Creatorem Coeli et Terrae

Sadly, Dr. Tam seems unaware that all the suffering and evil has its one and only ultimate source in the original sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve, just as narrated in the third chapter of Genesis.

            The effects of sin in our bodies, in the Earth’s topography and even in the cosmos, are incalculable, but will all come into the light of the truth some day. 

            (See the writer’s comments on the Collect for the ninth Prophecy of the Easter Vigil and the second Offertory prayer at Mass.)  Next, I must—again—take issue with Editor Michael Matt and his insistence that Pope Benedict’s “Summorum Pontificium changed everything . . . and young Catholics are flocking back to Tradition” (p. 2).  He goes on to assent that “The word traditionalist only means a Catholic who has added or subtracted nothing to or from what it always means to practice the Catholic faith . . . .”

            Now, Mr. Matt, Dr. Tam’s letter proves that an awful lot has been both added to and subtracted from what Catholics believed and practice up until, let us say, at least to 1633 when the Copernican belief was pronounced “formally heretical” as to Earth’s orbiting the sun and at least “erroneous in faith” as to its supposed diurnal motion.

            The popularization of the Copernican hypothesis into the minds of believing Christians (not just Catholics) caused incalculable confusion, as the literature of the Renaissance attests.  Sorry, I cannot quote from memory the famous poem of Anglican John Donne exactly, but the “new philosophy calls all in doubt” is close enough.  Notice Donne refers to the cosmology as philosophy.  That’s because the believing mind at that time, in the end of the “Age of Faith,” could not envision, and rightly so, a cosmology, nor even the natural sciences as a whole, at odds with the doctrines of Faith.

            It is not only abnormal but perverse to think that “science” can contradict “reason” or “faith”; and yet, Catholics today have so distorted a view of both faith and reason, that contradictions such as those of evolution and creation are not only tolerated but embraced and exalted as does his Eminence Christoph Cardinal Schonborn in his book Creation and Evolution.

            And this, despite the ever growing mountains of empirical evidences in support of Romans 1:20 and 2 Peter 3, to mention only two scriptural references in support of Genesis 1-11.

Surely, they are “willfully ignorant,” and that is St. Peter’s judgment, not mine (thought I must add mine to it).

            Finally, there are just two points in the article by esteemed Catholic creationist Peter Wilders that I submit are perhaps not quite as clear as we would wish.  These two points are 1) Creation is not a miracle; and 2) the necessity for secondary causes plus the need to be clear about them vis a vis Creation.

            Creation is not to be compared with Our Lord’s miracle at Cana or with any other miracle, however stupendous.  The reason, most simply put, is that all miracles, while requiring the power of God, also presupposes God’s acts of Creation ex nihilo and in toto of the entire natural Order of things, an order which all miracles temporarily suspend or interrupt or in the same way contravene.

            When Moses, by the power given him by God and by God working through Moses, using Moses as His agent or secondary cause, made the waters of the Red Sea to stand up as a wall on either side of a roadway through which the Israelites passed, the normal and natural law which governs the flow of water and which natural law was created most probably on Day Three.  The miracle at the Red Sea obviously presupposed the entire natural order which includes all laws governing the behavior of water.  (I cannot resist referring here to the landmark and classic work, Universal Water by Wes Marin. One does not agree, obviously, with his many atheistic/naturalistic views, but one cannot question his purely scientific (science as certain knowledge) descriptions of the atomic structure and natural laws that govern this most amazingly versatile molecule.”

            Similarly, when Our Lord changed the “substance” of water (H20) into the substance of wine (look up the formula), this miracle, in order for there to be a miracle, presupposes that in the original order of creation established during the first Six days of the first week of the world, Bod created the substances of substantial forms that are unable to transmute, one into the other, by any natural process.

            I am glad Mr. or Dr. Wilders made this comparison because it is causing me to articulate once more my cosmological theory of the universe as the first substantial form and the first secondary cause.