Answering Mark Shea

Creation vs. Evolution : Answering Mark Shea · HGL's F.B. writings : Mark Shea's Post and My Comments + Debate · New blog on the kid : Mark Hausam on Infallibility

He's doing a book on the Creed (not sure if Apostolic or Nicene, anyway, it seems to be an extended, beyond Q & A format, catechism on the first part of Christian doctrine, that being the Creed).

He quoted a passage from it on his blog, and I quote this tetrachotomy on the people involved in a certain discussion:

• the Atheist (who imagines that evolution somehow proves there is no God designing anything).
  
  
• the Fundamentalist (who fears exactly the same thing about evolution and therefore tries desperately to make the convincing and converging lines of evidence for it go away by appeals to simplistic readings of the biblical text, as though it demands the universe was made some six thousand years ago in a single week).
  
  
• the Intelligent Design advocate, who seems pretty Catholic, but who in fact seldom enjoys a warm welcome from Catholic theologians, including (particularly) the people who study the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.
  
  
• Thomists and other Catholics, who affirm that there is an Argument from Design, but who deny that “Intelligent Design” arguments really capture it.

A bit of my Creed book
July 22, 2019 by Mark Shea
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2019/07/a-bit-of-my-creed-book.html

Where did he forget the Fundamentalist who is also a Catholic?

That Adam was made 6000 (5779) - 7500 years ago (diverging counts for diverse texts and diverse calculations, not a continuum) is required by Genesis 5 and 11 as well as Luke 3:23-38.

That the universe was made in a single week is required by not just Genesis 1, but also Exodus 20:

[11] For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them, and rested on the seventh day: therefore the Lord blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.

That Moses was not under any illusion due to cultural prejudice, but God Himself said these words, is clear from the New Testament, both Pharisees and Christ:

We know that God spoke to Moses: but as to this man, we know not from whence he is.
[John 9:29]

And as concerning the dead that they rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spoke to him, saying: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?
[Mark 12:26]

If God really spoke to Moses in the bush, and sending him as a prophet*, Moses cannot later on Mount Sinai have taken his own cultural prejudice and inner monologue or inner dialogue as God's voice when it wasn't.

Therefore, there is a clear requirement of continuous creation followed by continuous just upholding of what was already created, and not any "punctuated equilibria".

But there is more, Christ also considered Adam and Eve as contemporaneous with the beginning.** Their creation was according to Roman Martyrology 5199 years before His Birth, and therefore 5129 years before He spoke.

6 days / 1 873 328.7825 days = 0.000 003 202 854 755 7

If their creation was 3 ppm of the then history of the universe after absolute beginning, Christ's words hold.

Now, what is 5129 years to 4.5 billion years?

5129 years / 4.5 billion years = 0.000 001 139 777 777 ...

So, their creation would have been only 1 ppm less recent than his own words compared to a much vaster "history" of the earth. The very reversal of above.

Therefore, yes, the texts do indeed require that creation days were negligible in comparison to the history of man since Adam to when Christ spoke, which is the case for one week, which is also the specification given.

Note also what God did not speak to Moses of, which was not part of a revelation at Sinai, except God giving a general yes to Moses on the whole of it : the history of Genesis 2:4 to 50:25. Unlike the account of 6 days in Genesis 1 (to most of which Adam and Eve were not witnesses), Genesis 3 is known because Adam and Eve recorded it in a short text which was easy to memorise.

For the more than 20 to less than 30 generations between them and Moses (as per Genesis 5 and 11 plus generations from Abraham to Moses), with many overlaps due to long lifespans, so several pre-Flood patriarchs could rehearse under Adam and Eve, and so Noah could rehearse under one having done so (even with LXX?), and similar from Noah to Abraham, and tribal life from Abraham being compatible with logistics of transporting written documents (hence longer chapters from 12 on), Genesis 3 can be fairly well relied on even humanly, and inerrantly so when God's inspiration to Moses as final collector is concerned.

If we had instead lifespans like "dying at 30 to 40" for tens of millennia, the transmission would be less secure (there would for instance have been more language changes) and also Genesis 5 and 11 would be documenting a corruption by omission of the genealogies.

So, yes, the texts do require Adam being created c. 5199 BC (more recently in Vulgate / King James / Masoretic, less recently in Syncellus' view of LXX).

It is funny that Mark Shea then goes on to divorce the Thomist and any other Catholic not just from the Fundy, but also from the kind of ID arguments against atheism that he considers different from a Catholic take on ID (without giving specific examples).

Or, perhaps, tragic. He's known to be a very avid supporter of a "Pope" who in 2014 said "God is not a magician with an omnipotent magic wand". Bergoglio, begone!

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris XI
Vigil of St. James
24.VII.2019

PS, I am not afraid evolution would prove atheism. I am not afraid of a non-proven theory that is disproven on several accounts, at least 3 or four, including origin of language, would prove anything./HGL

PPS, in a previous post, Mark Shea engaged in blatant ad hominem:

The first is this: St. Thomas himself never says “We cannot explain a natural phenomenon, so God did it”, and for good reason. The problem with such “God of the Gaps” arguments (“I don’t know how this thing works or originated, so it must be a miracle”) is that we are constantly filling in the gaps. A few hundred years ago, people could have said, “If there’s no God, then explain lightning!” Then somebody explained that lightning was a big static electricity discharge. A little after, they might have said, “If there’s no God, then explain magnetism, or immunity from disease, or where babies come from!” Now we know how these processes work pretty well. People who thought such arguments were bulletproof often lost their faith when those arguments fell apart.

ID also never said “We cannot explain a natural phenomenon, so God did it”. ID consistently says we can explain such and such a thing (like life arising in non-life or human speech taking its first step) only by God.

Also he is wrong on history of sciences, and a Medieval of St Thomas' time would not have said the lightning was most of the time directed by God. Its electric essence does not prove it had to fall exactly then, exactly there, and angels or demons directing that (under God's providence) are therefore still not superfluous, nor were they in his time regarded as sole origin of lightnings.

Mark Shea bungles both quoting ID and narrating history of sciences, a bit as if he was overrelying (I'm tempted to a rude image) on someone else, like a scientist who never read an ID article (with normal understanding of his reading) and has no idea of history of sciences./HGL

* Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich can have been spoken to by God without having this clear discernment always, since she was not sent as a prophet, her revelations are not known by her looking up the bishop's office room to obey God, but because Clement Brentano was curious and wrote them down, hence some could be of her own - undiscerned - invention or recollection of someone else : as I suspect for pre-Babelic language being close to Sanskrit rather than Hebrew, which could reflect discussions among priests or doctors taking care of her, since this was after Bopp.

** Mark 10:6 - read your patron Saint's Gospel, Mr. Shea!