good evening all just part 2 of the discussion between david from catholic verses and joel pearson from reduce debates and Alan Kinsey let's just kick off joel you go for it so david the reason that we kicked off this conversation was because he said he recently changed her mind and he decided to become a young earth creationist yeah i guess the best way to relate what happened is to say that i've always wanted to be a young earth creationist but i never had the nerve to come out of the closet and i just listened to a sermon or a talk a religious talk by a priest who is a young earth creationist and his talk was about mary and the church but in that talk there was a little two-minute segment where he talked about how obviously evolution is false theistic evolution is false and it made a lot of sense and now i feel comfortable to admit that i'm young earth creationists but i've always wanted to be young earth creationist i've never liked the idea of theistic evolution so i'm just very very happy to now be a young earth creationist and to be open about it so does that put you against the teaching of the Catholic Church since I support evolution no the church allows various opinions about how the body came to be created by God the only thing the church stipulates dogmatically is that the soul the human soul is not a product of evolution it's not a product of any natural process the sole human soul is a product of special creation the Fiat of God creates the human source we're allowed to believe in theistic evolution young earth old earth intelligent design I don't know I hope that you know something about the landscape of creationism so you can sort of give me something to think about because I really am a noob I don't know that much about it and all I know is that God created Adam and Eve out of nothing he did not use evolution are not that you said you've always wanted to be a new earth creationist maybe that's needed just you just want to be just because I want something to be true doesn't mean it's true and just because I've stumbled upon one tiny theological argument that makes me comfortable coming out of the closet doesn't mean that I'm right I'm not claiming to be right I'm just claiming to be happy there's there's a big difference right so I'm not claiming to be right if I were to claim to be right I would be in opposition to the church because the church says we don't know yet we don't know and let's let the scientists and the theologians battle it out and there's some questions like the question of God's grace versus free will where it came to loggerheads within the church and the Pope stepped in and said look we're not going to resolve this not now not anytime soon stop fighting and just go your merry way investigate honestly and take into consideration everything that can help you to come to a decision but right now we can't come to a decision so it's sort of the same thing with creation the only thing that's been established so far is that the soul is created by special creation but this whole idea of my desire for young Earth Creationism to be true it's neither here nor there if tomorrow the church came out and pronounced that theistic evolution is the way that God created the human body I would just bow and submit to that without a moment's hesitation I wouldn't go kicking and scratching into conformity and into submission I would just submit instantly because that's what my relationship with the church is I'm a Christian I submit to Christ and His Church so does it matter to you whether the belief is true of course of course that's the most important thing so she had evidence supporting say an Old Earth and not evidence supporting us then you just move back the other way no I don't care how much evidence there is for the other positions I have a theological justification for being young earth I know that I'm on the wrong side of science by all appearances I know that that's why I hesitated for 10 years to come out of the closet as a young earth creationist because it doesn't look good for this position but I found one theological argument that made me comfortable saying I could be wrong but at least now I have a justification before I had no trust it was just I wanted to believe it was hoping against hope I had nothing I really had nothing and now I have one argument and that's good enough so now I came out of the closet so you said that you do care whether it's true that you don't care whether it aligns with evidence I don't see the connection there well because I don't trust theologians philosophers or scientists or myself I don't trust any human not even the Pope I only trust God Almighty so God Almighty allows the Pope to define a dogma theistic evolution is the case I'll go with it because I trust God but I don't trust the Pope I don't trust the bishops I don't trust the theologians I don't trust the philosophers I don't trust the scientists I don't trust you and I don't trust myself so I just go with God so that's the the difference between the Pope saying something and him saying something officially yeah it's not dogmatic I mean the last six popes have been on board with theistic evolution right they're free to endorse it they're free to get excited about it they're free to favor it and to think that it's probably true they're free and I'm free to and if I thought that I were showing any disrespect to the last six Pope's I wouldn't come out of the closet and there is a teaching in the early church it was st. Augustine who said that we have to be careful when we have controversial positions we have to be careful that we're not bringing more mockery and disdain and hatred on to Mother Church and there is a risk of that and I'm aware of that and my way of justifying being a young earth creationist even though it seems wacky and weird my way of justifying that is to say that I'm willing to change I'm not claiming that it's true I just hope that it's true and now I'm comfortable publicly saying that I hope that it's true so I hope you see the distinction there yeah so you said it was a theological point that made you lean in that direction although you did you were already thinking in that vein presumably because of Genesis and and the word rates things yeah I was already bending over backwards and then there was a feather of theological insight that made me fall back completely onto my back into that prone position where I can be mocked and ridiculed by everyone non-christians and Christians alike so I'm not I'm not afraid of scorn and ridicule and the theologic I think you're asking me what the theological point was that tipped me over the edge right yeah that would be interesting yeah it's all about Mary that lecture that I was listening to was all about Mary how she is the Alpha and the Omega of the church if we're going to talk about the church we need to look to Mary as an example Mary with her purity and with her holiness and with her virginity and the fact that she's a mother although being a virgin she's a mother and the church is the same way Mary is perfect and immaculate and so is the church and so in this context of the discussion of that one teaching that one doctrine that Mary is the Immaculate Conception this priest mentioned sort of in an offhand way that Adam cannot be immaculately conceived in the womb of a nonhuman Beast as theistic evolution claims he cannot be immaculately conceived in the womb of any creature therefore he was created by special creation by Fiat because we know that until the fall he wasn't a culet and it's only at the fall that he became in a state of sin he was sinless up until that time so either he was immaculately conceived in which case Mary is not the one unique Immaculate Conception as the Church teaches clearly or he was not conceived in the womb at all he was just created by special creation so this is the one theological point there may be good counter arguments theologically good sound Catholic arguments that are based on other pronouncements by other Pope's and other dogmas that that qualify what it is to be the unique Immaculate Conception in the case of Mary maybe there's a way where Adam can be immaculately conceived in the womb of a beast I haven't heard any argument to that effect I'm curious about this wound with a bee sting is that something that sziasztok evolution teaches of course of course so how does that work there's a nonhuman that gives birth to a human yeah yeah which I find repugnant as a Christian I don't I don't like it that sounds like an abandonment of evil it's a very odd thing to say I may be misrepresenting it because I don't as I told you before we did this interview I don't know a lot about the science I don't even know a lot about the theology frankly I basically just have this fondness for the literal or quasi literal or more literal interpretation of Genesis the Genesis is one of my favorite books I love all of the stories I remember even in Sunday school as a Protestant boy loving the stories this sort of Sunday school presentation you can grasp these colorful images Adam and Eve and the fall and Noah's Ark in the flood and all these sorts of things the Tower of Babel and you know I want to maintain that just to set the the science straight on it evolution doesn't say that a nonhuman gave birth to a human that's not how evolution works it's far more gradual than that you'd have to zoom out tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before you could draw a line and say there's humans on that side and not on that side of this line there was never an individual who was different from their parents than that to that extent it's it's like trying to look at a photograph of yourself every single day of your course of Aging and try and find one where on one side you were a child on in the next photograph you were in adults there's no clear dividing line oh yeah yeah I'd love for you to talk to someone that subscribes to theistic evolution and find out what they actually believe I don't actually know what they believe but I was just listening to a lecture by that sensus fidelium it's sort of like a quote-unquote traditional Catholic YouTube channel but there was a talk on there about all the different flood stories around the world and not only that but all the different genealogies that go back to Noah and Shem ham and Japheth and their many many many many of these genealogies going back to Noah and his three children I don't know if you're aware of them but they're all over like on every continent and in most countries so it's really interesting well so the the ones have a common theme of the boat and they're rescuing the animals and all that tend to be focused around the Mesopotamian region there are other flood stories elsewhere but they're very different stories yeah but the genealogies from the four corners the world basically there are people claiming to go back to Noah or someone that whose name is sort of a cognate of Noah and of course it would take a lifetime to sort of unravel the mystery of these wild claims that are made by anthropologists right like I don't have time to research anything that's why I don't really waste my time with looking at the evidence for young Earth Creationism looking at the evidence for old earth creationism or theistic evolution I don't have time for that because I mean you could just spin your fancy tale based on this mountain of data and once you're happy with your story that it looks coherent then you think you know the truth but I think that's naive yeah I suppose the age of the earth becomes more relevant in positions where you have a job to do that's relevant to the edge of the earth thing for example astronomy it's impossible for the earth to be that old when for example there was a photograph taken recently or I say photograph an image taken of a galaxy that's 50 million light years away so obviously in for time to have extended that long it's impossible for the earth to be so young I'm sure that people are going to assume that there's all kinds of baggage that I've accepted about cosmology about astronomy and about anthropology and civilizations and genetics and everything else I'm sure they're also sort of assumptions that are being made about what I believe but I haven't looked at any of that I don't know anything about it and I don't want to deny any data any evidence I don't want to deny any of it but I also am not committed to modeling any of it and when I say my young earth creationist I'm not saying that the earth is 6,000 years old I have no idea I've looked into it it's based on Russia's calculation isn't it I've heard that but I'm just not that terribly interested in it but I mean if someone asked me do you think the world is six to ten thousand years old I'd say I have no idea I haven't looked into it and looked at the data well now so if you take in the story of Genesis literally in the sense of the youngest creationism and the general creation story does that mean you also take the firmament story literally for example the Noah's Flood involved the water's coming down from windows being opened in the sky yeah and that was water over and under the earth yeah I don't believe that I don't want to believe that but I'm willing to believe that it seems like it's going that one step further into cuckoo-land but you know now we're getting into like flat earth territory and all that sort of stuff yes that's that's a logical extension of is there anything that I've already lived that sort of rules out the Flat Earth have you ever driven towards a mountain yeah which bit of the mountain do you see first the top yeah yeah that's instantly destroys the Flat Earth have you got oh yeah okay I wanted to ask you you know feel free by the way to pull me out of young Earth Creationism like that's you'd be doing me a favor if it's not true right but in that in that vein I was just wondering is there a technology that depends on evolution because you know quantum physics gives us the technology that we're using to communicate now to a large extent are there technologies absolutely all the modern biology so all of modern biology depends on evolution virtually all modern psychology depends on evolution because the way you understand human thought processes is based on the environmental survival advantages earlier on I'm just reading a book actually called survival of the prettiest which is a psychologists perspective on beauty and how beauty is based on evolved human reflexes and and our modern living is only very short time we've only been for the last twelve thousand years and agricultural species so before that we were hunter-gatherers as small roving bands where it was easy for us to understand who everyone was so the anonymity of modern cultures and cities is quite new to us our brains haven't evolved to cope with that and there's all sorts of other things where you can explain human behavior through the evolutionary model and of course geologists oil company is very much interested in evolution and deep geological time because that's how they find what they're looking for so yeah huge areas of scientific disciplines and practical disciplines rely on evolution and deep time yeah I have heard something about a distinction between microevolution and macro-evolution do you want to talk or that is is it real now sure um so Mike revolution is adaptation mutations changes within species macro evolution is when you get two strands of species that separate it physically so they can't interact with each other and they diverge sufficiently that when they get back together they are no longer able to interbreed because they've evolved out separate paths but it's so clearly related they're almost identical to each other okay and so some people I've heard claim that there is no actual missing link between humans and nonhumans there were a couple of spoofs that were made like Lucy and stuff like that he talked about that Hilton was a hoax Lucy is not a hoax actually she is one of hundreds of examples of the same species so that goes back let me see six million years or something like that I figured the exact amount but there's a quite a long chain of different connections going back millions of years where you can connect humans onto the other great apes and not only that but the thing as fossils are actually some of the weakest evidence for evolution the other parts of evidence are far stronger phylogeny is the most powerful connection where you can actually see genetically and in terms of taxonomy the links branching everything back up to a common root interesting yeah so Aaron rather big guy in the phylogeny project right yes quite a fan of him and I have helped the project slightly but really I didn't do that much compared to the guys doing the real work programming the database entering all the information and then just that whole his phylogeny challenge is I think unbeaten so far it's I think the only way you can lose is by refusing to answer direct question okay I don't have no idea what you're talking about can you tell me what the challenges yeah sure the so the challenge or the basic challenge is to show him two kinds so completely unrelated creatures of any kind life-forms of any kind that were individually created by God and who are not related to each other I see okay okay so if you follow him down the you know the branching tree of life in the connections you actually end up always back at the beginning of the tree so any two things that you can name that are alive related in some way Oh karaoke and so is this a project that will constantly be gathering more and more evidence or is there an end goal like with a Human Genome Project where was completed the the Falacci Explorer projects I don't think it will ever be completed because life is too complex the goal is ultimately to map all of life which if you consider that 99.99 etcetera percent of life forms that already extinct that's a ridiculous task it you could never possibly find all of them because of course you've got this extension events where something like three-quarters of all life dies and then we start again ok ok yeah this is one of the arguments against theistic evolution is that God would not have used this messy trial and error technique to give birth to humans and a sort of a trail of blood and disease and misery behind that human creation story right yeah I can see why that works in fact have you seen Christopher Hitchens talk specifically about that where he says say you give a hundred thousand years for humans to evolve and he says ok so you've got 90 thousand years god watches with a difference and then it's only recently that he goes alright now we better go down there and intervene so all the people who you know lived and died before that don't get saved and he has like this very small group of people in recent history say the last two thousand years where he goes ok now we'll go down and intervene and do the whole Jesus thing yeah well that's not what the Church teaches that Church teaches that those who lived before Judaism or those who lived before the Jewish Messiah came they're called the righteous right and they went down to the underworld when they died and then when Jesus was killed he went down and he rescued them you can see that famous icon of the harrowing of hell it's not hell hell it's a sort of limbo of the of the righteous but he's going down and he's taking up Adam and Eve by their hand and bringing them up to heaven because the gates of heaven were closed up until that point so the gates of heaven were opened and then the righteous went up from quote-unquote hell this limbo of the righteous yeah it's a later theological point I think that it forgot to dress and the original stories in the Bible yeah you've got because of course you got Paul's letters that don't really address it the Gospels don't really cover it yeah the Gospels cover the Gospels cover it Jesus himself talks about it how Abraham's up in heaven Lazarus and the rich man you remember the parable yes and Lazarus was later turned into a new character in John's Gospel he started out as a a parable character and then was repurposed into a full character there are lots of names that repeat in the Bible I wouldn't be too quick to jump to that conclusion but the weird thing about Lazarus is that in John's Gospel he's a central character he's actually the reason that Jesus is executed but the other three Gospels that came before John had never heard of Lazarus what do we do to believe he hadn't heard of him well they don't mention him at all but in John's he's the disciple Jesus loved and he is also the main reason for Jesus being pulled up on charges and then eventually executed it specifically says this because of the resurrection of Lazarus that they start to plot against him yeah learning about the Gospels in the New Testament in particular it's fascinating to see what went into it who wrote to why they wrote it what sort of motivations they had where they disagree with each other there's this whole pattern of how they were assembled and and also really interesting as the stuff that was left out I'm sure you're aware of many a bhag referred that you know there's about 40 odd Gospels and only a few of them made it in yeah what I find more interesting is the fact that we don't have any original manuscripts we just have copies so that to me is more interesting in that that fits in with my Catholic worldview where I have a living Magisterium of a living Church who interprets the sacred deposit of faith for me and the sacred deposit of faith is sacred tradition and sacred scripture so I find it fascinating that we don't have the original manuscripts we only have copies and there many discrepancies among the copies and I find it fascinating it lends more weight to my Catholic faith and it's sort of in a way it undermines all non Catholic forms of Christianity those who would claim to put their faith in the Bible alone I don't I don't know how they do it without buying protection from teaching error concerning faith and morals I don't know how they do it through ignorance or suspects because obviously the first two in TACT's codices we have are they the Vaticanus and the sign Atticus I think and both of them have books that we don't have and we have books that they don't have so it's clearly been modified over the years it's also interesting to see the ones that didn't almost didn't make it in like James nearly didn't make it in Esther didn't nearly didn't make it in these books were people I'll get back and forth over it and see into a force over which books were holy in which books were and revelations remember have made it in yeah with a later we that's not even counting the stories insides the books that were then added later like the pericope adultery the the story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultery was at his centuries later and the ending of mark marks are five different endings and the original actually cut off at sixteen verse eight there's all these things where we've got the textual evidence to show you go back to the oldest the best manuscripts and they don't have these stories they were added in later and in the case of the the woman adultery that was actually added in different places in different manuscripts because they had to squeeze it in on the bottom of a parchment it makes a good movie line there let's be honest it is a premiere best story I think of all the stories you can have in the New Testament that is the best story one of the thought experiments I like to play with in terms of the Bible and the mystery of the Bible is that it is in a way arbitrary what books made it into the Canon of Scripture and which ones didn't and it was arbitrary in the sense that the church said and whether they were right or wrong it's bound now it's bound what about on earth is now bound in heaven so and what they loosed on earth is loosed in heaven so it's a sort of arbitrary in that way but God let them because God is so powerful he led the church which is admittedly full of frail and fallible humans make these decisions and then he ratified the decision you know it's like he's just going with it it's like he let the church decide and he can work with anything and if the church had picked other writings to canonize God would have worked with that I think this is this is a little bit controversial that's a little bit wacky I've never ever heard any one in the church teach this idea it's just a fantasy I have to sort of reconcile how can we even know what's in the Bible and maybe they're a good scholarly reasons why the church thinks that she has certain knowledge about what the original text said and where they are and what belongs in and what's out but I like playing with this idea that it doesn't actually matter because God gave us the power in the church to bind and to loose and we've bound so now it's bound and we're going with it we've built this tradition and it is a sacred tradition because that's what God allowed the church to do what do you think of that idea I think it's a it's an interesting way of reconciling the differences because obviously but and the reason that he left or one of the things that first shook his face I think the reason he left was the Odyssey but the thing the first shook his face was the idea that well if God would these words originally then why was he why did he not preserve them why is it that we don't know what the original words written in the Bible were who who is this now Bart Ehrman is one of the best-known textual critics of the Bible of the New Testament specifically he's a professor in New Testament studies he Latorre wrote the textbook on it which denomination is he well he's now an atheist but he was a Baptist so he originally went to Moody Bible Institute to learn about the New Testament study it in the original language to find out what it meant and he's now one of the world's foremost experts on the New Testaments and the history of Christian forgery and interpolation and the polemics that Christians wrote about each other so he writes scholarly work but he also writes for the general public so that's one of the things that's great about his work is that he's writing for the common man whereas it's it could be quite difficult otherwise to keep track of where people are going because scholars will tend to descend into using really archaic language that is difficult to track but he does write popular books mm-hmm yeah it's all very complicated I like to stick to principles that I can pin down and grasp and commit to and going back to our original subject of the young Earth Creationism I know that everything's stacked against me and I know that I'm not really gonna look into the evidence because it doesn't interest me that much but I do feel the weight of the arguments all around me and I'm just sort of enjoying the freedom that the church gives me to believe this I'm not sure why the church gives me the freedom to believe this is it because it doesn't matter it's not essential to my salvation or is it because there might be something to it I don't know I don't know but I'm just enjoying my freedom I think it's more the the just the whole Reformation and the change of law and general isn't it because a long time ago heresy would have gotten you killed well I can guarantee if there was a death penalty associated with young Earth Creationism then I probably get in line with I mean before not adhering to young Earth Creationism what got you killed what do you mean as in it used to be the the standard passing line of the church oh that's another reason why I'm attracted to it is because it is a long-standing tradition no yeah if you go back to the fundamentals they were young earth creationists it would appear in in the biblical days so for example Jesus seemed to have believed that Moses existed and that Adam existed which is a serious problem for people who believe in theistic evolution because of course in evolution Adam never existed and if you follow archaeology then Moses never existed so there's there's a lot of problems Abraham as well was another one that was disproved in the 1970s I think and the consensus has now moved towards there them not existing so there's there's obviously pockets of resistance which generally are religiously motivated well not that you're an expert but what are the numbers like I mean in the Christian world what do you think is it maybe 50 percent that our young earth creationists or 10% or what I think if you want once you factor in most of the world's then most young earth creationists are actually Muslims but within Christianity most Christians I was I don't understand evolution but think most accepting of evolution and it's the smaller pockets in in the Africa's and in the like the southern United States for example they tend to be people who were young earth creationists it's also where the Flat Earth movement took off but in Europe you'll find that most Christians will accept evolution although I suspect that the majority of people don't really understand it because every time I meet someone who goes against evolution and doesn't understand evolution it's precisely because they don't know what evolution is they'll raise these objections to it which turned out to be nothing to do with evolution yeah I think that education is the key and I think if we're educating people into evolution then good faithful Catholics are having their faith weakened and you would agree with me because you'd say yeah because Catholicism is false and evolution is true but I would say Catholicism is true but evolution is a really good way of weakening the Catholic faith and it's a danger because the reality is that God is all-powerful and you can do whatever it wants and even if there's a lot of evidence against young earth creationism whether you believe in Catholicism or not you will it agree with me that it's a more robust position in terms of clinging to the Catholic faith and like you just said the Bible and Jesus it's a more robust position digging your heels in and saying well I don't care about the mountains of evidence God will explain it to me in heaven and I'm just gonna stick with what Jesus said Jesus believed in Noah and I believe in Noah so do you agree with me I know we're on different sides of the fence here but do you agree with me that it is a better position if you want to maintain your faith or no it's certainly a faith-based position yeah I mean obviously as the nature of faith is to go against I mean I mean I'm not gonna say that the nature of faith is to go against the evidence but there is something to the mystery of faith where it appears to be going against the consensus or at least the conventional wisdom of the age or whatever it is you know but I feel like my faith is strengthened I'm exhilarated by my renewed faith in the young Earth Creationism and I'm cautious because I do see the mountains of evidence that are against me but it's sort of like when you're in a relationship let's say you and your wife aren't getting along but then you move to a new town and everyone's against you then your little differences disappear and you just hunker down and you dig in your heels and you know you really grow together and you've got a common enemy and this sort of thing so I think that this is sort of the position I find myself as a young earth creationist like everyone's against me not in a way that's personal but there are lots of people who are antagonistic to the idea of young Earth Creationism and so that sort of gives me a nice romantic space where I can just be a more alone with God more isolated and more more faithful in that way so I'm just trying to portray sort of the psychology of being an outsider being marginalized and how it's kind of romantic yeah well you can actually see this in the don't demographics of America example for example the the tribalism so as they're raised objections to evolution what you've actually got is there are more American Christians leaving religion and becoming atheist agnostic or however you want to call it non-religious but there are also more fundamentalist extremists religious people so what's happening is this polarization where people go one way or the other and don't stay in the middle so you're losing the sort of tolerant middle ground you end up with people completely leaving religion and people fully embracing religion like you know the kinds of people who are anti-vaccination and kill children as a feeling and that kind of thing so you end up with this disturbing divide where you end up with no one in the middle to bridge the gap and so it's quite concerning thing really this this is the sort of tribal isn't at least the warfare as far as I'm going with faith though that's pretty much what they said about heliocentrism when we discovered that the earth is not the center of the universe then it was a very theologically sore point and people would refuse to believe it for the theological reasons yeah I mean I've had people emailing me and saying you know flat earth is next and then geocentrism the whole thing well I guess geocentrism is a moot point once you're flat earther then the geocentrism is not even relevant right yeah cuz then the Sun is just a picture yeah I did look up at the Sun yesterday or was it today it might have been today but I did look up at the Sun and I did ask myself does it look like it's just a luminary just a light in the sky or does it look like a big burning ball and I mean I my whole life I've assumed that it's a big burning ball of hydrogen you can definitely feel the heat from it on your face there's actually a probe heading for something there's you know there's I'm gonna be a TV show where flat-earthers tried to find the edge they're going to Antarctica I don't know why if they're looking for the edge why are they going to Antarctica they could go in literally any direction I heard this little lecture and it was talking about no one's allowed to go to Antarctica and it's like armed guards are guarding is NASA has a fleet large enough and don't forget they don't think that Antarctic is down at the bottom of the globe they think had talked to ago isn't all directions so they think that there's a fleet the size of the earth circling the whole earth Wow it's brilliant although there are Flat Earth is all around the globe yep no need to rub it in and you do understand that I'm willing to walk away from young Earth Creationism if it's not true or if the church says so right I suppose yeah so how would you know if it's not true I'm so if you if you disregard evidence why don't disregard it and as I'm willing to understand the problem of induction and that people can spin wild tales with the same pile of evidence we can make a story that will fit the data but the way I would know is if it becomes a dogma of the church and I don't think that's gonna happen I within my lifetime so I'm pretty much free to believe but do you you actually believe that faith supersedes evidence well I mean evidence is real I mean I'm not gonna deny like I mean if I if I go to the restaurant and there's a fly in my soup I'm not just gonna be like oh well God is good therefore this fly isn't real and just and swallow it I'm gonna acknowledge reality that's reality but the question is how did it get there you know there are different explanations for how that fly got into my soup but I'm not going to deny the fact that the flies in my soup same thing with like the fossil record or with you know stories of ancient civilizations or whatever but I'm not even committed to I don't even know how old civilizations are I'm not committed to like I said to the six thousand or ten thousand year old thing but yes I do give precedence to infallible dogmas of the church and the reason I do that is because there's a hierarchy of Sciences the Natural Sciences are good but they're limited and then we have above that we have the science of philosophy and then above that theology and finally above that is God God Almighty is science itself God is knowledge right God is perfect in that way so obviously if the Catholic Church is what she claims to be and if she has the infallible truths of God Almighty defined in these dogmas and they're you know probably about 500 dogmas that are defined then they will be my absolute rock solid core of belief until such time as I abandoned Jesus Christ as a false messiah if I have a good reason to abandon Jesus Christ as a false messiah then I'll end up being a generic monotheistic n or go back to solipsism so I would actually put science and theology both under philosophy with philosophy being a very generic you know broad just a way of thinking about things and you have subsections than that but do you know what it is about the scientific method that makes it so good at finding out what really reality is repeatability objectivity and independent studies blah blah blah I think falsifiability is the real key so yeah my faith is falsifiable and you're susceptible to your confirmation bias if you go looking for things to confirm you like you know what you're talking about spinning tails based on the evidence but the scientific method is to ignore all the evidence that supports you and go okay that goes in the pile over there but is there any single piece of evidence that proves me wrong if you can't find anything like that then you've got a pretty good chance of saying okay this is probably true then how many years have scientists been looking at evolution how many years later they're over a hundred and fifty years of people both from the theological side and from the scientific side trying to disprove ever and that makes that's what makes it the strongest theory in all of science in fact it's it rivals gravity for just the sheer amount of evidence supporting it yeah so I find it hard to believe that everyone's in on it and they're just playing along and because of people on both sides like you said atheist and theist that are playing along with with the story of evolution I find that really hard to believe that people have that much ill-will or that they're that easily deceived by Satan that they can independently get their science wrong in the same way so yeah it's like I said it doesn't look too good for my position but I'm not going to look too deeply into it because it's not essential for my salvation but I'll keep an ear open you know and all now that people know that I'm a young earth creationist there welcome to like send me emails and links and arguments and you've presented good arguments you know a lot of people have good arguments and I'm open to them and I just don't want to do the work I don't want to like occupy myself with trying to find out the arguments but people are free to send them to me I'd appreciate it oh that's cool have another stack of them so that you are a young earth creationist because first Watchi doubly with there is a 6,000 years old you're not sure where the evolution is or isn't I'm not so sure that you can you press wish to be under that category but thank you you are actually maybe yeah maybe well so what do you think of the usual method of explaining the evidence and people who have actually attempted apologetics for young as creationism where they say that God created the world to look old but it's actually young I don't like that I don't like that either I think it makes God deceptive yeah yeah so for anyone to oppose evolution but also acknowledged all this evidence for evolution they would have to say that their God is a deceiver basically to go with that yeah I'll have to find out what people believe I'm reaching out now I reached out to one Catholic young earth creationist and he agreed to come on I don't know if you know him his name is Hugh Owen do you know him I haven't heard of him no okay yeah but I'll be interviewing him and I'll assess his approach you have a talk with Arne coming up as well yeah yeah yeah yeah possibly tentatively he agreed he's very busy but he did agree to come back he's a bit annoyed with me because I said on a yawn earth creationist now but uh yeah I feel like he may go around he's a nice guy but I mean I can't believe he gives me the time of day like I mean I email him he always responds to me and he tentatively agreed to come back in early May so I'm really looking forward to that most of my listeners on YouTube are atheists and there's nothing they enjoy more than my Catholic versus atheist talks because they've they just chalk it up as a win every time like you lost again as I'm not trying to win that's the that's the thing I'm just trying to talk to people and I don't mind losing I don't mind losing yeah I did noticed actually something I wanted to address which is some of the really rude comments underneath that and I think they're just giving us a bad name and I want to apologize on behalf of the atheists who horrifies life the people who just give you grief and so a lot of times thank you very much thank you yeah I noticed you're very nice to me and in the comments and did you notice that one guy Robert white he's very venomous there was one guy who mentioned something about your wife which was completely inappropriate that was Robert white yeah I'm not totally sure what they want to achieve because all you're gonna do insulting people is drive them further away it's a terrible way to argue yeah I there's something troubling him you know there's something troubling him and he may have been abused by a priest for all I know you know you don't know what people go through I do think there is a phase and deconversion when people leave any kind of cult where they get upset at being deceived for so long and that I went through the angry phase myself as well but well if you followed the logical extension of determinism it's very difficult to be angry at people because if you had do you remember the but for the grace of God there go I quote yeah where you're basically like well if I was born in their position with the exact same DNA as them and have the exact same upbringing that's where I would be I would be doing that right now and to say otherwise was just arrogance and this flies in the face of all the evidence so yeah I tried to be simple setec the people in any position where it could easily have been me remember what st. Paul said he said what do you have that you have not received and if you've received it why are you boasting like you didn't receive it you know yeah absolutely it gives you a sense of perspective when you consider that so much of where you are is just the luck of the draw it's based on your family and friends around you the experiences that you've had what are we if not just a collection of memories and based on the trajectory that led us here very little bit was actually after our own decision yeah thanks for joining us second time around and it's been enjoyable for sure thanks a lot for having me yeah pleasure as always I'm sure we can arrange another one yes thanks very much one yes thanks very much see ya bye