Episode 296: Gideon Lazar on the St. Basil Institute (January 31, 2025)

In this episode of The Open Door, panelists Thomas Storck, Andrew Sorokowski, and Christopher Zehnder speak with Gideon Lazar, the Coordinator of the St. Basil Institute.

They ask the following questions: 

1. You are the coordinator of the St Basil Institute which your website describes as "A think tank dedicated to the renewal of theological discourse on the doctrine of creation within the Catholic Church." Could you comment on both what you mean by the theology of creation and why it is important? https://stbasilinstitute.org
2. You speak of your effort "to revive the Catholic Church’s perennial teachings on creation." How and why have these teachings been obscured? 
3. The entire thrust of modern Western culture seems to be concentrated on what man can manufacture and not on what God has provided through his work of creation. Lately this seems to be reaching its logical end with transhumanism, the rapid development of AI, and the erosion of the two natural human sexes via technology. What are the trends in Western culture that have fostered this kind of thinking? What hope do we have of resisting these things?
4. The trajectory over at least the last century has seen the abandonment of rural life and small farms. In many places the countryside has become simply an abode for factory farms with as few workers as possible. Obviously that has implications for rural parishes, schools, businesses, etc. Has the neglect of the Church's teaching on creation contributed to this situation?
5. What are the practical implications of creation theology for topics such as organic farming, food quality, natural medicine, and care of the environment in general?
6. When speaking of the theology of creation, at least in the U.S. one immediately thinks of debates about creationism and evolution. Does your theological work have any reference to those debates?
7. What projects or activities are you planning and how can interested viewers take part in these?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to WCAT radio, your home for authentic Catholic programming.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Welcome to the Open Door with hosts Thomas Stork the
co hosts Christopher Zender and andrews Rakowski. And let's begin
as we do, with the prayer of the Holy Spirit,
in the name of the Father and the Son the
Holy Spirit. Amen, Come, Holy Spirit, full the hearts of
your faithful and kindlement the fire of your love. Send

(00:28):
forth your spirit, and they shall be created, and you
shall renew the face of the earth. Let us pray,
Oh God, who has taught the hearts of the faithful
by the light of the Holy Spirit, Rant, that in
the same spirit we may be truly wise and every
rejoice in His consolation through Christ our Lord. Amen. Well,
today our guest is Gideon Laser, who is the president

(00:52):
and founder of the St. Basil Institute for a Creation
or Theology of Creation. So thank you very much for
joining us this morning. Get in.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
Thank you. Just to briefly correct, I'm only the institute coordinator.
Unfortunately I'm not the founder and president. Okay, but thank you.
Thank you for crediting me with that.

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Well, I'd like to give out favors when I can
when it doesn't have any negative in fact on me. Okay, So, uh,
your website describes your organization as a think tank dedicated
to the renewal of theological discourse when the doctrine of
creation is in the Catholic Church. Could you comment on

(01:36):
both what you mean by the theology of creation and
why it is important.

Speaker 3 (01:41):
Yeah, So, the theology of creation is sort of a
broad category, but it's very it's very foundational for everything
we do in the rest of theology. They're sort of
looking both at God's act of creating as well as
the created order itself and really touches upon every other
area of theology, right, because in terms of creating, that's

(02:04):
going to touch on our doctrine of God, in terms
of why did God create? That's going to touch on
our eschatology and our moral theology in terms of our
place in the created order. Again, that's going to touch
on moral theology. God's taking up of the created order
into the order of grace. This is going to touch
on the incarnation and on our sacramental theology. So there's

(02:26):
really no area of theology which is not somehow related
to the theology of creation. In his book, in the beginning.
Cardinal Ratzinger later Pope Benedict. He noted that actually there
was almost no teaching in his day in seminaries on
the theology of creation. And this has begun to be

(02:50):
fixed since then. But there's really been a lack of
proper discussion on the theology of creation. There's been quite
a lot of discussion on what we might call reconciling
faith and reason. All Right, we have all this modern
scientific evidence about creation. How do we reconcile that with
the theology, But we don't actually discuss the theology that

(03:12):
we're reconciling the science with. So we started the institute
because we realized we actually need to go back to
what the Church actually teaches about the theology of creation,
because this has been I mean, it's right there in
the beginning of the Bible, so it's the foundation of
the Bible. You turn to the very end of the Bible,
we see the new creation. You look at the Church fathers,

(03:34):
they're always discussing creation. You look at Saint Thomas Aquinas, right,
about a sixth of the Suma is about creation. So
anywhere you look in the Church's tradition, creation has been
absolutely central and so we realize you just need to
go back to actually discussing the theology of creation once again.

Speaker 4 (03:58):
But so you say that we need revive your website
says need revive the Calctrich just perennial teachings on creation.
Why do you think these have been obscured? I mean,
especially in our day where natural science is such a
powerful force. Why have we and why have we? Why
have we forgotten? Maybe two? When did we start to

(04:20):
forget it?

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yeah? In terms of when I think there was this
great sort of death of Catholic theology, it seems to
me around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where I mean
Cardinal Newman mentions, for example, how when he went to
Rome he couldn't find a single tomis there. And so
there had really been this death of Catholic theology in

(04:45):
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and under pope's like
Pope Leo the thirteenth, they really wanted to be a
revival of theology. And again once again is connected with
a Second Vatican Council, this concern to revive theology. But
I think at that same time period evolutionary science had

(05:05):
really welded itself into the public consciousness, and the Church
was very afraid of having I think a second Galileo affair.
We're looking back on everything that happened in connection with Galileo,
this had really implanted itself. I think in the mind
of Europe as the Church being backwards and unscientific, and
so the Church almost did not want to touch these

(05:25):
sorts of issues with a ten foot poll. I think
the Church, in her wisdom, has on scientific matters, allowed
for a range of opinions. So put Pius the twelfth
and Humani generous says, all right, we gotta believe in
Adam and Eve because that's foundational to everything. But how
long ago were Adam and Eve, how exactly were they created?
And so on. Let's allow theologians to continue to debate

(05:47):
these issues. But I think what ended up happening after
that is a lot of theologians went, Okay, the Church
is now allowed for us to believe in evolution. Therefore
evolution is now a dog. Well, let's stop discussing it
all together, as not to say someone can't believe an evolution.
But this is still an open discussion in the Catholic Church.

(06:07):
So we need to be having serious theological discussions about
these matters, because that's simply not happening in a lot
of places in the church today.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Before we move on to the number three, I just
wanted to ask a follow up question. Do you think
that the neglect of the theology of creation starting in
the ageent century had anything to do with the general
philosophical or philosophical not theological, but philosophical atmosphere, the cartesianism
and so on.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
I think that's definitely true, because you have with Descartes
substance dualism, or even though Descartes isn't necessarily there fully
separating the material and the spiritual, he's beginning to really
make this great separation of the material and the spiritual.
And in that then right, what we can have is
we can sort of have our Catholic faith as our
own private spiritual thing, but it has nothing to do

(07:00):
with this world really, So we have our public stuff
which is material, and we have our private spiritual stuff.
But the issue is if that if God created the
entire world, then everything, all the matter in this world
is subject to God as well, and so you cannot
have that divide then between the material and the spiritual.
So it is Cartesian philosophy there that opens the door

(07:24):
for this perspective. And you see this nowadays quite often
with how a lot of modern defenders of the faith
will present the faith right. They want to defend them,
maybe the moral teachings of the church, but do not
want to walk into controversial issues where all of a
sudden it might contradict scientific dogmas or historical dogmas or
so on, because as soon as you walk into those areas,

(07:46):
now we're making claims about the real world, this world
that is objective that everyone can share, not just about
will the faith benefit me in private?

Speaker 2 (07:56):
I think I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead.

Speaker 5 (08:00):
Yeah, I think you'd agree, But tell me if you
don't that the thrust of modern Western culture seems to
be concentrated on what man can manufacture and not so
much on what God has provided through his work of creation.
And the you know, consequence of this, one could say,

(08:22):
has been phenomena like transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and perhaps even
the erosion of the separation into humanity into two sexes
male and female. What trends and you know what other
trends in Western culture do you think have fostered that
kind of thinking? And do you have any hope of

(08:46):
any idea of how that could be resisted.

Speaker 3 (08:49):
Yeah. So, I think the key here for us fighting
against something like transhumanism is that we have to realize
that grace builds upon nature. It does not destroy your
replace nature, it builds upon it. And when Cadgetan is
discussing this in his commentary on the Suma, he points
out that it's because God has created both the material

(09:12):
world and the spiritual order that builds upon it. And
other schools of theologyal they might disagree some of the
details of that, this is a fundamental axiom that everyone
agreed on in the past, is that God created the
physical world and he creates the grace that builds upon it.
And so therefore any work we do to improve the

(09:34):
world has to presuppose the order that God already put
in there, versus transhumanism says, no, the material world is
just the result of random processes, so if we want
to change it, we're completely welcome to do so. And
so transhumanism does not need nature to build upon it,
wants to replace nature with our own design and turn

(09:55):
us into gods. And I think this is one of
the fundamental issues we face today is this issue of transhumanism.
But if you look at the social encyclicals, almost every
single social encyclical discusses the theology of creation, and go
all the way back to the early encyclicals. On this
of Popelio the thirteenth, he's discussing creation, and for example,

(10:16):
in Our Condum Divine or in Roum Novarum, he's using
creation to found the social doctrines of the Church, and
that goes all the way forward to today, and Pope
Francis and Ladatto c was turning back to creation. There
just came out a new document from the Magisterium on
artificial Intelligence, and I think I found the word creation
is mentioned there twenty one times in the short and cyclical.

(10:38):
So everything the Church teaches about the moral order is
founded upon creation, and transhumanism is in a sense the
synthesis of all errors on the moral order, because what
it wants to do is finally get rid of creation.
Those who wanted to push divorce or contraception, or gay
marriage or other things, they wanted to destroy little parts

(11:00):
of the created order, but not necessarily the created order altogether,
versus transhumanism wants to destroy the created order altogether.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
Let me ask the follow up question, if I may
get in you missioned grace of Nature, do you is
your work? Can you situate or is it possible to
situate your work in the intense controversies that have theologians
that had since the forties on Great Grayson nature and

(11:34):
the connection between the two. I'm sure you're familiar with
those controversies. People like Little Office One.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
Yeah. Something we've tried to do as an institute basically
is welcome in Orthodox Catholics of all different perspectives on
issues where the Magisterium has allowed matters of debate. So
we have people who work with us who will hold
much more to sort of the strict Tonistic position on this,
and we have other people who work with us. We
are much more in line with the new Altaelog because

(12:03):
I think that regardless of what perspective you take, what
school of theology you follow, no matter what it is,
creation is going to be fundamental to that. And I
actually think that the doctrine of creation can actually help
overcome some of those debates that are going on. But
I think the concern a lot of the new Veltailog

(12:23):
people were bringing in is they were concerned that when
you separate grace in nature too much that it can
almost sound like you're conceding nature to the secular world
and just leaving grace in this private sphere, and that's
where we have it. Essentially. It's a concern that Tomism
could almost deteriorate into Cartesianism. But what I think creation

(12:44):
does is it says no, nature is from God as well,
and so therefore you even though we distinguish nature and grace,
and that's very important to do for theology, neither one
is in a secular domain. Neither one is apart from
what God has done.

Speaker 4 (13:01):
It's interesting that even amongst Thomas, there is some debate
as to what the exact relation of grace and nature is.
School I mostly I follow, I would follow, would look
upon what I think. When Saint Thomas is talking about, say,
for instance, grace and the man's natural end, he does

(13:21):
he indicates that the union with God that comes through
the petic vision is actually natural so far as we
have a natural capacity for it, and that what we
long for is to know God belong to. When we
know God, we want to know not just what he does,
but we also the human mind seeks to want to

(13:44):
know what God, who God is himself. So Saint Thomas,
as I read it, at least suggests that that shows
it to that he calls it a natural end based
upon man's natural activities. That's that's different. I mean other
Thomas would would see the the end of the Bee's

(14:08):
vision is something entirely I mean imposed upon nature in
a sense, not imposed the sense it's against nature. That
it's something which is which is not even plicit as
a capacity. You. I don't know what your thoughts on controversy.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
I'll distinguished there. I guess a bit between my own
personal views and then my role as the institute coordinator.
As the institute coordinator, welcome Thomas to all these different
perspectives to work with us personally, I actually completely agree
with what you said there, and I would actually in
some sense ground that in the theology of creation that
when God is creating, it's not as though God is

(14:50):
creating nature and then he looks at all the nature
he's created and he goes, oh, wouldn't it be nice
to perfect this with grace? When God is creating nature,
he already has in mind all the grace that is
going to perfect this nature. And in some sense in
God's mind, it seems like that grace is almost prior.
I tend to actually follow Scotus on the incarnation is

(15:11):
he has this whole idea that actually the first thing
in God's intention is the incarnation. This is the greatest
work of God, and then he orders everything else He's
created towards that end. And so we can then dis
properly distinguish nature and grace while realizing in God's larger plan,
this is one greater architectonic hole. Something I've been looking

(15:33):
at as well in Saint Thomas recently is the natural law.
That we tend to treat the natural law nowadays as
sort of a secular version of Catholic morality, but that's
not how Saint Thomas sees it. He defines it as
our participation in the eternal law. By reason, Well, what's
the eternal law? He turned back right before that masuma

(15:55):
he says, the eternal law is nothing but providence. What's providence? Well,
you actually have to flip back to his discussion in
the Suma on creation, where he goes back and he
discusses the difference between created goodness and divine goodness, and
he uses the doctrine of creation there to resolve a
debate between Plato and Aristotle, because Plato thought the real

(16:16):
goodness is outside of this world, it's in God, and
Aristotle thought, the real goodness is in this world. And
Saint Thomas says, the goodness it's really properly in God,
but it's in this world through participation, because God created
this world and so it reflects his goodness. And since
goodness is connected with final causality, that because everything God

(16:40):
has made is good, everything that he has made is
subject to his providence. There's nothing that happens in the
world that is outside of God's providence. And well, for
us creation, we sort of see it as God created
in a point in time, and then providence occurs after that,
and that's an important distinction from our perspective from God's
perspective outside of time, and so he creates everything at once,

(17:03):
including that initial moment, and everything that will ever happen,
and all of this then is God's eternal This is
all the eternal law, God's plan of providence over everything,
including the divine laws. But because we don't have immediate
access to that whole plan of God, what we know
is the natural law, which is God has given us

(17:24):
human reason, so that way we can understand our little
portion of providence that God has made us coworkers in
this world and we have our little part to play,
our participation in it, and we know we need to
act according to our nature. But again that's that nature
founded in the doctrine of creation. There and so natural

(17:45):
law really makes no sense for Saint Thomas apart from
God and apart from creation.

Speaker 4 (17:51):
But I'm just jumping and I think it Isn't it
also the case too? I mean, if Saint Thomas talks
about the common good of the universe, just good humanity
that come good in the universe is actually union with God.
And that's and that's something which is attained by man
explicitly in that he actually has the union through knowledge,
but it's also participated in by the lower creation as

(18:14):
well through a striving towards perfection. So it's almost like
the whole universe is tending in a way towards that union.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (18:25):
Yeah, I was going to ask him, and I understand
from your barrio that you're doing an ma at the
Byzantine Catholic seminary. Is there a Eastern Catholic or in
the Byzantine tradition, uh, somewhat different, maybe complementary view of creation,
and that the in that theological tradition.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
Actually, I was just going to say, I think it's
what Christopher was just saying there is the Byzantine perspective
is that it's an emphasis on the deification not just
of man, but of the whole creation. That we tend
to think now nowadays in the West of all, right,
you die and then you go to Heaven, you have
your union with God and Heaven, and that's kind of it.

(19:06):
That doesn't make any sense of the creed we confess
the resurrection of the dead if you go look they
used to be in the West, that all the discussion
of heaven and Hell tend to be much more on
the emphasis of in the age to come. But I
think the Byzantine tradition has actually really retained this rootedness
in the deification of the whole creation. And I think

(19:28):
that even in a sense, the Byzantine tradition can help
the West to recapture its own heritage, because it is
there in the West historically, but it's been lost and
it's been retained in the East in a very real
way that we need to recapture there. That is, in
the West, we got so obsessed with distinguishing nature and
grace that once you introduce something like Cartesianism, you end

(19:50):
up separating nature and grace entirely. In the East holds
nature and grace much closer together. A lot of Easterners
will look at all our debates of nature and grace
and get very conf used. They'll sort of say, doesn't
God the creator of everything? Like, what are you talking about?
And I think our scholastic distinctions are important, but that

(20:10):
reality of actually living it in the Byzantine tradition, I
think is just so foundational. And the Byzantine liturgy as well,
right to the Western Mass, really emphasizes us as being
at the foot of the cross, and so there's a
real emphasis there on the ministry of Christ as earthly
ministry here, but in the Byzantine right there's an emphasis

(20:31):
much more of we've been transported in the future to
the age to come to be with God and his
kingdom there. And there's a part in the Byzantine liturgy
where the priest goes on and he says, we remember,
and he goes through all the things that God has
done in history. And at the end of that he says,
we remember your second and glorious coming. So the priest
is speaking as though he's after the second Coming now

(20:52):
that we the new Creation is present now in the
divine liturgy. And so I think there the Divine Liturgy
again can help us to renew our theology of creation,
because it's not just really about the first Creation, but
it's also about the New Creation.

Speaker 4 (21:09):
Yeah, it's interesting that you would. I think some of
the changes in the liturgy after the Council have seemed
to want to add that aspect. In I've been taking
particular the fourth EU Christian Prayer, which is sadly very
rarely used, but it harkens back to that more Eastern emphasis.

Speaker 3 (21:31):
Yeah, I'll step and I'll pick one of the more
controversial prayers in the New Mass, but I actually think
can be interpreted in light of creation very beautifully. Is
the part where the priest mentions the bread and the
wine as work of human hands. But right in between
where he mentions the bread and the wine, there's a
prayer about deification right in the middle there, And I

(21:52):
think what the prayers are trying to get at is
that God creates right grapes and wheat for us, and
then we and we work those and we transform them
into bread and wine, and then we offer them up
on the altar, and God then transforms them into his
own body and blood. And so I think we can
see there all right. God is the creator of all things.

(22:15):
God is the ultimate glorifier of all things. But he
also places us. We're not just puppets in this world.
God creates us with rationality and free will, so that,
in some mysterious way we can act in this world
but presupposing God and ultimately for the sake of God
as well.

Speaker 4 (22:35):
Do you think what place do you think the interesting
theories of Shadan have to do it? And it seems
like that was what he was trying to do, though
to my mind he collapses grace into evolution. Do you
what place does his thought of any have in what
the work you do?

Speaker 3 (22:56):
Yeah, I think we have to realize why was his
work so attractive Because there was no one putting forward
a really systematic account of the theology of creation that
accounted for what everyone was discussing at the time, which
was evolution. And so I think Tayhard's views are actually
very very problematic. As you mentioned, grace sort of gets

(23:17):
collapsed into evolution there we almost creation ends up getting
lost almost in Tahard's vision. But the reason he was
popular is no one was offering a serious alternative vision,
and we can't merely just say Tayhart is wrong. We
also have to offer a more compelling vision of the
theology of creation, which I think is present there in

(23:39):
the church's perennial tradition, but was not being talked about
at the time. And that's why it's so important that
we revive it, because if you follow through Tayhard's vision, right,
you're gonna end up with something like transhumanism. And we're
seeing that transhumanism is really becoming the zeitgeist in the
popular culture, and it's infiltrated much of the political world

(24:00):
as well. So it's very very important for the social order,
even as well as just for our own spiritual lives
that we have a truly compelling vision of the theology
of creation, because in some sense here right, there is
a sense in which a right we have to do
real science, we have to actually investigate, like what the
evidence is. But it's also the case that the average

(24:21):
person is not thinking in those terms. The average person
is thinking in terms of narratives, and right, if we
think about why was Genesis revealed in the first place,
a lot of scholars have noticed similarities between Genesis and
the creation myths of the surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures.
So God gave this story to Israel as sort of

(24:43):
a competing myth with the surrounding myths of the world.
And a lot of people want to say then that,
all right, this means Genesis is not true. But that's
not the case. It's a competing myth precisely because God
refutes the false creation myths by giving us the real
creation story. And in the modern world now we're being

(25:04):
bombarded once again with false creation myths, and so we
need a real creation myth to compete with these false
creation myths. We need to retake the real story of creation.

Speaker 4 (25:21):
Do you think when we've seen rerooting a lot of
this and problem are problem in theology. Here is a
problem in philosophy, and we've been we have been affected
in the Church by certain philosophical traditions which are not
in the core with our tradition, but those same philosophical

(25:43):
positions of positions have also influenced the world at large
and have led and made the world as it is today.
And I was curious, it's honesty to me that those
technological advances any which are good actually but came through industrialism,

(26:04):
altered the very mode of living that most people followed
for centuries. And it's in a way, especially the abandonment
of rural life, that you have this, you have people
withdrawn from an actual experience of nature. Do you do
you think that the tradicary of this rural life has

(26:24):
had implications for the church? Is it? Are we are
we simple? Are we reacting to? Are are we being
formed in the church by our our mode of living
to such an expense that we forget our own heritage?

Speaker 3 (26:43):
I think that's really is the case in many ways,
because it used to be that people had a daily
encounter with nature in a way they no longer do.
So it used to be you went out every day,
and you spent most of your day outside in a
real encounter with nature. I was listening to or I
think I was reading an article about this woman was

(27:04):
talking about how she went and got a PhD in
biology and her husband grew up in a family of
farmers and her husbandand could name all the local plants
and everything, and she had this degree in biology, but
she couldn't actually identify any of the plants around her house.
So we've replaced an actual encounter with nature with this

(27:24):
scientific encounter with nature, which is not really in scientific
it's reading a books about nature instead of actually just
experiencing it. So we need to recapture that rootedness in nature.
But I think the reality is is that we can't
all just simply return to a farming lift like our
world has transformed too much in a certain sense. But
I think if we look at the narrative of scripture,

(27:48):
we see that when man is first created, he's placed
into a garden. But then we see in the new
creation there's a city that fills the whole world. So
it seems the movement from rural life to city life
is simply part of God's plan of providence. Is over time,
civilizations tend to move from rural to urban. So now
I think we need to find a way to make

(28:10):
good cities. Then if people are going to live in
the cities, how can we have cities where people genuinely
encounter nature them And I don't have good answers to that,
but I do think that this is where the theology
of creation is going to have to enter into a
dialogue with all sorts of other fields. One of the

(28:31):
big areas we found as an institute that people want
to discuss with us is on bioethics. There's a lot
of bioethical issues that are related to the theology of creation,
but also farming as well. At one of our conferences,
we had Sean and Beth Doherty, who are farmers out
in Steubenville, come to speak about how they actually apply

(28:53):
the theology of creation in their own farming practices. So
they do what's called regenerative agriculture, where they they look
at nature and they look at the patterns in creation
and then they try to mimic that in their farming.
It was interesting is I visited their farm once. They
gave me a tour of their farm, and they did
not explain things as oh, this cow evolved to work

(29:17):
this way, or oh we bred it so that way
it would work this way. They said God created it
to play this role in the farm. Because we see
in a traditional view of the theology of creation is
that man is an integral part of the creation. Man
was not created as hunter gatherers out in the wilderness.
Man was created as gardeners. And then we see in

(29:38):
the second generation of man with Cain and Abel, they're
already hurting animals. And then again Cain goes out and
he builds a city. So this city life and this
farming life, these are not alien to who mankind is.
So we have to find this harmonious way of living
with creation, well, having cities, well having farming, but doing

(29:59):
it in a way that's harmonious with the creation, and
situating ourselves sort of between that first creation and the
new creation.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
One alienation from nature that particularly interests me is the
question of medicine. And I don't know if you've given
any much thought to that, but it seems to me
that the current paradigm for medicine in the West basically
treats the body as a machine, or at least tends
to treat it as a machine. And there are but

(30:32):
there are other ways of interacting with our bodies in
our minds, true for that matter, our souls that can
be equally effective as medicines, but are very different from
the current practice. Allopathic medicine. Has the sat Maslins to
have given any attention to that question.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
Yeah, Actually, one of the people who works with us
works with a pharmaceutical company, and so we're actually very
concerned about how we can apply the theology of creation
as well to medicine. And since I'm not a doctor,
I don't want to say anything that would sort of
give anyone medical advice or anything. But I think what
we have to do is treat the body as God's

(31:18):
creation and also recognize that we're not merely just bodies,
and we're not souls trapped in bodies, but we're a
hylomorphic composite of soul and body as one unified whole,
that both of them are the human person. And if
there's sort of two extremes we can go on medicine,
we can become materialistic, where we treat the person like
they don't have an immortal soul, and there's another way

(31:40):
we can go where we treat the body as sort
of unimportant, that it's just a soul and so as
long as that soul's okay, it's fine. And we also
have to care for our bodies as well, because they're
part of who we are as a human person. So no,
I definitely agree this is important in issues of medicine.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
Have you looked at Homiotothy for example.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
So I can't comment on that particular myself, just as
someone who's not a doctor. But I do know the
person who works with us on issues of medicine, I
think is favorable to certain aspects of it. But you'd
have to speak to him about it. Just because I
don't know that much about medicine.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
Well, we have. We've been using homeopathy for some time.
We find that can be very effective, although it does
take It does take more time on the part of
the practitioner to study each individual, which is one of
the reasons why it probably is not more common, because
you can't just dispense a prescription.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
Yeah, I do think with this whole thing, there's sort
of a There used to be something I noticed. There
used to be this sort of reigning thing that you
could not disagree with the scientific consensus on anything. And
then we went through the COVID years and now no
one leaves like anything scientists say. I think we've got
a little bit too far to the other extreme now,
But I do think that people are willing now to

(33:08):
have discussions they were not willing to before. So I know,
for example, someone who works with their institute, he went
his father went to the Vatican, met with a priest
there is pretty high up there, and this priest basically
wanted to hear nothing of what he wanted to say
critiquing evolution or anything like that. And I've met with

(33:30):
that same priest after the COVID years, and he's much
more willing to have discussions all of a sudden. So
I think that a lot of people are sort of
waking up and realizing that not say to science is
bad or anything like that, but that we basically turn
scientists into a new magisterium that you could not disagree with.
And there were very troubling consequences when that became a

(33:54):
very important issue during the COVID years.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
You've more with the was the work of the historian
and philosopher's science Thomas Kuhn.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
Kuhn was actually the one I think who woke me
up from my dogmatics lumber because I grew up in
a very secular, liberal family, so I was very much
of the minds. You know, we grew up we were
sort of a little bit religious Jewish but not that
religious like we'd celebrate major holidays. My parents were sort
of agnostic and stuff about if any of this is true.
But I quickly considered myself a very hardcore atheist because

(34:28):
I thought, all right, we have science, now why do
we need religion for anything? And then some Christian apologetics
encounter in high school convinced me of God, but I
had this big hang up of the scientific dogmatism I
still had. And a Christian friend of mine in high
school he got me to go read Thomas Kuhn, and
that just woke me up, like just rediscovering the history

(34:50):
of science. I think that's a great book to give
to your friends who are in that position, because Kuhn
is an like he's clearly not trying to say this
because he wants like Christianity to come back or something
like that. But Kuhn just realized that, no, there actually
is not really a hardcore scientific method like we imagine

(35:13):
there to be. What happens is there's a reigning paradigm,
and most people do science within that paradigm. So it's
not to say they're doing bad science, but they're doing
what he calls normal science. And in order to like
there's a lot of scientific work that's investigating minute details
that very few people care about but do have some application.
And in order to do that, you can't rethink the

(35:35):
whole history of the world every time you want to
investigate some like obscure frogs in China or something like that.
So you have to presuppose a paradigm in order to
do that work. And so what ends up happening is
a lot of people assume then that because everyone presupposes
the paradigm, it must be true. And well, happening points
out is little data points will come out that's what

(35:56):
a contradict the paradigm, but we sort of leave those aside,
and eventually what ends up happening is someone realizes that
there's enough accumulated evidence that what we need to do
is rethink the paradigm altogether, and they'll come up with
a new paradigm. And this is horribly rejected by the
scientific establishment in their day, because you cannot come up

(36:18):
with this new paradigm in accord with the principles of
the scientific method, because you have to take a step
outside the paradigm to make it work. But will happen
then is they will whoever scientists does this, They basically
educate the next generation in their and their new paradigm,
and the world basically moves on one dead generation of
scientists at a time. And he goes starts in the

(36:39):
early days of the scientific revolution and goes all the
way through to quite recently. I think his book was
written in the seventies and shows this is how every
advance in science has ever happened.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yeah, I've been very influenced by Koon as well, and
a lot of people don't realize that. In one of
his last books, maybe his last book C. S. Lewis's
book that has gone an image in the very enablut
of that book, he puts forth an account of science
extremely similar to Kuhn's. It's very very interesting over that,

(37:11):
beagewhen you two.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
I do think one thing I will say about Kuon
is I think he can sometimes be taken too far,
perhaps where all of a sudden there's now no framework
for doing anything. And I think what we have in
the Catholic Church is not just our theology but our
traditional philosophy, is that we actually give the framework in
which the science can actually be done. Then, and how

(37:40):
do we recapture that philosophy, though I think actually the
theology of creation it gives us the story to recapture
that philosophical ground, because if this world is created by God,
it lends you much more to really this Aristotelian view.

Speaker 5 (37:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (37:59):
Also you get you get with but the philosophy renewed philosophy,
you begin to ask new questions that never occurred to
anyone before right then has not occurred to modern scientific
establishment that would seem to be absolutely necessary for a

(38:20):
reevaluation a lot of the parent of the paradigm.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
It seems like Kuhn's view is you're familiar with the
phrase saving the appearances, and how you know there's there's
a pleasant in the assuma or same. Thomas specifically appeals
to that notion of saving the appearances. What he's talking about,
I believe it is Genesis uh as as an account
that uh makes sense of what we know, but we

(38:50):
don't mesh for it being true because of that m hmm.
And I mean it can draw in the connection between
Kuhn and the idea of saving them in because it
seems to me that kun Is doesn't necessarily think that
the paradigm shifts are necessarily toward a better understanding of nature,

(39:13):
but simply that certain erroneous ideas were dropped, but perhaps
new Erronia's ideas are being embraced as well.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
Yeah, there's a great book by a guy named Pierre
du Hem who was a historian of science in the
early twentieth century as a Catholic historian, and do you
go to ten volume series in French on the history
of science. There's a good one volume summary of it
in English called Medieval Cosmology, And essentially his thesis is

(39:43):
is it's actually the doctrine of creation which enabled the
possibility of modern science in the first place, because it
broke the eternity of the world, which created certain problems
for the possibility of science. But it also said that
now we have a rational creator who created this world
with a rational order, and there's the philosophical realism to

(40:05):
it which allows the possibility of science. There and Kuhn
very much emphasized the saving the appearances thing. So he
goes through all sorts of different medieval theologians theories on science,
and he points out they themselves realized they didn't necessarily
know if these were one hundred percent correct. They were
trying to give a plausible explanation of what we knew.

(40:25):
But laying in there we have them the foundations of
what we need for I think recapturing a genuine scientific approach,
and also I think properly distinguishing. We have to be
careful what do we actually know for certain and what
is just saving the appearances?

Speaker 2 (40:49):
Well, go Aheadersbury, Oh I.

Speaker 4 (40:54):
I really I was just I don't have anything to
follow up on that, except I might point out there's
also another problem that we have, I think in our
world is that certain scientific paradigms make money for certain people.
And so what you have is there's an interest there
to not change the paradigm, and that you know that

(41:16):
that has its roots of course, and I take a
perversion of the economic order.

Speaker 3 (41:24):
Yeah, one of the important people is often missed out
because a lot of people jump to Darwin. And actually
Darwin seems to me like he was actually a very
upstanding person, like he did not like the implications of
his own views. There's one spot where he comments about
how his theories are going to lead to genocide, and
he does not like that, but he sort of realizes
that's the inevitable consequences. But there's other people who were

(41:46):
much more malicious in their intentions. An important one who's
missed heres. I can't remember his name right now, uh Lyell.
There is Charles Lyell, if I think remember his name,
actually was a geologist and was actually he was the
one who really defended this idea of the ancient age

(42:08):
of the Earth and really really pushed this and popularized
the idea of the ancient age of the Earth based
on geology. And if you read his letters, he explicitly
says that his goal is to remove Moses from the science,
but he wants to get rid of Genesis from any
discussion of creation, any discussion of science. And it's this

(42:30):
book that Darwin is reading upon the Beagle when he
comes up with his ideas of evolution. And so there
are some people, I think, within the scientific establishment who
are just doing good work, even if maybe they have
erroneous opinions here or there, they have no malicious intentions.
But there are also people with malicious intentions. I mentioned

(42:50):
Another example that I know of is there was a
journal of evolutionary science that released an article against this
idea called Barahminology. This is an idea that some Protestant
creation scientists have come up with. Some Protestant creation scientists
will say it, the world is six thousand years old,
and there was a real Noah's flood that was global
and stuff, So we have to explain why there's similarities

(43:12):
among some animals. So they've come up with this idea
that God originally created what they call a bhyman, where
it might be like one original type of cat that
then differentiates into house cats and tigers and lions and
leopards and so on, but would not be in common with,
say a dog. For example. Sony's this journal of Evolutionary
Science releases an article against it, and Todd Wood, who's

(43:35):
one of the big proponents of this, he writes an
article in response and submits it to the paper, or
the journal rather, but he knows he has to be
careful about how he phrases things to not tip his
hand too much that he actually believes this because they're
not going to publish him, and so he tries to
be very careful. He keeps going a barymnologists might say this,
they might say that, and he finally manages it to

(43:55):
get it through their peer review and gets a reply
in there. Then the other guy right to reply back,
basically straw manning everything he said, and Todd tries to
write a response, but at this point they've caught on
to who he actually is, and they won't publish any
of his responses at this point. This is a common
issue where because there I don't even know if people
are doing it maliciously, right, A lot of them just

(44:17):
assume this is the paradigm, this is what's true. If
you're working outside of it, you must be a pseudoscientist.
And so if without even thinking about it, they're already
enforcing the paradigm and acting as the guardians of this paradigm,
and so this is a big reason that it can't
be challenged. And a point that Koon makes is that

(44:40):
even if, let's say you a new paradigm is wrong,
it's actually good to let people work in paradigms that
are wrong, because they're gonna ask different questions than you. So,
for example, another example these Protestant creation scientists is a
guy who I can't remember his name right now either,
but he did research on what are called pilleoccurrence where

(45:03):
he is looking at the directions that rocks are laid
down in the in the geologic record, and he basically argued,
you can find these wide areas across multiple continents where
it seems like these peliocurrents are in the same direction
in all the rocks, as though all these rocks across
multiple continents were laid down in sort of single great events.

(45:26):
And he would not have been looking for this. And
the first he got this published in Nature, which is
like a mainstream, major secular magazine. But like he would
not have gotten this published. We would not have even
looked for this data if he did not have presuppositions.
And you might think that's false. The Catholic Church has
no official stances on these matters. So you can completely

(45:47):
disagree with him as a Catholic, but recognize that the
fact that he had different opinions on it led him
to do that research. In any humani generous where Pope
Pious the twelfth opened theological discussion, we didn't settle it.
He opened the discussion. He actually encourages scientists there to
investigate multiple perspectives on the origins of man. And what

(46:10):
happened is the Catholic scientific establishment used this as permission
to only study evolution at that point, but that's not
what Pius the twelfth said. He said they should be
investing in multiple perspectives. So really Catholic scientific institutions and
universities should be hiring professors of different perspectives on these
matters so that way we can have research and move forward.

(46:31):
We can have real debate within the scientific world, because
if we really followed Pious the Twelfth's instructions, the Catholic
world would be ahead of everyone else because we'd be
having as all the scientists are different perspectives, coming to
the Catholic Church is the place where they can have
that dialogue because the Protestant world, many of them treat
this issue as dogmatic young Earth, so they can't have

(46:51):
the discussion. The secular world treats evolution as dogma evolution
old Earth. Well, we need to have that discussion, and
is a Catholic Church has, in her wisdom has set
up the place for that many perspectives. It's just that
we have not followed through on it.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
Yeah, it seems like I have a lot of conflicts today.
Ignore THEMANI generous and pick up on some remarks of
John Paul a second as well. Now we accept evolution
completely macroevolution, and there's no longer a debate.

Speaker 3 (47:22):
In What's interesting is John paul A second and also
Pope Benedict right, they were big proponents of evolution, but
I know some people who they actually went and met with.
Pope Benda can't remember if it was a cardinal at
the time. We had become hope at this point, and
they presented him scientific evidence against evolution and he goes,
I've never heard this perspective before. So a lot of

(47:43):
the poet the popes, they have they're busy people. They
have a multi billion person church to run, right, they
do not, and they also have to be reflecting on theology.
They're probably under more spiritual attack than anyone on earth,
so they have to really focus on their spiritual life,
like it's not an easy job. So when it comes
to scientific matters, they just turned the Pontifical Academy of

(48:05):
Sciences and ask for their perspective. So really what we
need is that discussion to be able to reach the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences, because when they go to the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences and they ask them, and the
Pontifical Academy of Science, which is populated by many atheists. Evehn,
they say, no evolutions, one hundred percent certain, They go,
all right, I don't want another Galileo affair. Let's just

(48:26):
go along with that. But Pope Benedict and his Final
Will to the Church, which was released upon his death,
he actually discusses not this issue, but the closely related
issue of historical critical studies of the Bible. Because Pope
Benedict was a very big, a big interest in this.
So if you look in his writings from his youth,
he was really obsessed with historical critical studies. But if

(48:49):
you look later on in his Jesus of Nazareth series,
he's much more cautious about using historical critical work. He
realizes that we've had a lot of new, good discoveries.
We now know more about the historical context of the
Bible than any generation before us, and that's a great thing.
We should use that information. But a lot of people

(49:10):
were abusing it to overturn the traditional theology of the Church.
And what actually has happened is that all the theories
that were popular when Ratzinger was young in the sixties,
all of those theories have now been disproven, and there's
a new set of historical critical dogmas within the academy today.

(49:31):
And so what he said in his Final World of
the Church is basically, be really careful, do not trust
these historical critical studies because in my lifetime, all the
ones I grew up with, they've all been overturned. And
I think we need to think that way again about
the science as well. We now have more scientific data
than any generation before us, and that's a great thing,

(49:52):
but we also have to realize that most of our
scientific theories today are not going to be believed in
one hundred years, and so we need to be very
careful about putting too much weight because what is going
to be the same in one hundred years is the
theology of the church.

Speaker 4 (50:11):
It certainly makes it hard.

Speaker 5 (50:15):
Yeah, do you have any views on the intelligent design controversy.

Speaker 3 (50:23):
Yeah? See, you often hear that these intelligent design proponents
they're just trying to sneak creationism into schools, but that's
not really accuen you look at Michael Bahee, who's one
of the biggest proponents of intelligent design. I mean, he
believes the world is like fourteen billion years old or
whatever number is the scientific establishment. He thinks all life

(50:44):
on Earth descends from a common ancestry. But what he's
pointed out is there's a lot of data that just
from natural selection alone would be unable to explain that data,
and so there has to have been divine intervention and
divine guidance in order to account for the life we
have now. And he provides lots of scientific evidence for this,

(51:06):
and what the scientific establishment has done in response is
essentially to blacklist him from everywhere and brand him as
a creationist. And this is again the scientific establishment is
not allowing multiple opinions. I mean, there are atheists who
promote intelligent design. So this is not just by Christians

(51:28):
trying to s meeet Christianity into schools. This is people
of lots of different perspectives who are just realizing that
there seem to be issues in the current paradigm. And
what is the correct paradigm? I think intelligent design. As
I've read various proponents of it, they do not agree
among themselves. What is the answer. It seems to me
to be more a common movement of the current answers

(51:49):
that we have are not enough and we need something more.
But what is that more. I think that's then a
very open discussion that we need to have in the
scientific community, in.

Speaker 4 (52:03):
The in the cider community. To do that would have
to be willing to look and look at the guidance
of philosophy. I think, yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
I think this is the big area that intelligent design
is lacking a bit right now is in the philosophy.
And this is as well in the Protestant creation world
as well, because a lot of the discussions in the
both intelligent design the Protestant creationist world, they almost act
like the secular scientific approach is still the correct one.

(52:39):
Maybe they add got into it, but it's still this
cartesian approach to the world. And I think we need
philosophy in order to solve this. We need philosophy and
Catholic theology to overcome these sorts of issues that are
being faced in this world. You know, I had a

(52:59):
geologist friend of mine come and actually visit one of
our conferences. He wasn't speaking at it, but he just
came to visit CEAR conference. And I asked him, how
does this compare to like the Protestant creationist scientists to
go to, including the theology ones, And he said, what
we were discussing is none of us were giving a
paper on like all right, they would do things like

(53:20):
all right, here's one hubret word in the Book of Genesis.
Let's really closely analyze it to see if you can
give us some clue about how we should be doing
our scientific research versus what we were doing at our conferences.
As we were saying, let's take the whole vision of creation, philosophy, theology,
the Bible, the Church, father Saint Thomas Aquinas bring everything

(53:40):
together into one larger synthesis. This is how the Church
has always done things, and it provides a holistic vision
that other people can't account for. I think this is
what the Church has always done.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Right.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
We've always looked at other cultures and drawn the good
from them. We've brought draw good from Plato and Aristol,
we drew good from Avisana and A. Vuez and May Monodes.
When we went to China, right, there was a lot
of engagement there with Confucius, and there's actually now been
a revival of tomistic engagement with Confucianism. And so I

(54:13):
think we can go to every culture and draw out
what's best in it. But what we have that I
think no other religion has is we have the synthesis
that can contextualize everything and make everything make sense. I
can talk about this perhaps a bit from my own
background as a convert from Judaism, is that Judaism, I
think has a hard time of making sense of the

(54:34):
fact right that they believe the Messiah is supposed to
bring the knowledge of gods of the whole world. And
there was this Jewish guy two thousand years ago who
they don't regard as the Messiah, who because of him,
like now half the world are monotheists between Christians and Muslims,
and are now believing in the Jewish God. So this
is a whole issue they have. But what we have
is the way to contextualize the insights that everyone has

(54:57):
into one larger synthesis.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Andrew Christopher, do you have any final questions?

Speaker 4 (55:04):
No, I don't.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
Okay, Well, thank you, thank you very much. Get in
for being our guest this morning. Is I thought of
an extremely interesting discussion. Let's conclude with uh, he'll marry
to our lady. You didn't even involve these on wi spirit.
He'll mary full of greatest words with the blessed of
the allman, women and blessed is for that womb. Jesus O, Mary,

(55:28):
Mother of God, pray for roose sinners now at the
all of our death. Amen.

Speaker 4 (55:34):
But before we before we break, maybe just ask what
projects or activities he's planning and how can the people
who are vieing us today take part in any of them?

Speaker 3 (55:46):
Yeah, So we have one book that's out. Actually put
it up on screen here. It's I Believe in God,
the Father, Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. Both myself
Anne Thomas contributed to this volume and this is our
Studies in the Theology of Creation Volume one. So what
we hope to do with these is we're hoping to
actually have another volume out sometime later this year, hopefully

(56:07):
by this summer, and we want to do what with
these volumes is just bring together various essays on the
theology of creation. We also host conferences about once a year,
and usually these are sort of invite only events, but
actually this year we're going to be a bit more
in the public with our conference. So we're going to

(56:29):
be in Steubenville, Ohio at the Saint Paul Center on
June sixth through eighth. On our website, that's a Saint
Basil Institute dot org St for Saint and probably about
a month or so we'll be opening up registration for
that conference so you can come and join us and
hear talks. We're going to be discussing the Biblical temples

(56:50):
and how they relate to the theology of creation.

Speaker 2 (56:55):
Hey you, hey, you, would you repeat that website one
more time? Please?

Speaker 3 (56:59):
Yeah, this is Saint Basilinstitute dot org, the St for Saint.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
Okay, well, thank you very much for joining us this morning,
and we wish you all the best of your work.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
Okay, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Hello, God's Beloved. I'm Annabel Moseley, author, professor of theology,
and host of then Sings My Soul and Destination Sainthood
on WCAT Radio. I invite you to listen in and
find inspiration along this sacred journey. We're traveling together to
make our lives a masterpiece and with God's grace, become saints.

(57:39):
Join me Annabel Moseley for then Sings My Soul and
Destination Sainthood on WCAT Radio. God bless you. Remember you
are never alone. God is always with you.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
Thank you for listening to a production of wuc AT Radio.

Speaker 5 (58:01):
Please join us in our mission of evangelization, and don't
forget love lifts up where knowledge takes flight.