Other on Kevin Davis's First Video with Rev. Rudolph Bandas

Archibald Sayce was no Church Father, Reverend Bandas was not Pope · Kevin Responded - On Something Else ... · Debate with Skabedab · Other exchanges under same video · Other on Kevin Davis's First Video with Rev. Rudolph Bandas

The Bible and Science
Catholic Family Podcast, 18 Sept. 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99IwSns3qhU

note A
You may be friends with a man not just Geocentric but flat earth (didn't know there were RC flat earthers), but if so it is because he is not trying to get a living from writing among inter alia about this position.

A basically total boycott of a writer, because he is Geocentric and even if he writes on other topics, resulting in prolonged poverty is neither charitable, nor even just.

note B
The principle that:

• what is proven science cannot be condemned by the Bible
• what is proven Bible exegesis (includes but is not limited to decisions already made by the Church) is compatible with all that is correctly scientific, and any scientific pretended fact incompatible with it must be false

is obviously correct.

This doesn't mean that anyone is free to dismiss traditional exegesis, just because it is not yet backed up by an anathema, in favour of a very total remodelling inspired by what one thinks is proven science.

On the same note, while scientific facts just in general are no wise profitable for the salvation, except St. Paul, St. John of Damascus and St. Thomas Aquinas say they are, since they prove God, there are key areas where they are or where the refutation of a false idea is so (proving God by Geocentrism - yes, that's how Riccioli summarises Prima Via - or rejecting eternity of matter and energy).

note C
Traditionally speaking, the Church has been undecided between literal six days (in which case light is created on day I, sun and moon and stars on day IV) and one moment creation.

That one can say "light was not created before the sun" if one means that every part of material creation was created in one single moment, it does not follow that one can say "sun and light existed before the earth, like in Big Bang astronomy" - the decision of 1909 allowed extending days to longer periods, in a somewhat cavalier manner, but that other dispensation of allowing sun and light to be created before the earth is not specifically mentioned.

I think Rev. Rudolph Bandas mentioned natural laws as criteria of proof in relation to this subject.

BUT, it is philosophically false that God can only create or manage creation by allowing all results to be caused by secondary causes acting in the manner according to natural laws. If there were no key points at which some created fact is caused directly by divine fiat, and if the natural world did not depend on these key points, this would make miracles a kind of intrusions, and it would also destroy the argument in secunda via of God as prima causa.

note D
Outside Genesis 1, where there are traditionally two explanations possible (I'm not sharing, but also not condemning, one moment creation), Genesis is one of the historical books, there is no such "Biblical literary genre" as "myth" the Church has never remotely doubted historicity.

This is easy to check with either St. Augustine's City of God, or Historia Scholastica, or diverse histories of Germanic peoples. Venerable Bede starts off with Adam and Eve in Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as well as in In principium Genesis, usque ad natiuitatem Isaac et eiectionem Ismahelis, libros III. Gregory of Tours does it in Gesta Francorum.

Historia Scholastica was translated into Flemish and French and Rijmbijbel and Bible historiée were proposed to the laity.

When Haydock speaks of how we know Genesis 3 is true, he traces the shortest way of transmission from Adam to Moses, which in his Masoretic chronology of the Vulgate he gets to Moses being eighth from Adam in "minimally overlapping generations" - extending Genesis 5 and 11 by presuming genealogies to be not just incomplete (which on occasion they were, as I would say for ritual reasons of damnatio memoriae), but even "fragmentary" as Bandas does makes nonsense of this fairly basic epistemology.

No one pretended Moses knew more than the six days from a divine revelation to himself. For the rest of Genesis, the traditionally held epistemology is at least implicitly that Moses was to Henoch or Joseph in Egypt or Noah or Abraham as St. Luke to the visitation of Gabriel - relying on testimony from the time of the events, in the case of Genesis obviously via intermediate transmitters.

Note E
"It would not do to impose the theories of physical science as a positive norm of Biblical interpretation, and to demand that Genesis be explained in accordance with constantly changing hypothesis. All that can be reasonably demanded is that exegetes accept the established conclusions of science as a negative guiding principle, and refrain from advocatng as certain, or even as probable, any theory whcih would contradict ascertained scientific facts" (p. 10)

I suppose that this is not just the personal opinion of Rev. Bandas, but fairly closely reflects some kind of ruling from Rome at the time.

The problem is, a phrase like "ascertained scientific fact" and even worse "established conclusions of science" are pretty much weasel words, which on the one hand can cover a case like hard proof, and on the other hand can cover a case like a very persistent error within the scientific community.

Such errors are not getting corrected by Catholics who with the Bible could save science as a social venture from some disasters, and when some Protestants are doing the work we should have been doing, some of us refrain from appreciating because they are Protestants.

There is a similarity of wording with a quote from St. Augustine, but the words he chose were really only applicable to hard proof for undeniable truth. De Gen. ad litt. i. 21, 41. is the reference, meaning I cannot access it online. But anyway, part of the words were Whatever they can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature, we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures = and that is a higher bar that "science" has to meet before it can even negatively interfere with Exegesis.