do you believe that all of the early church popes or for for the listeners like the term church fathers the term father is pope that's the truth well the term is a term for church fathers like the early church fathers were called the early church popes really now i know catholicism uh as in roman catholicism differs on that okay as in their pope itself there is only one pope the bishop of rome that's the victor of god yeah but i'm saying the term of papa father yeah father father right exactly so whenever i speak of the because sometimes you'll see in older writings they'll refer to the an early church pope a lot of times they just mean an early church father like okay you know tertullian or somebody like that where you might not necessarily think is a pope right in that way so do you think that the early church fathers also hold uh because they're part of the tradition yeah that leads up the chain of custody yeah do you think that that their words have the same type of uh i guess uh veracity yeah yeah it's a it's it's a it's a teaching of the church that they cannot air when they're when they are when there's an overwhelming consensus so again that's if you zoom in too closely you're going to find well you know what exactly is a consensus because it's hard to find 100 right um but it's it's a principle of the church that if the majority of the church fathers agree on something then we can't uh we have to accept that you know there is a lot of weight on the consensus the consensus of their early church fathers and yeah i i wanted to say something about um the popes but i can't remember you prompted a question but it'll come to me as you continue uh okay with your questions so yeah i guess my question was um what do we do when they differ so for example some of the early church fathers they thought the book of enoch was holy scripture yeah and um i would say that i think i would say i would have to make sure but from the scholar that i listened to on the early church fathers i think they would the majority would say that the deuterocannon was not in the cannon yeah what do you think about three i'm talking about before 325 obviously yeah yeah yeah well there's a there i think the best examples are things like arianism where it dominated the bishops the bishops of the church were dominated by the heresy of arianism and then once it was um condemned as a heresy then it draws that line in the sand like you want to be a catholic you got to get on this side of that line i mean there's just there's no other way to to to describe the un you know the organic development of catholic doctrine it's like once that line is drawn infallibly you have to make a choice okay do you want to hold on to your arianism or do you want to be catholic that's it you know and it's the same thing with the um a later development which was the doctrine of the immaculate conception there were lots of voices including saint thomas aquinas against the immaculate conception but once it's defined dogmatically as it was you have to make a choice do i want to be do i want to be catholic or not i mean it's it's that simple so it's the same thing with the church fathers was it defined by the church or not and if not they had the freedom to speculate and to have uh to hash it out and to you know to speculate within within the bounds of reason and obedience sure so um for the people that are just coming in we have catholic verses with us david and um david i'm actually a fan of his work david is a very bright person uh you might if you just came in you might think that i'm grilling him on some of these questions about catholicism it's not the case i i'm like i say i think that he's very bright i listen to his material routinely and i suggest that you go and subscribe to his channel if you haven't already um because he has talked to aaron rob matt dillahunty inspiring philosophy tom jump uh you he talked to so many people um grandmappy uh is a big name that that you would know um just a lot of people that i'm that i like listening to as well um i don't see how you made it through the interview with aaron rob sometimes besides that he's my favorite and i gotta say this that was the best that was probably the best um discussion i've seen with their hard there's two of them and one of them is just him kind of talking about evolution yet the first one i mean i just felt like he took on your task you know you know i just met him that day like i had never heard of him i had no idea who this person was i just i i saw him another big name that you shouldn't throw up there is uh steve mcrae i really love steve mccree so i'm uh i'm a chat mod on steve's channel steve uh i like steve as well yeah so we're friends and um but there's a so i did listen to that one actually too and and that one was um interesting because i didn't know steve grew up in the mormon church and so i yeah i knew he did because of his debate with trent doherty which is another catholic which i've reviewed trent dougherty versus arn roth that was my first video on youtube is a review of that i thought trent doherty did phenomenal like he's just such a smart person he's and he's a he's an evolutionist now he says it's a fact like so you know i know you guys disagree on that but it might be that might make for an interesting conversation oh yeah i wanted to say something this is what i was uh trying to remember um you know there's this whole issue of authority and the magisterium the living magisterium is the current pope and the bishops who are the faithful bishops who teach in union with the current pope okay so that's that's the central issue for me this whole thing with young earth creationism is tertiary it's not even secondary it's tertiary okay it's a fun hobby for me i'm excited about it i think it's true but it's not the focus of the catholic church right now the focus of the catholic church church right now is stewardship of the planet social justice all this stuff that's seen as progressive light right wing uh sorry left-wing like uh wacky uh you know communism by the those who are on the right they just hate pope francis and everything he stands for but i'm a catholic i love the pope i love the emphasis that he's placing on love of neighbor and charity and the option you know for the for the poor and i love the emphasis he's giving the church and that's where i have to if i'm going to be catholic i have to pay heed to that right and readers and cyclicals and all that so the young earth creationism thing is fun and exciting for me but it's really far down the list when it comes to the priority of the church today if down the road the church says oh we gotta we gotta take control of this uh evolution and uh we've gotta address this problem of the uh mis you know misinformation about evolution that's everywhere then that's what the church will do that's not what the church is concerned with right now so it's not a big big big big deal it's just fun for me because it's wacky and weird and i i like i like i want to bounce this idea off you just briefly the proximity that i have living in a in a universe that's less than 8 000 years old the proximity i have to the garden of eden i think every old earth creationist should be jealous of me the proximity that i have in my mind whether it's true or false the proximity i have to the fall i mean it's just everything is closer everything is more tangible everything there's there's less um cloudiness in when i read genesis it's like i have to i have to acknowledge my part in salvation history and how fresh and recent the fall is and the flood and the tower of babel and all that sort of stuff it comes to life and it gives you more of a connection so i wanted to bounce that off you do you feel like there's an attraction to that and if you could believe it would you like to believe it the way that i believe it yeah i would actually a lot of my listeners won't know this but early earlier in my walk i was a young earth creationist okay um yeah i actually believe that because the exactly why a lot of young earth creationists believe it is because they think if you don't believe it that you're trying to water down scripture or do something like this and i feel like sometimes people can be and this may not be the case with you obviously but i feel like sometimes people can be so afraid of that that they see any variant from what the western of what western thought has been that they might you know like like i listen to um a scholar named dr michael heiser which my audience knows i bring him up all the time probably too much but i like one of the things that he says um where he talks about you know what the hebrews thought about the universe and how they conceived of the universe and he said it says things like god reveals things to people in a way they can know them he comes to them in their own time and place he like and then i think about this think about a bible verse like god has all the hairs on your head numbered well what if he would have told the hebrews i have all the molecules in your dna strand numbered they would not have understood that so what i'm getting at with that is that he reveals things to people in a way they can know them in the time he reveals them so he couldn't have revealed something to them in in a time that let's say their mind couldn't grasp but perhaps it's the only way that he could have revealed something to them such that they could understand it at that time and that it would be uh gra it would be malleable or enough or open enough or fluid enough that it can match modern day science and that's why you have so many people uh let's say um taking that view on it and again i would obviously point to augustine and say that augustine or augustine said that um maybe there weren't six literal days because the sun wasn't made to the fourth day so maybe these were periods for example uh all the way back before science ever became popular before i mean before it ever became like modern science when this is back in the third century or the fourth century and so um you know things like that i would just say that it could just be that god reveals things to people in a in a way in their time in a way that they can understand them so but but i think that like you say that's kind of a tertiary thing i don't think that has anything to do with salvation but rather maybe there was something else i'd want to say about um the tradition so yeah um i guess what you were what you were saying was that like when we see the early church taking uh scripture and let's say not uh let's say a lot of the early church doesn't accept the deuterocannon are you saying that um is that out and this is i'm just asking you because i want to know not because i'm trying to pressure you yeah but do we do we accept it because a later um there's like a let's say a later uh poke or council uh dog dogmatizes it or like how does that how does that work yeah yeah this is this is the whole organic development of doctrine is that men in the church are fallible they're sinners and they are confronted with a heresy or the confront confronted with a crisis in the church or their research into a scripture leads them to ask questions which are deep and perplexing and when the need arises they confront these paradoxes and they if they're able to with god's help they can come to a decision and they can establish the truth in a matter right and so with christology and with uh the trinity and these things took time to hash oh it's it's just men fallible men sinners like you and like me but they're members of the early church and they cared about the truth and they sought the truth and of course with god's help they found the truth and the the holy spirit is leading the church into all truth but it's a rocky road because we're in a fallen world right it's messy it's ugly and it's a you know it's a teaching of the church that the arguments are not protected from error the the politics surrounding a council or a judgment are not protected from error the you know the the discussions uh surrounding uh the development of a doctrine are not protected from error only the doctrine itself when it's formally defined is protected from error so we can't point to the arguments and say look this infallible doctrine has infallible arguments no not at all we might be completely wrong about our arguments i don't think we are but in in principle we could be completely wrong about how we arrived at this this doctrine but the holy spirit allowed us to promulgate it and define it because it's true it's eternally true even though our understanding that led to that may have been flawed and it probably is flawed okay well great thanks for that answer and i got maybe one more about the church and tradition and then maybe i'll brag on you for a few minutes sure i really do uh i really do um appreciate um david and i really enjoy his um his channel so if you haven't subscribed definitely go and do that um one more thing i wanted to ask you about with the council of trent sure i've heard you mention it on your uh show and you've asked some of your listeners like have you heard of the council of trent or have you read any of their stuff and one of the big ones that i hear protestants bringing up a lot and you'll probably be pretty familiar with it is the count uh canon 9 that if uh it says like if any one say that by faith alone the empire is justified and such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to the uh obtaining the grace of justification and that is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will let him be anathema yep what what do you think about that well i i like to the way i like to talk to protestants about justification sanctification is with a catchy little phrase everything is grace everything is grace right sin is not grace because sin is not a thing right evil is not grace because evil is not a thing there's no substance to evil so everything is good everything is good and everything is grace when i prepare to pray it's at the prompting of grace that i prepare to pray when i'm praying it's it's grace that's praying in me when i complete my prayer it's grace that completes the prayer if i do a good work it's grace that prepares me for the good work does the good work and completes the good work it's all grace okay but we what that what that canon is saying is that my will is real my way my will is free i'm made in the image and likeness of god and so i have reason and free will and i have to cooperate with the grace i mean i could choose not to but if i want to go to heaven i have to cooperate and it's a free choice now the the thing the way i think about this cooperation grace and free will and saint augustine has a whole book just on grace and free will um the way i think about it is sort of like climbing a ladder or doing a three-legged race at the fair whatever you know what i mean it's like you take one step and god takes one step and it's like he's powering everything you do but you are cooperating you're helping your it's like maybe like a little baby that's helping you make some cookies it's like it's mostly the parent that's making the cookies but the baby is helping it's undeniable like i mean to say the baby's not helping is cruel you know the baby's helping and you're teaching the baby you know that's it so that's the way i see grace and our human free will cooperating together it's embarrassing how little we contribute but we do contribute it's essential that we acknowledge that we are contributing by our free will and it's like uh when we think about the mass uh if you've been to a catholic mass or not it's like we bring bread and wine these are called the gifts and then you know we bring it to christ the altar christus the priest the he's another christ on the on the altar and he's making the sacrifice making present again the mystical and timeless sacrifice of the once for all sacrifice of christ on on calvary representing it and that sacrifice is pleasing to god and the gifts are consecrated by christ through the priest and that bread and wine become the body blood soul and divinity of our lord and savior jesus christ and then we line up and we take we take that and the priest says the body of christ and we say amen what we're saying is that that consecrated host is the body of christ and that i am the body of christ right we're this is the communion this is this is like this is the whole point of religion is uh god became man so that we might become gods right that we might enter into the life of god so there's a strange exchange where that bread and wine that we bring where did we get it who made it whose bread is it whose wine is it is it's not the invention of man it's not the creation of man but we cooperated with god's good gifts to bring about the wine to bring about the bread so we just need to understand that everything is in exchange like that like we it's like that famous um proof of abiogenesis like the scientist says oh i can make uh i can make life out of non-living matter and uh god says okay show me and then the scientist grabs a hunk of mud and he says god says well whoa get your own make your own mud right like you have to make your own mud if you're gonna if you're gonna do it so it's that same sort of idea that exchange like everything we have why are we boasting like we didn't receive it when we obviously received every every good thing we have we have received right so it's that exchange i'm giving to god what he gave me and saint augustine famously said that when god crowns our merits he's crowning his gifts to us they're his gift to us so if you're a good boy and you strive to be virtuous that's his that's god's gift to you and when he crowns that he's crowning his own gift to you this is how the catholic church sees uh grace everything is grace okay so let me just ask you a couple little things about that then um one i would wonder about paul saying you know through faith alone by grace that no man should boast what do you think about that uh passage first of all did luther add the word along there i'm sorry you think that luther added the word i'm asking is that the passage where luther added the word alone are you familiar with that no i think so but i would i mean i would look it up there's one passage where where luther because faith alone the only place that faith alone appears is where it says we're not saved by faith alone right so if you're if you're thinking of another passage where it says faith alone then that was the one where luther added the word alone okay so let's um let's bypass that for the time being and let me ask you about the thief on the cross sure who merely had faith had no works in fact he was a convicted thief yeah and he just said remember me in your kingdom christ said you'll be in paradise what about something like that god is good he's generous you know he's good he's he's he's cooperating with each and every one of us all the time i don't see it you know i don't see it in uh ridiculous caricature triumphalist terms i see i see baptism as essential for salvation but god is not limited by that we humans have to conform to reality but god is the author of reality so when the church says you have to be baptized and you have to be a member of the visible church and you have to go to go to mass every sunday and you have to support the church financially and they're all they're called all kinds of precepts of the church right and then the ten commandments like there are all kinds of things you have to do as a catholic right it's not easy i mean there are sacrifices you have to make the sexual morality is very strict as you may know and their other you know their other um the bar is high in many respects okay but um god is you know god built church jesus christ built a church and this is i believe is the catholic church the fullness of christianity is uh to be had in the catholic church and you are you are considered a catholic you a converse contender you are considered a catholic not in good standing but in an imperfect relationship with the church you're a christian assuming you've been baptized in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit you are a christian you're a member of the catholic church you're in an imperfect relationship that's the catholic position but even those who are outside of christianity ostensibly they um there are there are means of salvation outside of the church that that they have access to and they're all designed to bring those people too into the closest possible union with with christ and i see i see the catholic church as the mystical body of christ so i'm giving a very rambling answer here but basically god is cooperating with everyone and he is not bound by the limitations that you and i are bound by so when the church tells you you have to baptize your baby for them to be saved um if you're about if your baby's not baptized god can still save the baby you understand there's an asymmetry between the creature and the creator so um but you can't presume on that the sin of presumption is to say well god can save my baby without baptism so i'm not going to baptize the baby okay so i'm going to just read a couple of verses here um galatians 1 says that yet a person is justified uh is not justified by work so the law but through faith and in christ yeah because therefore since we have been justified by faith we have peace with god uh through the lord jesus christ james says you see a person is justified it is uh that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone right that that would be the passage that you would probably go to i don't go to passages i i don't i don't dwell on the bible myself when it comes to uh apologetics with with anyone really i mean except you know uh if i'm talking to a catholic and they're confused about dogma i might talk about the bible with them but i don't i don't talk to non-catholics about the bible because we need to establish what the canon is and on what authority you know what the canon is all that sort of thing so i don't go to the bible right but if you you know uh one thing i could clarify about that um works of the law there's a very clear distinction that's been hashed out for a long time in the catholic church between the mosaic law and you know the the ten commandments i mean jesus christ says time and time again if you love me keep my commandments right that's not the mosaic law that's the ten commandments and if you want a nice overview of what is implied by each of the ten commandments and how broad that and how wide that net is uh with the ten commandments i think the catechism of the catholic church is a good place to start because it touches on everything in morality the ten commandments uh very nuanced uh teachings in the catechism about the the ten commandments very very broad there's more like catholic uh what would you say catholic tradition the the only thing i read that i've been reading it's a new thing i've started uh i'm starting a series of readings of my highlights on my kindle device of the 16 documents of vatican ii which is the most recent ecumenical council of the of the church and the reason i'm excited about it is because it's the most recent ecumenical council it's very controversial those uh on the right within the church uh shy away from vatican ii they deny the validity of valid or at least the applicability of vatican ii instead of a cantus outright deny that it's an ecumenical council and um they deny the recent popes as well so that's the only thing that i really do a reading of everything else is just either interviews or um you know just my impromptu thoughts but i just i do want to uh thank you for having me on i do want to um say that all the praise and compliments you've been lavishing on me are over the top like inaccurate and exaggerated and i don't i don't accept any of it but thank you very much i appreciate the gesture very nice of you but uh my ego is like uh huge and i'm a vain and i'm proud and i don't want uh it just proves don't you so yeah i mean it's very very interesting uh very i love all the uh everything that we've been hearing out of out of david so check out his channel if you haven't already he talks to a lot of oh my catholic friend comes in right at the end of where i'll shut it to him i apologize his name to apologetic showdown now but um the dry apologist yeah you missed it uh caleb but um anyway yeah thanks so much for coming on and uh i hope to have you back on in the future because uh i'm very interested in the the catholic church and while i'm not a catholic um you know sometimes i listen to material where they are let's say heavily criticizing or or trying to break down parts of the catholic church and sometimes i like to have a catholic perspective then to kind of give me the other side and say well hold on here's why i don't buy that you know and so thanks for coming on and i hope you would you would um i hope you would come on again soon for sure and for my because i'm live streaming this myself for my uh few listeners and watchers uh head over and subscribe to converse contender a real sweet guy he's um it's the first time i've met you converse contender but i saw you in the comments a couple times always very thoughtful always very considerate kind and of course like i said very generous so thank you very much i'm going to sign off now and are you going to continue and have more people uh open up the conversation when i step out yes i may uh yeah i may be uh i may just start an after show i'll probably just end this stream start an after show and let people come in i've got some homework and stuff to do but i um i may let some people come in and talk and just um you know uh but but if you want what i'll do is i'll send you the link to the new um stream just in case you want to come back on yeah of course i do of course they do all right excellent thank you so much go ahead and send that over to you when you sign off thank you so much we'll talk soon god thank you so much we'll talk soon god bless thank you bye