A Truly Traditionalist Approach to Science Isn’t What You’ve Been Told
Later this month a conference promising to lead Catholics from “diabolical deception to [the] restoration of truth” will be held in Wisconsin. The headline speaker is Fr. Chad Ripperger, predictably leading Where Peter Is founder Mike Lewis to pen another unhinged rant against Fr. Ripperger, this time calling him “wildly heterodox, superstitious, and conspiratorial.” Last week we published an excellent article by Michael Hitchborn demolishing a previous Lewis article attacking the well-known priest.
Though it always feels right to disagree with Lewis, I do have serious reservations about this “Restore Truth Conference.” Other speakers at the conference include Hugh Owen, director of the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, and Robert Sungenis, longtime Catholic apologist. The Kolbe Center advocates for a “traditional doctrine of creation”, by which it means it supports the “young earth” hypothesis (i.e., the earth was created only around 6,000 years ago), and Sungenis is a vocal proponent of geocentrism. (Owen and many people associated with the Kolbe Center also support geocentrism, although not as dogmatically as Sungenis does.) This conference, then, promises to push both young earth and geocentrism points of view as Catholic truth. This is as pseudo-scientific as many of the atheist attempts to use scientific findings to push a purely materialistic outlook. But more importantly, it opposes the actual traditional approach of the Church to scientific discoveries.
The conference’s promotional materials promise it will take aim at two evils: Darwinian evolution1 and “alien deception.” I agree that Catholics should have deep concerns about both. Darwinian evolution, specifically biological macroevolution in both its original and its later “neo-Darwinian” forms, has been used for the past 150 years to advance a fundamentally anti-Catholic worldview, one that rejects the role of God in our universe. And as it is popularly understood and taught, Darwinian evolution has little actual scientific evidence to support it.
Likewise, the modern UFO movement has deceived many. Recently on the Crisis Point podcast I spoke with Teresa Yanaros, who was actively involved in this movement before returning to her Catholic Faith. As a result of her firsthand experience, she believes there’s no question that most purported alien encounters are actually encounters with demonic forces.
If the Restore Truth Conference was simply warning against the dangers of Darwinian evolution and the UFO movement, I wouldn’t voice my reservations. But having Owen and Sungenis as speakers tells me that the solution being proposed—teaching that a young earth (Owen) and geocentrism (Sungenis) is “Catholic teaching,” as both Owen and Sungenis do—will also lead people astray, just in a different direction. A faithful Catholic can reject Darwinian evolution while also realizing that both a young earth and geocentrism are not scientifically viable alternatives.
In this article I can’t detail all the arguments that Owen and Sungenis present to expound their views (see Owen’s Kolbe Center and Sungenis’s Catholic Apologetics Inter
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