Answering Thomas Storck and Solving Problem (I Propose at least) Set by Humani Generis

Series on Chestertonian attitudes on Creationism (i e today's Chestertonians being clearly less favourable to Young Earth Creationism than GKC): 1) Mark Shea Basically Calls Creationists Protestants, 2 Mark Shea Responded, 3) And what of Mark Shea's Attitude to Marco Rubio?, 4) Answering Thomas Storck and Solving Problem (I Propose at least) Set by Humani Generis, 5) Trin80ty's bias, his ugly bias

How long did it take for God to create the cosmos? The Protestant creationist movement is firmly committed to holding that God's creative acts were limited to six 24-hour days.

Reflections of a Catholic Creationist
by Thomas Storck, January 2004
https://78462f86-a-62fa986c-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/thomasstorck.org/www/files/Catholic_Creationist.pdf

Not quite. Hugh Ross - who is a Protestant - is very firmly Old Earth creationist. He considers the "distant star light problem" as a refutation of a young universe.

When I was a Protestant before my baptism and before my Catholic conversion, I took the "light created in passage approach". Now I take a small universe approach (confer Chesterton and St Juliana of Norwich) meaning I do not believe the universe is much bigger than the solar system as one calls it, or that several orders of magnitude separate the distance of the most distant stars from the distance of Pluto or other Kuiper Belt objects.

This means I do not accept parallax as parallax, since otherwise I would have to acknowledge that if a light-day separates Sun from Neptune, it is four light-years that separate us from the closest star.

And believing that the heavenly bodies created on day four were entrusted to the angels created when God created Heaven and Earth, in the beginning, before day one, I believe there is no problem in assigning:

• yearly stellar aberration of light
• yearly stellar parallax
• orbit of Mercury (which does not quite fit with Newton's and Kepler's prediction)
• twinklings attributed to all the 777 exo-planets not seen directly through telescope
• gravitational lensing due to stars and heavy planets
• gravitational lensing due to black holes
• and cometal orbits reaching to "van Oort's belt" or more probably "sphere of the fix stars" or "stellatum"
• and possibly more ...

... to the simple expedient, far better in tune with Occam's razor, that all such movements are due to angels shifting position of bodies entrusted to them.

Now, a Catholic Old Earth creationist or Theistic Evolutionist (excepting Adam and Eve) is obviously agreeing with Hugh Ross and Stephen Jay Gould as much as I agree with Kent Hovind (who unlike me now does not take the Geocentric approach to distant star light problem).

Of these two, I have heard Hovind utter some idiocies about history of the Catholic Church, but without any rancour against the rank and file of Catholics. And I have heard Hugh Ross cite the Belgic Catechism, which is written by a minor Calvinist Reformer, Guido de Bres (one man who was actually hanged by the Spanish Inquisition, it seems he was scandalised at the Catholic Church publically burning copies of the Vernacular Bible's in Protestant translations to Flemish and French along with works of Erasmus, but that hardly excuses Calvinism). So I cannot exactly say that Hugh Ross is less Protestant than Kent Hovind.

The reason Pius XII in Humani Generis persisted most about Adam's special creation was obviously because Roman's "by the sin of one man" most certainly concerns human death, while some Church Fathers (St Augustine and Venerable Bede) do not take it as concerning animal death. But even there, the liberty of discussion he gave to learned should not immediately be taken as a liberty of belief in the faithful. Sadly enough it was at least so taken, as we see from Tolkien's collected Letters where that author states that the Pope allows us to believe Adam's body, but not Adam's soul evolved from previous animal creatures.

Now that is a pretty awkward position. Both mammals and men in an ethic or merely emotional way honour their parents.

If Adam was born from a couple of non-human highly evolved apes, we get a problem.

Was he himself non-human for a long time up to when his parents died? And after that changed? I call that position highly impious. It reminds of a certain position about Nimrod "beginning to be a giant".

Or did he become a man while his parents remained highly evolved apes? How could he then honour those that were less than himself without that being awkward?

Or did his parents die very early so as to leave this problem out? How was he then nurtured up to adulthood? Instead of making him a Nimrod, maybe you have made him a Mowgli or a Romulus without a Remus! And even they continued to honour the shewolf.

The one sense in which this would not be impious is not a syncretism with evolution, but with Nordic Myth, where it states the first couple were at first two tree trunks. Ask and Embla means ash tree and elm tree, or ash tree and vine (but a vine would not be a tree trunk). Being created out of two trees is not very different from being created out of slime of the earth.

But all these senses, including two tree logs in a river are impious in so far as instead of attributing death to disobedience of man, they attribute evolution of last link up to Adam to "evolusion's chisel" death.

There is another thing about Adam which rules out day period creationism. If after creation of Eve day six ceased immediately and we are still in day seven, then there was no marriage for six sevenths of creation and Christ's words about marriage "from the beginning of creation" become a lie.

Whereas if day six was 5199 years and nine months before the birth of Our dear Saviour, and each day was 24 hours at most, the part of creation on earth that occurred before the first marriage was only 3.16 parts per million of the time elapsed up to Christ's birth. In that perspective "from the beginning of creation" makes perfect sense.

This was probably overlooked by Pope Pius XII - assuming he was indeed Catholic - and it has been pointed out by Kent Hovind. So far I have heard no answer from Hugh Ross.

If Catholics are free to agree with Theistic Evolutionists like Jew Gould, or with Old Universe special Creationists like Protestant Hugh Ross, why should a Catholic not be agreeing with a Young Earth Creationist like Kent Hovind?

One answer I can think of is misunderstanding the scope of Humani Generis - or if it was no misunderstanding, one can hardly say Pius XII (whom Chesterton had the chance to miss in such a case) was Pope.

Humani Generis can be read as merely allowing a discussion to go on up to when a definite solution has been found and approved by a future Papal decision. This is not what happened, it was taken immediately, as a licence for every Catholic to be cavalier about Young Earth Creationism. It has eventually come to be taken - although the document nowhere mentions that - as an indirect new condemnation of one kind of Protestants, namely Young Earth Creationists like Hovind.

Another one I can think of is that Chesterton had a knack of attributing hysteria to Protestants - and hysterics they often are about some things, but creationism is not in these days one of them. Maybe it was back at the time of the Scopes trial. Nowadays, Creationists are among the least Catholic bashing and in ethics least hysteric Protestants I know of.

There is some ground for taking this to be Storck's point.

For them, because of a commitment to a Fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture ...

Which was maybe not that of Cardinal Suhard or Pius XII in 1948, but certainly that of the Church Fathers, including St Jerome who calculated Our Lord was born on December 25th (he compared which feasts he thought most probable) 5199 Anno Mundi (he did as Ussher, but on the Septuagint). As equally it was certainly that of St Thomas Aquinas. And of St Robert Bellarmine, during the Galileo trial of 1616.

However, a few pieces of scientific evidence have also been picked up since then by Young Earth Creationists. I have for my part added the problem of Mammalian Chromosome numbers to refutations of Macroevolution. Even though, like Thomas Storck, I am no scientist, that does not mean all evidence of scientific nature is vague to me. I learned Mendel's laws when I was pretty young. By a ma who was a medical student, a Christian (in fact Protestant, back then at least, in the sense of non-Catholic rather than anti-Catholic: she placed Sts Benedict Patriarch of OSB and Francis OFM with William Booth) and a Young Earth Creationist. Remaining faithful to that, even after Catholic conversion, seems neither Protestant, nor hyperecumenic or syncretist, nor an act of prophecy requiring corresponding poverty for the right to state it.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou
Decapitation of St John the Baptist
Birthday on earth, 1911, of a grandmother
who offering a book on evolution
wrote "read, learn, think" (I did)
29-VIII-2013

I tried to post following comment under a blog post by Storck:

What’s Wrong with Distributism: A Response (when comments were nine)
http://distributistreview.com/mag/2013/08/whats-wrong-with-distributism/

My not published comment:

"Cassiodorus", the apostate to Sufism known as René Guenon is very much not the most famous perennialist. He is only very much cited in French circles in order to discredit perennialism as a kind of syncretism and apostasy.

Mr Storck, here is my answer to your biassed essay from january 2004:

http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2013/08/answering-thomas-storck-and-solving.html

Ice Cores with Lava Dust (a k a Tephra Layers)

Hugh Ross series:

1) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Angels and Men in Hugh Ross Context , 2) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Hugh Ross' take on Day Four, 3) Creation vs. Evolution : Ice Cores with Lava Dust (a k a Tephra Layers), 4 ... on Moses, Church Fathers, Oxygen and Hydrogen (featuring Kent Hovind and Hugh Ross, separate videos)

Hugh Ross mentioned ice cores with lava dust.

Supposedly ice cores in Northern Greenland cannot have as many layers as those in Southern Greenland.

As to that, climate has shifted in Southern Greenland, which was in early 1400's inhabited by Norsemen who were using agriculture and who were the Northernmost diocese in Communion with Rome back then. They did pay the Peter's Penny. Since then Southern Greenalnd is far less inhabitable - and possibly what Northern or possibly just what Midmost Greenland was like back then. And if so, Northern Greenland back then, including periods from which we do have ice cores (accessed or not) was like Midmost or even Southern Greenland is now. Which means the supposition that layers are different and annual up there is a bit suspect, to say the least.

Also, they can be dated by lava dust from volcanic eruptions - the ice layers between lava layer for Vesuvius 70 A.D. and Krakatoa 1883 A.D. match up with the 1813 years between these two events. And in total there are eight lava layers.

But here we might caution a bit that Vesuvius and Krakatoa are not the only ones in last two thousand years, we do not know if the two layers identified as from Krakatoa and Vesuvius are not in fact both more recent and closer, like Stromboli 1930 and Krakatoa.

We might wonder even further due to the fact that Krakatoa had another eruption earlier. French Wiki cites a page that no longer exists:

Sa géographie a été bouleversée au moins à deux reprises, au cours des deux grandes éruptions des années 416 ou 535³ et 1883⁴.

And note three gives a link with title:

(en) Ken Wohletz, Were the dark ages triggered by volcano - Related climate changes in the 6th century? (If so, was Krakatau volcano the culprit?) [archive], Los Alamos National Laboratory

Here is the cache: [archive], but the paper itself is gone:

Not Found

The requested URL /ees11/geophysics/geody/Wohletz/Krakatau.htm was not found on this server.

Why is it gone?

Thing is written sources about eruption give year so and so on that calendar "misaligned with AD 416" and the ice core dates give AD 535. Ken Wohletz overruled 416 in favour of 535, relying on tephra layers in ice cores ... if historic research overruled that guess? Well, that might be one reason why the paper is gone.

Now, Hugh Ross mentioned one other calibration of ice cores, namely carbon dating. And this also as used for calibrating that method by the ice cores.

Now, here I am a disbeliever, simply. Lava per itself does not contain organic material. I do not know if it contains trapped carbon dioxide from the air. That would be a possibility. I try a search and find this:

A 22,000 ¹⁴C year BP sediment and pollen record of climate change from Laguna Miscanti (23°S), northern Chile
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818100000631

22,000 ¹⁴C year BP? Sounds like one Creationist estimate of "carbon dates" for the flood according to one article:

Radiocarbon in dino bones
International conference result censored
by Carl Wieland
http://creation.com/c14-dinos

But as to linking ¹⁴C with lava layers in the ice cores?

The Greenland Ice Core Chronology 2005, 15–42 ka. [quoting from pp. 6 f.]
http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/publications/papers/pdfs/240.pdf

Identified volcanic tephra layers in ice cores provide a very important link to other paleoclimatic archives and facilitate the validation of ice core chronologies. If tephra layers have been radiometrically dated by means other than ¹⁴C they can be used to validate the ice core chronology, whereas an additional ¹⁴C dating links the ice core chronology to the ¹⁴C calibration curve. In the time interval 10–42 ka b2k, three tephra layers with known source and independent age determination have been identified in Greenland ice cores. Two of those are the Saksunarvatn ash layer (early Preboreal) and the Vedde ash layer (Z1, late Younger Dryas), which both demonstrate an excellent agreement between IntCal04 (Reimer et al., 2004) and GICC05 around the last termination as discussed in Rasmussen et al. (2006c). The third tephra layer is the Fugloyarbanki tephra, recently identified in the NorthGRIP ice core at 1848m depth and about 1 ka after the onset of GI-3 (Davies et al., in preparation). The GICC05 age of the Fugloyarbanki tephra layer is 26 740+/-390 yr b2k. This tephra layer has been identified and dated in several marine cores from the North Atlantic with ages in the range 22.85–23.3 14Cka BP and an average of 23.1 ¹⁴Cka BP (Rasmussen et al., 2003). A reservoir age of 400 yr has been applied to these ages (T.L. Rasmussen, 2006, pers. comm.). This age goes slightly beyond the IntCal04 calibration curve but is covered by the calibration proposed by Fairbanks et al.(2005). In Fig. 6 it is seen that the Fugloyarbanki tephra data point falls more than 0.5 ka away from the ¹⁴C calibration curve, therefore suggesting that either 1) the GICC05 age is too young, 2) the ¹⁴C calibration is too old, or 3) the applied marine reservoir age correction is too small. A direct and absolute dating of this and other tephra layers from terrestrial sources is required to eliminate the latter possible source of error.

Two problem's with Hugh Ross' claim: the tephra layers here talked about are from eruptions before historical dating, and they are not confirmed by ¹⁴C, but confirming it, and being confirmed in their turn by radiometric datings of the kinds creationists usually consider useless. A far cry from identifying Vesuvius and Krakatoa and linking that with ¹⁴C dating to confirm it. Also the correlation between different dating methods is clearly not perfect.

The funders of this project are the Carlsberg foundation. Now, the Carlsberg breweries have taken over the Swedish Pripps breweries, and then closed down one factory, with 200 Swedish brewers out of work. I am not keen on having confidence in that particular brewery. They have a clear agenda of making much money and as clear an agenda of making culture speak in their favour. If you have visited the Glyptoteket you may see what I mean. And this second thing is not quite achievable if the researchers give conclusions differring too widely from the opinion of the very brainwashed evolutionist and old earth Nordic peoples (we have very oppressive school systems, though Denmark gives better freedom for homeschooling than Sweden). While we are at beer, if you are in Denmark, there is Faxe Fadøl and smaller breweries.

Hugh Ross also mentioned that lives have been lost while doing the research for ice cores. This is very possibly a sinful waste of human lives, or even a kind of Pagan human sacrifice. It is possibly a reason to admire the ones risking their lives, but not a reason not to distrust any of the research. I was proning the moontruthers' scepticism about moon landing 1969 a few years ago and got one reaction from an Indian lady who felt I was being unjust to the Indians who had been killed in the space shuttle. But what if that Indian was fooled into it by some superior not risking his life? And risking a fast brutal death is not quite like risking martyrdom either when it comes to determining honest belief.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou
Vigil of St Bartholomew
23-VIII-2013

PS, Hugh Ross on word "min" as in "kind" with reference to Leviticus 19:19 ... he is saying that "min" in Genesis cannot mean things like genus or families because in Leviticus it means things like species or subspecies ... it is not as if "min" could have only exactly one well defined meaning. If he is open to yôm having different meanings why not min? It is even applied to human beings, like "minim" as in Jewish heretics or schismatics, where it is clearly something other than in either Genesis or Leviticus. But he is a Calvinist (correct me if I'm wrong, but you cited the Belgic Catechism!) and may be taking the Bible as a law book ... and what if producing mules were not the exact thing prohibited in Leviticus 19:19 but rather totally infertile unions? I mean, Jews can read "boil not the calf in the milk of the cow that bare it" and concoct a system of two kitchens, two sets of plates and knives and forks and spoons, and a minimum of two hours between a dairy meal and a meat meal. Not making a separate refutation article on that one though.

Carnivores in Eden?

Series:

Did animals die before the Fall? If yes, can dinos be very, very old?
Animal Death could be Consequence of the Fall (Patristic support and scientific consideration)
Carnivores in Eden?

I am obviously speaking of the dogs and cats as belonging to the class carnivores, not as absolutely sure they were actually eating meat.

Church Fathers have differed on this one. St Augustine and Venerable Bede both held herbivores were actually getting fed to carnivores by sovereign decision of Adam.

As Benno Zuiddam very amicably pointed out to me, others before them disagreed. Defending either scenario - carnivores actually eating meat or not yet eating meat - is thus possible for a Christian.

Now, I will caution two things about this:

• if death occurred in beasts before Adam sinned, as per carnivores eating herbivores, it does not mean other beasts were dying as well or that there were any sick herbivores that needed mercy killing - and absolutely not that Darwinian evolution "guided by God" used deaths of less adapted forms to purify adapted ones, so that Adam would have come from less adapted hominids gradually evolving towards him by deaths of those less like him;
• if no death in beasts (at least what Hebrews would call nephesh creatures) occurred, this does not mean that the carnivores were automatically anatomically herbivores until drastic evolution changed them.

Let me elaborate on this point, and on another one also related to evolution as observed after the fall.

Hugh Ross is very right that God provides, and that this is stated in Psalm 103.

Therefore the direct driving force of selection is not chance death or struggle for survival, but the Providence of God.

The other point is this: an anatomical omnivore can be individually herbivore.

But a herbivore can loose its capacity to digest herbs. In a pure herbivore this leads to extinction, as celiacy would lead to starvation if man could digest nothing other than wheat. But in an omnivore this leads only to specialisation as a carnivore. And this would not be added information, it would merely be degenerative evolution.

Two nourishment related mechanisms may have been destroyed in man - perhaps at the fall or perhaps when God shortened human life span from 1000 to 120 years. We have an appendix, which may have been an appendix of a full caecum, as found in apes. But in us it is not. We have a sequence related to production of vitamin C within the body that is not functional - that lacks DNA "letters" to do that.

Now, dogs and cats could have lost caecum too, between fall and flood. Guineapigs have according to that appearance lost the vitamin C sequence functionality too (as have, I think apes).

One other point about evolution: for a mutation to spread, a small population is ideal, it does not have to get by many barriers before getting dominant or exclusive in them. After flood or even in breeds leading up to the arc this may explain quick evolution. In human varities enumerated by Linnaeus, europaeus, asiaticus, africanus, americanus, monstruosus, I only attribute monstruosus (extreme giants or dwarfs and possibly centaurs and fauns) to direct nephelim traits, while the four normal "races" would all have resulted in part by quick evolution in small groups. Actually it may be that American Natives are a mixture of West Europeans and Mongolian type Asiatics.

Whether it comes to skin colour in men or to exclusive carnivorousness in beasts, this is not at variance with Hugh Ross' mathematical model for evolution (which works well enough for bacteria, as he said) since the result to be explained is not advantageous mutations breaking through among ten thousand disadvantageous ones, but only the sometimes clearly degenerative mutations to actually break through - even by deteriorating a species.

Now, if Adam had not sinned, why would there have been carnivores around even though not eating meat in actual fact?

Well, as Christians know Satan hates us. He did creep into a snake to seduce, but he could theoretically have crept into something like a T Rex (unless these are genetically manipulated organisms, created by sinful tampering with genetics) or a bear and attacked Adam with direct physical violence. I think the snake was chosen because carnivores were part of a bodyguard for Adam. Let us say a big lizard, carnivorous like others, had attacked Adam under the influence of Satan. Let us say a Brontosaurus had killed it (thus expelling Satan from his tool as well) - there would have been a pile of unsavoury carcass around, and carnivores would already have been able to deal with it by scavenging on it. If a T Rex had killed a Brnto before getting killed there would be two carcasses. And even now, dog teeth are not just useful for chewing their meat food, but also for holding on to the limbs of malefactors, as guards know.

But without such an eventuality (and presumably there was none, since Satan chose the snaky approach, which he might not have done if there had been no carnivores around Adam), maybe they were symbiotic with ruminants. A sheep eats grass, it digests in one stomach, it pukes it up to chew again before digesting in the next stomach (which might be an argument why centaurs are less believable than fauns and dogheaded men even after Nephelim taint came into humanity) ... I am not sure lambs need feed on that, but if they do that would have been an occasion for a lion literally to lie down beside that lamb and get fed too, although an adult lion.

And after the fall, they still had the physical equipment to feed that way, if this theory goes anywhere, but after Adam's sin, peace was gone between lion and lamb, and the carnivorous capacity was used for simple feeding purposes - and the other feeding capacity may have been lost through degenerative evolution.

Bears are still able to eat berries and honey.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou
Vigil of St Bartholomew
23-VIII-2013

I wonder if the three sixes in the number of this post are a kind of warning? If so, I am forwarding the fact.

It might be because I used material about "homo americanus" from a video showing only stone age people in both Europe and America (but Ojibwa Indians have genetic markers in common with Western Europe, that was not mere speculation on part of those). Or it might be the prayers of some followers of Eugene Rose who in religion was Fr Seraphim Rose and who strongly disagreed with St Augustine and St Bede. Or again Orthodox opponents to him - I was neohimerite for some time. Or ...

Or I might have been culpable or badly influenced in not voicing my suspicion that T Rex might be a genetically modified ostrich rather than lizard. Some "dinosaurs" are of lizard type in hips and some are of bird type in hips. T Rex belongs to the bird type of hips dinosaurs.

Or culpable or badly influenced in not mentioning that Psalm 103 supports Geocentrism. Was probably so used in Galileo process.

St Augustine gives an inch and some take an ell

Series: 1) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere 2) somewhere else : Bible and Church Questions 3) Creation vs. Evolution : Why I have a Personal Grudge against Kenotic Heresy 4) item : St Augustine gives an inch and some take an ell 5) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : When St Augustine makes a fault, it is not all that faulty

Where did St Augustine write about Genesis? There may be a passage in Confessions. There certainly are parts in City of God and in Questions about the Heptateuch (Pentateuch, Joshua and Judges). There may be parts of Revisions. There is De Genesi ad Literam in twelve books, De Genesi ad Literam one incomplete book and De Genesi ad Literam against the Manichees. There may of course also be passages in Letters. And in each case of the three works named De Genesi ad Literam, the title so far means "on Genesis [taken] at the letter", and in each case this refers to the fact that it also has spiritual senses - like Eve taken from a rib of Adam while he slept denoting Church taken from the opened side of Jesus Christ while he hung dead on the Cross. Now, thing is, Kent Hovind said that evolutionists contradict Jesus and Saint Paul. In both cases there are people who try to get around this using Saint Augustine. And in both cases I would say that if St Augustine gives an inch, they take an ell. If you know a certain proverb, I would say that gives them, but not St Augustine a certain similarity to the Devil. Jesus said: From the beginning of Creation God created them man and woman.* Now, if someone playing around with St Augustine likes, he can say: "sure, in the beginning of creation, the way St Augustine speaks of the six days, God created all there is in its roots, and then after that there were billions of years until Adam was actually formed in time and matter and Eve too, but they had already been formed in their causes billions of years before that. That does not make Jesus a liar." Hold it a minute! This is in De Genesi ad Literam book five and onwards at least into book six. St Augustine did say the six days and the seventh days were essentially atemporal. He also says that taking them as temporal, as six and the seventh time 24 hours lapse is, if not quite adepquate, at least good enough for beginners. He does most certainly not say that the kind of indeterminate lapse of material and temoral time between Adam's individual body being created and him getting married to Eve could amount to billions of years. Still less that God would successively have created world after world without man and all different from ours and from each other before landing on the one with man. On the contrary, his basis for taking the six days and seventh days as other than normal days is Genesis 2:4-5. That passage contains "day" in the singular.** OK, says St Augustine, then there were not six different days, only one day. Repeated six times. And that means it was not temporal. It also says of this day "before any herbs were germing".**

*Gospel According to Saint Mark : Chapter 10 : [6] But from the beginning of the creation, God made them male and female. [7] For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother; and shall cleave to his wife. [It is pretty cool the verse containing these words is 10:6, while Gospel has all in all 16 chapters.] **Book Of Genesis : Chapter 2 : [4] These are the generations of the heaven and the earth, when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the heaven and the earth: [5] And every plant of the field before it sprung up in the earth, and every herb of the ground before it grew: for the Lord God had not rained upon the earth; and there was not a man to till the earth. ***Ecclesiasticus Chapter 18 : [1] He that liveth for ever created all things together. God only shall be justified, and he remaineth an invincible king for ever. °Epistle Of Saint Paul To The Romans : Chapter 5 : [12] Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned. [Here 5:12 makes a sum of 17. These verses "sixteen going on seventeen" do not need someone "older and wiser" telling them what to say, and St Augustine does not pretend to be so either.] °°The City of God (Book I) Chapter 9.— Of the Reasons for Administering Correction to Bad and Good Together. What, then, have the Christians suffered in that calamitous period, which would not profit every one who duly and faithfully considered the following circumstances? First of all, they must humbly consider those very sins which have provoked God to fill the world with such terrible disasters; for although they be far from the excesses of wicked, immoral, and ungodly men, yet they do not judge themselves so clean removed from all faults as to be too good to suffer for these even temporal ills. ... If any one forbears to reprove and find fault with those who are doing wrong, because he seeks a more seasonable opportunity, or because he fears they may be made worse by his rebuke, or that other weak persons may be disheartened from endeavoring to lead a good and pious life, and may be driven from the faith; this man's omission seems to be occasioned not by covetousness, but by a charitable consideration. But what is blame-worthy is, that they who themselves revolt from the conduct of the wicked, and live in quite another fashion, yet spare those faults in other men which they ought to reprehend and wean them from; and spare them because they fear to give offense, lest they should injure their interests in those things which good men may innocently and legitimately use—though they use them more greedily than becomes persons who are strangers in this world, and profess the hope of a heavenly country. For not only the weaker brethren who enjoy married life, and have children (or desire to have them), ...

OK, says St Augustine, who had had a Platonic education before becoming Christian, this means what God created in the six days were not yet any individual items of anything. Growth still had to happen. Biological process did not start till after the six days. But he gives a parallel passage*** to support this reading of Genesis 2:4-5.** This parallel passage*** says God created everything at once. It is pretty obviously in visible or at least apparent contradiction with Cuvierism, with the idea now proposed by Hugh Ross, the idea of God first creating one world like fauna and flora and climate and all, then the next, then the next and each successive one containing traces of the earlier ones. If St Augustine was by any chance wrong, then "day" in Genesis 2:4-5** would be using the word yôm in a looser sense, like "occasion". And the parallel passage*** would be using "at once" in a somewhat looser sense too. As, obvious to us now, opposed exactly to Cuvierism or successive stages of creation evolving on top of each other. As opposed to creating trilobites on one occasion, then waiting for millions of years, then creating dinosaurs on another occasion, and again waiting millions of years, then creating Australopithecus on one occasion and waiting a million of years to see how he was doing, then creating Adam and Eve. With death in between all those occasions, which brings us to the next point. But first one pause on the topic of six days. Even if St Augustine was exactly right about atemporality of six days, as St Thomas Aquinas points out, this does not exclude that the first seven days of actual material time mature all the items created "in their causes" in the atemporal six days" as well as the rest in a temporal so to speak repetation or rehearsal of the atemporal six days. St Paul said: By the sin of one man, death came into the world.° Same kind of guy would say: "sure, death as a punishment for humans came with the fall, but since St Augustine says animals would have died even before that, we can accept evolution." Right, he said that carnivores were carnivores and would have eaten by killing even if Adam had not sinned. Note that his argument is a very total fixism and non-evolution of the carnivorous species. If a lion was exactly a lion as we know them, and if a wolf was exactly a wolf as we know them, or even a cat and a dog exactly a cat and a dog, as we know them, and if each species of finches of the Galapagos islands was created seperately on the fifth day and had a separate couple of ancestors on the Arc of Noah, then St Augustine has proven there were animals eaten before Adam sinned. And animals eaten obviously means animals dying. But in that other scenario that evolutionists give, animal death is not limited to some deaths to feed some animals, it is actually made the chief instrument for weeding out the varieties not wanted for "next step in evolution". St Augustine weakens "by the sin of one man, death entered the world" but he never reverses it to - as do the evolutionists - "by death man entered into the world". And maybe for a very good reason. You see, St Augustine was a convert from Manichean heresies. To them, to the heretics adherring to them, man precisely as a biological being is a product of a kind of spiritual death or fall. The souls that stayed quite alive never made it to be men, they remained body-less spirit children of the purely spiritual "God". Man as living on earth is the product of such beings getting trapped by the "other god" of death and materiality. So, to a Manichean as much as to an Evolutionist it would seem true enough to say "by death, man entered into the world". But St Augustine had washed off that shit from his mind, when he asked St Ambrose for baptism. As an ex-Palmarian, I know what it means to stake the view of creation on St Augustine. The Papacy or Antipapacy at Palmar de Troya has issued a creed in which a recent creation, but that one "in one moment" is raised to status of dogma of the creed. The people who just barely avoid contradicting Our Lord Jesus Christ and St Paul by taking an ell where St Augustine gives an inch, to me they are very clearly sham Augustinians on that precise point. So, I have taken my distance from Palmar de Troya, even before I left Sweden. When I did, I started reaffirming literality of six days as most probable since supported by most Church Fathers. Some people similarily - like Palmar de Troya - place St Augustine over the other Church Fathers - for sake of whose authority St Thomas Aquinas insisted on the possibility of harmonising by a rehearsal of the heptapartite initial not yet successive moment of Creation with subsequent heptapartite week in time of maturing with miraculous rapidity what had been created "in its seeds" or "in its causes" in the "one moment week". They similarily place St Augustine over the other Church Fathers, but only when it suits them. That is where they are not like Palmar de Troya, which refrains from going beyond St Augustine away from other Church Fathers on this one. Dom Gérard Calvet, who was founder and first abbot of Le Barroux, Sainte Madeleine Monastery (one kilometre or so above Le Barroux village and castle), clearly had read the fifth book of the twelve book work on Genesis. He finds the prologue of St John's Gospel make better sense that way. Any tree "was life" in God the Son from all eternity as knowledge about treeness is part of God's Wisdom and hence eternal life. Then - possibly - it was created in its treeness in the third recurrence of the one-moment day. A one moment in which God decided that trees should be among the infinite possibilities He knew that He also brought to actuality. Then individual trees were created up to present - very probably with the first ones created on the third lapse of 24 hours of actual time. Now, Dom Gérard Calvet did support this reading of St John's prologue. He was certainly a devout Catholic, a real friend of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He was also a friend of two people - Father Bryan Houghton, who described Evolutionism as rehashed Buddhism, but also Gustave Thibon, who thinks a certain evolution with its painfulness is an essential to the production of Christian saints, of hallowed souls. Now, I have not read much of Gustave Thibon, but I do fear he may have been a supporter of Thestic Evolution. Father Bryan Houghton clearly was not. The Pseudo-Jesuit Pierre Theilhard de Chardin (a favourite intellectual enemy of Father Bryan Houghton), as we all know, was a supporter thereof. Whether Dom Gérard was a Theistic Evolutionist or not, I leave, for the present to God's privy. If he was, "he was wrong on that one" - amicus Gerhardus, magis amica veritas. But I thought it worth mentioning the fact that people who have read St Augustine with even less attention than I used yesterday - including those who have read only selected quotes - may feel able to plead not guilty to the charge that evolutionism makes Our Lord Jesus Christ and St Paul look wrong or misinforming. They should not need to immediately take heat as heretics from people who may be orthodox on Genesis but wrong on even more important matters. However, I should not neglect to inform these evolutionists who think they are no heretics, who think they respect scrupulously the words of Christ through the Catholic interpretation of St Augsutine, that the same St Augustine might have a point about why the Church is on the brink of being submitted to persecution by certain powers. City of God. Got it? Now look up Book I. Got that one too?°° Now, there is a chapter called chapter IX. I am one of the guys that St Augustine calls weak. I still hope to have children. I do not like the prospect of my family getting persecuted - whenever I shall get it. But I do say what I think about Evolutionism. Or about Heliocentric false philosophies too. Some guys are what St Augustine calls strong. They are monks or bishops, like Dom Gérard or Monsignor Lefèbvre were in their mortal life. And some of them are still a bit queezy about correcting the evil mighty ones. Read through that chapter and see what such behaviour brings in terms of misfortunes that the good share with the bad when living together in a society. Hans-Georg Lundahl BpI, Georges Pompidou Sunday after St Lawrence and before Assumption of the BVM 11-VIII-2013

A little PS: This link is These links are too good to miss, while we talk about dates:

Creation Ministries International: How do you date a New Zealand volcano? by Robert Doolan http://creation.com/how-do-you-date-a-new-zealand-volcano

CMI : The way it really is: little-known facts about radiometric dating Long-age geologists will not accept a radiometric date unless it matches their pre-existing expectations. by Tas Walker http://creation.com/the-way-it-really-is-little-known-facts-about-radiometric-dating

Can Evolutionists be a Laughing Stock?

Series:

1) Creation vs. Evolution : Can Evolutionists be a Laughing Stock?
2) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Age of Earth video's by Kent Hovind
3) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Chaplains vs Councellors and on Creation vs Evolution (feat. Kent Hovind)
4) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Hovind's Dissertation Not as Bad as its Critics on Rational Wiki Think
5) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Hovind - Ross Debate, for Four Videos
6) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on History being Kent Hovind's Weaker Subject
7) Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : ... on Kent Hovind's supposed failure in Carbon Dating Subject

I just saw a video which complained that creationists were too funny and killing poor atheists by provoking laughter.

Same video professed it was impossible to make evolution look funny.

Now, here I am watching Kent Hovind. He had moments of making evolutionist atheism look funny. Looking at such a video, I think an atheist would either snicker - or be angry.

Now Kent Hovind is serving prison. Maybe he was kind of funny. Check him out.

He can of course have been set up because he attacked the public school system. As do I. As do I.

We have both served in such.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI Georges Pompidou
St Alphonsus Maria Liguori
2-VIII-2013

Turtle's and X-rays:

That poor turtle!” the netizen wrote. “It had to absorb all those X-rays!”

source

Now, absorbing X-rays is not very healthy, but turtles are thickskinned and absorb less than others.

Mussels - other long lived species - also have a shell and are furthermore protected by water. Trees are longlived and have bark.

As I said elsewhere, I do not believe the Hovind theory, since I believe the "water above the firmament" is a permanent part of creation and refers to all water molecules, maybe even all hydrogen molecules you can find all over space. Came down during flood, then back up, part of it.

But he is right that there were less X-rays or other cosmic radiation reaching earth before the Flood, that much I consider a safe guess.

My turn on that is that God asked the stars "time to turn on some more radiation, men have been living too long and getting too bad, as you could see. If times are shortened some of them even might be saved" and stars answered "OK, you are our creator and theirs, you know what you are doing". (Confer Canonic Book of aruch, chapter 3:34-35)

Now, I found his defense of the water canopy theory, and I will quote from it what I find relevant to mine, with my answers. And maybe later restudy it:

2 Peter 3 : Open letter to Brother Tom Ish- Editor of Creation Illustrated

"Genesis 1:1 in the Jewish Torah (OT) says, 'In the beginning God created the heaven...' Hmmm? Heaven is in the singular and has been for 3,400 years in Jewish literature as well as the thousands of copies scattered around the world."

Sorry, but ha-shamayim is in Hebrew plural. Whether you translate the word as heaven or as heavens in English - you did not cite the Hebrew - the Hebrew word is plural.

"The FIRST 'bible' I can find that uses 'heavens' plural in 1:1 is the 1553 Spanish 'Inquisition Approved Old Testament' -'En Principio crio el dio alos cielos y ala tierra.' Plural. Catholic Spanish Inquisition... Hmmm? Satan plans lo-o-o-o-ong term!"

Sorry again, but Spanish Inquisition at that time included lots of converted Jews who really knew Hebrew.

[Besides, if you accept the Sanhedrin approved Masoretic version, approved by the inheritors of the Sanhedrin that condemned Jesus or at least the Sanhedrin at Jamnia, that seems to have condemned Christians, it seems a bit fuinny to object to a "Sanhedrin" of a Christian type when it is on top of that clearly not withholding the Bible from the people. At least not from stable and pious ones.]

"KH- Ps. 148:4 says 'the waters THAT BE above the heavens.' Based on that verse I believe the entire universe we see is inside a water canopy right now. That would not negate the idea that there was also one over the first heaven as we will cover in part 3. The birds fly in the firmament (KJB). That means it is the air not the stretching. I do agree the heavens have been or are being stretched. The Bible says they are at least 11 times."

Ah, that was the psalm I was looking for!

That is why I believe the waters above the firmament are still or again at least in part there.

I wonder if the verses about having been stretched mean that God is making the Universe bigger - which could explain why year is now more than 364 days (confer Book of Henoch) - or that it is not hanging loose and limp as something "not stretched" would.

Now, if the waters are "above the heavens" they are therefore also above the firmament.

That is my main reason against the Hovind theory./HGL

Yeah, sth else I would not laugh at at all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP4dp-VxNvQ