https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=MvJMSSAX6Go
Oh, I think we got you now. Oh, oh, oh, you got me now. Yep. Okay. I’m in. Yeah, I just got to get you on to our second slides. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk again. Again. Talk again. Can you hear me? Crisis averted. Woo. Alrighty. Alright, gentlemen. Now that we’ve got Deacon Riley in here, I suppose anybody who was watching the first five minutes of that may very well have thought that I was just talking to myself. But watching Deacon Eric to send them to madness. Yeah, yeah. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time anyway. We’ve got Deacon Riley Durkin here from the Diocese of Fargo. Deacon Tom Rausch is in fact out of town. Not out of town. He’s he’s got his own live stream that he’s doing tonight. And that’s okay. And Father Phil is out of town. He won’t be here to field your questions, inquiries, comments or concerns. So it’s going to be up to the YouTube live stream. To get that done. Right. So please go ahead and type a question in the comments and I’ll be able to see it live and then ask it for anybody that’s writing it. Yeah, yeah. And that would be the easiest way to handle things. So please, please, please ask questions. Please ask questions. I’ve made that clear enough yet. All right. So that makes our job easier. Yes, it does make our job easier if we know that we’re not just screaming out into the void. Well, we’re still in the book of Genesis. And we were talking about Genesis chapter, chapter five and chapter six. And just and our last slide that we were going over was a slide on Original Sin. And I’m going to go back to that slide. I’m just going to bring that back up again because it’s actually pretty closely tied to our next slide. So I’m just going to go ahead and review what’s going on here. Term Original Sin. It’s not in the Bible. St. Augustine came up with that. Churches accept the phrase as its own. And the reason that Original Sin is an important and useful concept is because it takes God’s involvement out of evil in the universe. So we don’t have to say, well, God created a defective universe or God created the universe so that he could watch us suffer. If all of our suffering is due to sin, then that kind of leaves the blame on us who can sin, whereas God who cannot sin, his hands, I suppose, are left clean. And so in order to have a comprehensible faith, we need to defend the doctrine of Original Sin at all costs. And then there’s just kind of a how to use this word properly, this concept properly. When we talk about the transmission of Original Sin, when we use the word sin, what comes to our minds first is this idea that we have committed some kind of a sin, right? And that’s the way the word is ordinarily used. But with Original Sin, it’s not used in that same sense. Original Sin in the sense that we’ve inherited it is just calling us back to where that came from. That came from the sin of Adam and Eve, the Original Sin. And so what we inherit from Adam and Eve are the effects of Original Sin. And it’s really helpful to be absolutely clear about that point, because otherwise you think, oh, you know, I just had a child and the child’s sinned already somehow. And then you’re like, wait a minute, hold on, how can a child sin? It doesn’t make any sense. So if you’re just clear that when we talk about Original Sin, that’s washed away at baptism, that’s the effects of Original Sin, namely the alienation from God. That’s the worst effect of Original Sin. So we need to be able to understand this in order to really be able to get the next slide that we’re going to talk about here. So I once I once heard I’m going to jump in here real quick. I once heard that Original Sin or a fallen world is the only empirically verifiable church doctrine. The only thing we’re able to look around and say, you know what, they are right on this one. Yeah, yeah. And you’ll be amazed at who would try and deny that. You know, when I say just go to a four way stop sign, and you’ll see plenty of evidence for Original Sin. Or a fallen humanity. People that are prone to sin. Yeah. Yeah, so let’s talk about the first family. Genesis introduces the story of Cain and Abel, and that story is pretty well known and is pretty straightforward. So I don’t think we need to just speak too much about it. And then afterwards it says Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. And so this could very quickly lead to some strange questions. Who exactly did Cain marry. In fact, how exactly did the entire world come from a single couple. So we have evidence that Adam had other sons and daughters with Eve, and it only mentions in the Genesis text, Seth and Cain and Abel, but he had other sons and daughters. Okay, so, okay, where are we going with this? And just to make the point about Original Sin. That’s a scriptural doctrine just as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners. So by one man’s obedience many are made to be upright. And then just kind of touching on what we covered in the last slide Original Sin is a sin, which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind that is by the transmission of a human nature deprived of Original Holiness and Justice. Moreover, scripture tradition and the Magisterium have rejected any theory that would involve God creating any human beings before Adam or concurrent with Adam. And this was condemned as recently as the 1950s by Pope Pius XII. So we’ve got scriptural evidence that everything has to come through Adam and Eve. We’ve got that through the tradition and we’ve got that affirmed by the popes. So, we’re kind of left at a point where we have to, we have to say that Cain married, Cain and his brothers married their sisters and that’s not a, you know, it’s not necessarily a fun conclusion to be thinking about but we can, we can say pretty firmly that God who created the heavens and the earth can make that not weird for one generation. And then after that, it’s first cousins, which I found out recently is actually fully legal in 16 US states without any restrictions whatsoever. So, I figured it would be like two but it’s, it’s still in 16 states so that’s just pretty interesting but it’s still legal in North Dakota in case you were wondering. Okay, so I was not carrying on. Yes, yes. So let’s move on to something else. All right. So anyway, I found this useful list of non negotiables when it comes to talking about creation so these are things that you have to affirm in order to be in with the scripture of the church and in with the tradition of the church. And as far as I can tell anything within these kind of six bullet points is going to be going to be an acceptable interpretation and you can argue from within this framework. So the first one is initial creation from nothing that God did not create the universe out of pre existing matter. God’s direct intervention to make the soul of man, so you can’t have a strictly material account of the origins of man. You have to include God in there at some point. And so I just kind of have an opinion on that that I’ll share. It seems to me to be most likely that Adam’s body was prepared by an evolutionary process. And from at a certain point, his body would have been infused with the human soul and we don’t know exactly when that would have been. And then from that time on, he would have understood that God was his father. And he would have understood that in a profound way that even nowadays after the full revelation of Christ, we still not able to achieve here on Earth on account of us being separated from God by the effects of sin. And so, yeah, and then there’s no reason to doubt the biblical account on this point that Eve would have been formed from his rib exactly as it exactly as it says in the Bible. So that’s just kind of my opinion. Other people who are still just as Catholic as I am, they’re going to want to hold to a theory where wherein God would have formed Adam directly out of the earth. And that’s a perfectly intelligible and acceptable interpretation. There’s no need to to say that they’re not being a good Catholic. If they’re saying that you could certainly have a good discussion with them. But both are acceptable interpretations. What’s really important is God’s direct intervention, God’s direct intervention to make the soul of man. And in fact, it’s still a church doctrine that every human soul is created to this day, every human soul is created directly by God with the father and the mother providing the body for the for the child. So moving on to our third non-negotiable, Adam and Eve are a real couple from whom all humanity descends because otherwise you’d have humans without original sin and that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Now when you say Adam and Eve are a real couple, how deep should we go into that? Were they named Adam and Eve? If we hold to a non-strictly material evolution, could we hold to other human-like creatures also existing? Well, sure. If my theory is correct, if my theory that Adam’s body was formed by an evolutionary process is correct, and I don’t know if it’s correct, it just seems to be the most likely to me. What would be necessary would be for a group of very human-like creatures to have existed in order for Adam to have existed. So I think that makes sense. A group of very human-like creatures who weren’t quite human and then Adam being drawn out of that. So a lot of money’s been made on drawing out the connections between humans and chimpanzees, but I imagine whoever these ancestors were would have been even more human than even chimpanzees. So that’s kind of my take on it. Does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah. That’s basically my thought too, is if we hold to a Darwin-type evolution, something similar to that, it would have had to have reached the point where this evolving creature is now human. Let’s call it Adam. Which in the Hebrew just means man in the generic sense. Let’s call it man. So, right. So there are other human-esque creatures, missing links if you will, that existed at the time. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say even to a strict evolutionist. Eventually we reached a point where we as people were able to be rational, to be able to do math, to be able to have complex thoughts. There had to have reached a point where we were that way, which would have been the imbuing of a soul. Right, right. Yeah. As we took the same philosophy classes, you would know that the difference between man and the difference it makes. Yes, yes. That was a book we read. It’s actually a fantastic book, The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes. C.S. Lewis, right? No, Mortimer Adler. Oh, that’s right. Yeah, he said that the difference between humanity and the rest of the animals is a difference in kind and not just a difference in degree. He wasn’t Catholic, but he was often correct. So, yeah. Yeah, he said that the difference between humanity and the rest of the animals is a difference in kind and not just a difference in degree. I think all the evidence really points there. So, yeah. And he argues that book very well. It’s like 600 some odd pages. We didn’t read all of it. I should get a copy of that though. It’d be good to go back. You probably won’t, Riley, and that’s okay. Yeah, I’m not going to find it. So, I don’t want to get off the train too much here. Yes. Can you explain a little bit between the difference of kind and the difference of degree as it relates to the theory of evolution? Right. So, the difference in kind would be the difference between an apple and an orange, and the difference in degree would be the difference between a, what are those ones called, the little cuties and a navel orange. You know, so you can look at both of these, you know, they’ve got rinds, they’ve got sweet pulpy centers. But it’s like, well, oh, and neither of them have seeds, you know, so it’s like, okay, these are clearly the same thing. But this little cutie is kind of a lot sweeter and a lot smaller and my regular old navel orange over here. Well, that’s just, that’s bigger. It’s not quite as sweet, but still quite tasty and full of vitamin C, which will help prevent scurvy. In case you were wondering. And so, yeah, obviously a difference in degree exists between the little cutie and the navel orange, whereas a difference in kind exists between the regular orange and a regular apple. Those are clearly not the same thing. And so in the same way, human beings are clearly not the same thing as chimpanzees, dolphins, you know, ants, whatever you want to, whatever you want to compare us to. Clearly not the same thing. Even though there are similarities, right? So we have bodies, we have a lot of the same instincts that are common to all mammals and a lot of bodily structures that are common to all animals. So it’s not so different that we can’t be compared, but it’s still a difference in kind, just like how oranges and apples are still both fruit. So how does, so is that just a rejection of Darwin’s evolution? No. Can you explain to me how it’s not? Right. So, we still, it’s still perfectly acceptable to hold that life on Earth progressed by means of evolution in the general sense in which Darwin described evolution and other scientists who have made solid contributions have expounded on his theory and filled it out. I don’t think that comes out to a rejection of Darwin in general. It’s almost like, it’s almost like God is elevating what nature had produced. Okay. So that’s my way of thinking about it. So it’s not like, you know, when God infused a soul into Adam, that it destroyed his human, or it destroyed what he was before, right? This very human like creature. The correct sense is it was raised it to a higher plane, raised it to a plane where he could begin to contemplate the supernatural, could begin to understand himself as a self. So that’s part of what it means to be in the image and likeness of God is to be able to know things, to be able to understand things, rather than just reacting to them in the way that animals do. Right. Right. Well, that’s the major difference that says humans apart is that we’re able to, we’re able to ask questions about the universe around us. Right, you hear stories about chimps that have learned sign language, for example, and are able to communicate that way, and effectively, and while that’s true, they still, they’ve never asked a question to us. Right, it’s not like the chimps are able to learn sign language the same way Father Phil learned sign language when he was a kid. They learn how to use sign language. So they’ll say, I don’t know what the sign for banana is but they’ll make the sign for a banana and hopefully they’ll get a banana right? And maybe some basic, you know, basic communications. Yeah, so they can effectively do yes, do no, they can, they can respond to simple questions, but they just don’t have the curiosity that people do. Right, and there’s, you know, as far as we know there’s no chimp poetry, there’s no chimp neoclassical movement in art, there’s no chimp architecture. There’s no, well there is chimpanzee politics but it’s related strictly to the tribal level and is often very brutal. So there’s no, there are no democracies among chimps. So, so yeah, there’s just, they’re just different from us and that’s okay that’s why God made things if he had wanted to make multiple rational species on the earth he would have done it. If you wanted rational bees, he would have done that. And there could come a time in history where we look at something like the, like the Neanderthals or the other subsections of humanity at that time that existed but no longer exists, and they may be able to point to them and say they were just as rational. And they may, that may be right and that’s something a question will consider when science gets that far. Right, right, because we don’t, I mean, honestly we don’t know when any of this discussion about infusing a soul into Adam, when that would have happened. Like, I don’t know when it would have happened. I don’t know if we can even prove that you know. Yeah, when did, when did we become rational as a species. I don’t know. Right, that’s the question. We can do we have bits of evidence. Do we have to hold that it was a particular moment in time. I think so if we’re going to hold to God infusing a soul into Adam as a particular event in time. That I don’t know how you could escape that conclusion that it was a moment. Now he was unrational now he what is. And, and I don’t know what point of his life that would have been, you know, God would have waited till he was a juvenile or an adult, or if he would have done that from conception. God handled all that. I’m just here to be a deacon, you know. Right. Well I think we’ve pretty well hammered that into the ground. So let’s, let’s get back to our six non negotiables. So Adam and Eve were originally in perfect harmony with God, perfect harmony with their soul and body, and perfect harmony with each other, and with all creation right so this is a state that was called original justice. And Adam and Eve committed a real offense against God. So, the story about the Garden of Eden is not merely a myth. And that destroyed that original harmony. And so Adam and Eve passed on this original sin which is a state of disharmony to all humanity by natural generation. So whatever was that was the creating this harmony on it was obviously like a positive gift that they had. And so they were able to pass that on to them when they sinned, they destroyed that gift inside of themselves and they weren’t able to pass that on to their descendants. And so there’s different theories about how those gifts would work and they’re very interesting but they’re going to slow us down even more so I don’t really want to get into them, but, you know, go ahead and ask if you want to know about those different theories. I’ll just say this real quick, is that the story of Adam and Eve before the fall, being this being the story of the creation of man the creation of you and I. It’s the story of what God intended us to be. And where we’re intended to go back to and have to be in perfect union with him. As Genesis says to walk with him and the cool of the night to be in perfect, perfect harmony with nature. And so we’re not just as people we were created, we know that from the story of Adam and Eve, and that’s where we’re called to go back to, but sin wound that right right. Exactly. Thank you very much. Yes, not merely original sin, but also the sins of all of us every day. We just tile on to original sin every time we, we eat more brownies than we should, and other offenses. Alright, so that covers our, our discussion on, on creation. So let’s talk about something else that could really trip people up. How about them absurd lifespans in the book of Genesis, thus, all the days of Methuselah, or 969 years, and he died. So, how do we understand this. So, first way we could understand it is we could be at face value so we’re just going to read the book of Genesis. This would be very common among younger creationists. And so a literal reading of the book of Genesis would mean that humanity is about 6000 years old, that Adam died, less than 2000 years before Abraham was born. We can’t say that this is impossible. But I think that reading is really really stretched. Now, the thing about. So that’s a very literal reading, and you calculate the dates, based on the list of names and years, given in the book of Genesis. The thing about biblical genealogies is that they skip generations all the time. So if you were to add up, let’s say the genealogy of Matthew at the beginning of his, beginning of his gospel with reasonable expectations for lifespan, you don’t get nearly all the way back to Abraham. And the same thing with the genealogy in Luke’s gospel. He traces things all the way back to Adam, and he only has like 13 generations in there. So, so that was a convention with biblical genealogies is to just stick with the highlights and skip all the boring stuff in the middle. So, it is possible, it is possible that if Adam lived, say, something like 90,000 years ago. People could have had lifespans like that back then. I can’t say that it didn’t happen because I don’t know for sure. But, you know that that reading doesn’t really seem to jive well with a lot of people and it’s not the opinion that I’ve come down on. So we can look at the next one and the next one looks like a promising option that when the biblical writer was talking about years, he was actually talking about months or some other different time span. And, you know, on the surface that actually seems pretty good. But you run into a serious problem once you start actually doing the math because some people are about seven years old when they start having kids. So, that really doesn’t have a whole lot of legs to it. So, there’s a third option that these lifespans actually described the life of an entire clan. So that seems kind of interesting. So, you know, Methuselah didn’t actually live to be 969 years old, but the clan of Methuselah was around for 969 years. What doesn’t really work is that in the biblical text, Adam, Cain, Enoch, and Noah are all expressly described as individuals. And it’s really hard to get that theory and this theory to the biblical text and the theory that it describes clans. It’s hard to get that to get together. And so the last major theory is that absurd lifespans were a mythological genre convention. So I know we’ve talked an awful lot about the mythological genre and it appears to be important. And so the idea is, is in the genre of mythology, in the way you write a mythological story, there’s a central idea that you want to get across the antiquity of humanity, just how old humanity is and how long they’ve been around on Earth. And so this is a mythological genre idea. And if we can look at other mythologies from the ancient Near East, they all have some kind of a golden age, and that during that golden age, people had very long lifespans. And so we have writings from the ancient Near East, about the same time as the book of Genesis, and they’ve got kings with 10,000 year lifespans. So it’s entirely possible that what the author of Genesis is trying to communicate to us is that there was a golden age, which was a common belief back then, and that humanity has been on the planet for an exceptionally long time. And so when I look at these, I actually find that that idea of the mythological genre convention is actually pretty favorable. But at the end of the day, both reading these lifespans as at face value that Methuselah actually lived 969 years of 365 days on Earth, both that and this explanation of a mythological genre, that is both those theories. And we really don’t have the final word on that. Right. I mean, and also, anytime you see a number in the Bible, a lot of times it means more than just the number that’s there. The number 969, for example, could have brought a certain person or a certain culture concept to the mind of the people at the time when this was written that we just don’t have a concept for anymore. Right, right. Like their gravitation towards the number seven. Right. Or you look at the numbers like, I think, I think it’s in the Gospel of John, the fish. Yeah, the fish and the loaves. Oh, okay. How many, how many were left over there with seven fish left over. Is it the feeding of the 5000 or the 4000? One of them. I don’t remember which one. Right. So the feeding of the 5000, they had five loaves and two fish. And that happened over in Israel and they filled 12 wicker baskets full. Right. So five loaves, two fish, that’s seven. The biblical perfect number, 12 wicker baskets of the 12 tribes of Israel that were brought to Jesus. Jesus was gathering all the tribes together. There was another one where there was a certain number left over, which was the number of times the country of Israel has been invaded, the number of invaders they’ve had over generations. That was actually the Samaritan woman. It’s there too, but it’s also in one of the feedings. Oh, okay. That’s neither here nor there. Yeah, yeah. They like numbers back then. You know, the number of the beast is 666, guys. That’s why. Why? Why is it 666? I mean, maybe there’s an explanation, but. It’s a little bit under perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, at the end of the day, Church hasn’t given us an official interpretation. If you want to interpret it as a mythological genre convention, or if you’d rather interpret it at face value, both of these are kind of within the bounds of what is acceptable. Right. And I say this every week and I’ll say it again. What’s the point of the Bible is to bring us salvation, is to bring us closer to God. How long Methuselah lived, how many laps around the sun he took, that doesn’t matter to that. Right. Right. And that’s okay. It’s okay that he can Eric Rye or the Church can say we don’t know. We don’t know why these numbers are so big. Yeah. And that’s the fine answer. Yeah. So just like that’s kind of freeing, isn’t it? And I was like, no, the Bible is taken care of, man. Don’t worry about it. Yeah. So very good point. You can say that every week, Riley. I’m happy to hear it every time. And I’m going to keep saying it because it’s so important. All right. Now we’ve got maybe a concept you’re not familiar with. The notion of a concept. You’re familiar with the notion of a concept of a concept. All right. Now we’ve got maybe a concept you’re not familiar with. The notion of a first bloodline. And, you know, this isn’t a huge problem for a lot of people, but it can lead to very bad problems. So it’s pretty clear in the book of Genesis that you’ve got different lines which have been cursed and different lines which have been blessed. So if we look at Cain’s descendants, seven generations after Cain, we’ve got Lamech. And he took two wives and was a worse murderer than Cain. So Lamech said to his wives, I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me, sevenfold vengeance for Cain, but 77 fold for Lamech. So in addition to being worse, he brags about it. There’s also Cain’s descendants are responsible for building the first cities and technological innovations. And that’s kind of, you know, kind of in the book of Genesis, they look at things like cities as sort of mixed blessings, right? Because the more powerful something becomes, the more it can be used for evil, right? So, you know, humanity’s got an awful lot of power with nuclear energy these days. I personally happen to be a fan of nuclear power. I think it’s a renewable resource that’s actually like a or a low carbon emission resource. It’s actually a good idea, but that’s beside the point. But we can also use it to flatten cities, you know, so it’s like technological development. Well, you got some good and you got some evil and which is it going to be, you know, so that’s a that’s kind of a. It’s an ambiguous development. Meanwhile, we’ve got Seth’s sons who are shown to be blessed. And so a son was born to Seth and he named him Enosh. This man was the first the first to invoke the name Yahweh. All right, so that’s a big deal. Seth’s son is just and he’s worshiping God. Moreover, you see with all of these very long lifespans, the longest are always in the line of Seth, not in the line of Cain. And also in this line, we’ve got just this mysterious figure, Enoch, who walked with God, then was no more because God took him. And that’s besides an age and some children he had. That’s all we know about Enoch. He was just picked up. And then finally, Noah, who was found righteous in the days of the flood, was descended from Seth. And then the whole cycle begins again with Noah’s sons that Ham is cursed for a sin and Shem and Japeth are blessed. And so the reason we need to we need to be careful with this is, you know, you can find yourself, you know, talking with somebody. And and and they’ll say, yeah, you know, those biblical curses like, yeah, yeah, that’s in the Bible. And then all of a sudden, they’re going to be like, and, you know, you know, the Jews in Europe are aren’t actually defend descended from Shem. They’re actually descended from Ham. And all of a sudden, you’re in a very different conversation. All of a sudden, you’re you’re like, whoa, and and they’re making biblical arguments that, you know, you know, Hitler kind of overdid it, but he really wasn’t as bad as people paint him, you know, and they’re using biblical arguments. They’re using biblical arguments. Look, we have cursed bloodlines in the Book of Genesis, you know. And so how do we reconcile this with later theology, biblical texts and oh yeah, trauma and decency. So we see here in the later text, Book of Ezekiel, the one who has sinned is the one who must die. A son is not to bear his father’s guilt, nor a father his son’s guilt. The upright will be credited with his right uprightness and the wicked with his wickedness. So here we see clearly that a father is not punished for his son’s sins and a son is not punished for his father’s sins. It doesn’t matter who you’re related to or where you’re at. Your sins are your sins. Other people’s sins are other people’s sins. So what exactly are they getting at here in the Book of Genesis with these cursed bloodlines? And I kind of have a theory. I didn’t read this anywhere, but I don’t know if I’m the first to come up with it. So we’ll see how it goes. So we notice in society that while people aren’t punished directly by God for the sins of their parents and the sins of their community, they still have to bear with the effects of the sins of their parents and the sins of whatever community they’re in. And my thought process of it is the people who wrote the Book of Genesis, the people who were in that community and the inspired author hadn’t yet gotten to the point of making in their heads a clear distinction between the sin itself and the effects of the sin. That that would have been a later biblical development, very important for Christian theology, but not present at the time that the Book of Genesis was written. But they see this phenomena and inspired by the Holy Spirit, they need to say something about it because it’s so obvious that people who have stable family and a stable community are given an advantage over people who are born into a chaotic, sinful situation. And that’s just a truism of life these days. And so they tried to articulate this idea in the best way that they could. And that turned out to be this mythological representation of a cursed bloodline. So anyway, I didn’t get this from any of my books. This is like my one original idea, but I don’t know how original it is because somebody else could have gotten there first. But it seems to give appropriate reverence to the scriptures of Christ while also not getting us into a racist interpretation of, well, these people are cursed. They’re rejected by God. So, I guess that’s just what I think. Right. Racist being because of this one person’s fault, an entire group of people are now bad. Condemned. Yeah. And people do genuinely think that way. You can find entire sects of Christianity who think that way. Here’s a pop quiz, Bible pop quiz question for you, Deacon Eric. The blind in the Gospels, the man that was blind, and they asked Jesus who sinned because he’s blind, who sinned, this man or his parents, what did Jesus say? Oh, it was definitely his dad. Yeah. No, no, he said it was not this man nor his parents, but he was blind so that the glory of God made manifest. That’s my paraphrase of what Jesus said there. Right. So there’s, I mean, there’s a rejection of that. It’s this person, that sin is hereditary sin itself. So Jesus himself would reject an overly literal interpretation of a cursed bloodline. Yeah, okay. Okay. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s a hundred percent true and a genuine contribution to this presentation and thank you Deacon Riley Durkin. Thumbs up. I’ve got two thumbs up on the camera. I’ll see you in about 30 seconds. Yeah, yeah. Well, all right. Glad we avoided that crisis. Let’s get on to another crisis, which is probably a lot closer to people’s minds is, oh, sorry, we got to get through this passage first. When the people began being numerous on earth and daughters had been born to them, the sons of God, looking at the women, saw how beautiful they were and married as many of them as they chose. Yahweh said, So, anybody else ever actually read that from Genesis chapter six? I know my first trip through the book of Genesis, it was like, whoa, never heard that one before. So, obviously, even back to the ancient days, people have have wondered what this passage is meant. So, a very common interpretation in antiquity would have been fallen angels. A common interpretation in antiquity was fallen angels. Now, this thing creates serious philosophical and theological difficulties. Angels don’t have bodies. So, it’s unclear how they would be capable of human reproduction, which is predicated on having a body. Moreover, these fallen angels are mentioned only here, and that really doesn’t make sense if we had these fallen angels. It’s like, well, where are they now? Because they couldn’t have been killed by the flood. The fragment we have here contradicts the flood narrative, which says that all flesh is being punished. So, what really complicates this passage for people are two rather obscure verses in the letter of Jude. So, Jude chapter six, that’s a New Testament letter, and second Peter chapter two, verse four. And what Jude and Peter are doing here is they’re going through a list of different sins in the past. And showing how God punished all these people for that. And so, you know, you won’t escape punishment if you continue sinning, right? Now, if you read them carefully, it just says that fallen angels were punished. And then it goes immediately into a section on Sodom and Gomorrah. It doesn’t necessarily say that these fallen angels committed the exact same kind of transgression, but the coincidence of those two is very telling, and that’s how a lot of fathers of the church understood it. So, I don’t really hold this opinion, and I don’t really know how it could be possible. But there have been some theologians, including church fathers, who held to that opinion. So, you know, it’s in the tradition of the church, but so are contradictory opinions. So, the second is these sons of God referring to kings. And I think this is a more modern theory. So, Sons of God was often used as a title for kings in the ancient Near East. So, you know, you say Ramesses III, son of God, you know. And so what this would mean is that this interpretation would say that they started taking more than one wife on themselves and creating a royal harem. I guess that’s possible. It doesn’t seem to me to be quite as as tight an explanation. But maybe I’ll get to heaven and find out that’s the case. And the final one is, is the sons of Seth, right. So these sons of God are also the sons of Seth. And so, you know, we just talked about the cursed bloodlines. Well, the blessed bloodline would have continued through Seth. But by the time we get to the flood, it’s only Noah left who’s continued on this blessings and the rest had fallen away from humanity. And so what this theory talks about is the sons of Seth marrying the daughters of Cain. Right. So in a mythological way representing the The sin of humanity and almost all of humanity coming through and the pure line being, you know, there’s like no purity left in the world. It’s all become stained with the sin of Cain and his descendants. And that’s a very common opinion, even in antiquity. This is actually St. Augustine’s opinion. And I think he had the most influence on the theology of the church in the West, especially on topics like these. So it’s a very widely held theory and it seems to fit things the best. And then finally, about these giants. So the word Nephilim is used twice in scripture. It’s used here in the Book of Genesis and then it’s used in the Book of Numbers when Israel’s camped outside of Canaan. And they say the Canaanites are Nephilim. So they’re giants. So the question is, what do you mean by giants? You know, because if somebody who was seven foot five top tier athlete and incredibly muscular walked in, you might describe that person as a giant. And that would not be too terribly incredible. And even in the first book of Samuel, Goliath was listed at six cubits, which we calculate to about nine feet, five inches tall. So absurdly tall. But there have been people who have had a disorder in their pubic gland who have grown up to about nine feet or so. So it’s not outside of what we’ve ever seen. So and also hyperbole is an OK thing to use in the Bible. Yeah, yeah. No, the biblical authors are quite OK with hyperbole, you know, because if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It’s better to go into the kingdom of heaven blind than it is to, you know, go into Gehenna with both of your eyes. Have you ever cut your hand off, Riley? Not not lately. Has ever ever in your life has your hand been involved in a sin you have committed? Almost certainly. Yeah. OK. So even Jesus used hyperbole, right? Because otherwise there’d be a lot of blind Christians walking around because we can sit with our eyes. Yeah, I mean, so the Nuffolium could mean giants, could mean fallen angels. It could be a concept that was common or even uncommon in the ancient Near East when the Bible was being written or when this part of the Bible was being written and that we just lost the concept for it all together. Yeah. So anyway, this four verses out of scripture, it’s kind of mysterious. But again, you know, we don’t have to have 100 percent absolute clarity as to exactly what happened and what the biblical author meant in order to continue believing in the Bible. All right. So I think we’re going to cover one more slide tonight. And this is the flood. Now, I think a lot of people start to have serious doubts with the Genesis narrative at the flood. They think that a global flood is just impossible and that if I have to believe that there was a global flood, I can’t believe in the Bible. So I’d say there’s three major theories floating around today. And an important point to note is that the church hasn’t given us a final answer on this one. It allows us a range of interpretation. So one of the major theories that’s pretty common out there is it never actually happened. It was just a fanciful myth. I don’t really think that one’s tenable. The New Testament frequently refers the flood as a historic event, not just as a mythological event. So it’s not treated like, let’s say, one of the parables of Jesus was treated. It’s treated as a as an actual event. The catechism of the Catholic Church, when it speaks of the flood, it seems to refer to it as a real event. And you know what, guys, come on, enough of this rationalism. You know, I think we could do this without going there. Now we come to the major opinion in antiquity, which was there was in fact actually a global flood. So a fellow like St. Augustine, he would have affirmed this fellow like St. Thomas Aquinas, he would have affirmed this. It’s not until about the 16th or 17th century that there’s serious contention on there. But I found this from the Old Catholic Encyclopedia published in the early 20th century. And it gives four reasons why a global flood is unlikely. First off, we can find no geological traces of this. We can find geological traces of other floods. So apparently there was a flood about seven thousand years ago that created the Black Sea. And was it just a catastrophic event for that area? We’ve got geological traces of that. Well, flooding the entire world should leave greater theological or geological traces. Secondly, they did the calculations here. You would need four billion six hundred million cubic kilometers of water to flood the entire earth. Now, if 40 days rain, ten times more copious than the most violent rainfall known to us would only raise sea level about 800 meters and the height to be attained is nine thousand meters. Furthermore, if it were geographically universal, the seawater and freshwater would mix to such an extent that neither marine animals nor freshwater animals could have lived in a mixture without the miracle. And fourthly, every animal on earth in the Ark, how were they brought to Noah from remote regions of the earth? How could eight persons take care of such an array of beasts? Where did they obtain the food necessary for all the animals? And how can penguins and parrots, you know, penguins, they want it cold, the parrots want it hot. How do you negotiate that without advanced refrigeration, cooling and heating? It just seems to just not work. So finally, we’ve got this idea of a catastrophic regional flood. So this is going to seem like a very, very difficult thing to balance out with the words of St. Genesis of the book of Genesis talks about all the flesh on earth being being destroyed by the flood. The tops of the mountains covered by the flood and that theologically there’s this is like a recreation that, you know, the world is returned to the formless void that it was before God created the light and the darkness. You know, it returns to the water, it returns to the chaos and out of that a new humanity is drawn. And from this, we actually use Noah and the Ark as a symbol of baptism. So how do we understand this? Well, there’s one interesting grammatical point with the Hebrew that we’re using here is that earth and land in the Bible are used by the same word so you could talk about, you know, the land in Cavalier County. And you can talk about the entire earth, the globe, you know, in Hebrew, both of those ideas that have been represented by the same word. So it could say all flesh in the land was destroyed, it could say the tops of all the hills in this land were covered. Now if we imagine that humanity at this time was confined to a small area of the earth, maybe they member 5000 or so. It could have destroyed all of humanity so we would get both we would get the idea of just a regional flood, which we could find archaeological evidence for maybe already have candidates for, or maybe we don’t find the archaeological evidence or the geological evidence but we don’t have that evidence and for some reason we don’t have that evidence and that God could have intervened to save Noah and his family built a moderate sized Ark to float out the flood. And, and yeah so a local flood seems to me to be able to be a way to explain this and therefore it becomes scientifically plausible, it becomes theologically correct. And the only other thing that we would have to contend with is having an early enough date for humanity to spread out, you know, from, let’s say, Mesopotamia because that’s commonly cited from Mesopotamia all the way down to Africa all the way over to India and China, all the way up to Russia all the way over to Europe and then across the Bering Strait to North America, and that doesn’t seem impossible to me I don’t know what do you think Riley. Um, yeah, I mean, first of all the church hasn’t given us a strict interpretation. Like, you have like they did with Adam and Eve where you have to believe that humanity comes from two people at some point. They haven’t said either way. This was whether or not the flood happened at all. The way I read it is whether or not it’s a historical event. That doesn’t, it doesn’t matter. I read it as the. The same to the St. Paul talk about the, the arc being a symbol for the church or was that St. Peter. Yeah, talks about Noah’s Ark being a symbol of the church. The waters, being a water baptism washing away the evil so reading it in a strictly analogical way, rather than historical is where I think you would find more fruit spiritually anyway. Right, right and obviously the spiritual fruits are are very important but I’m going to lean up against what lean back is, you know, with all of the skepticism and all of the rationalism that have gone into reading the Bible in the past say 300 years. I just kind of want to lean against that because that’s where our culture has been leaning for so far it’s been leaning Bible is just a bunch of fairy tales you know, kind of want to lean against that and try and write things out. So anywhere where I can come up with straightforward interpretation that is ultimately historical I’m going to want to lean in that way. And I think the other. So scientifically, scientifically we have to be rather agnostic about it right because we don’t have a good candidate for this sort of situation yet, and it might be that the geological record has been covered up by too many layers in order for us to find, you know, oh yeah it was 120,000 BC, you know. Right. I mean, we did find that big pile of gopher wood on top of a mountain and Mesopotamia. Right. So how did that get there. Yeah, yeah. Right, because that’s, it’s Armenia, the mountain of traditional Armenia that was where the arc landed, according to the book of Genesis, that and I think the, the witness of Scripture, where they talk about it as a, as a human being. And so, you know, when they talk about it as a, as a historical event, kind of leans me towards well, you know, there was probably something there was probably a gigantic flood and Noah was saved from it by direct intervention of God through divine providence, you know so anywhere where I can, where I can find a combination that jives with both the text of the Bible, and what we can reasonably know. Right. Yeah, God can work through miracles, but you you always assume the natural for the supernatural right right look at the way nature works. And you gave the numbers about about just the feasibility of a global flood. Yeah, yeah. And that, that is something not to dismiss. Right, right. So I don’t really hold to the global flood theory myself. I think the local flood is probably a much more reasonable approach, and it also fits the possibility of a historical account, while covering all of our bases theologically. So, so that’s a legitimate opinion. Also saying this is strictly to be interpreted in a spiritual sense is a legitimate opinion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, wherever your conscience leads you, please. Yeah, yeah, church is not bound our conscious on this one yet so ultimately, if you’re more comfortable with the strictly spiritual interpretation. I don’t think I can censure you for that so here we are. And then, you know, it’s really interesting. Just every single culture and the ancient Near East had a flood myth, you know, it was like, I think we have record of at least 80 blood lip myths of that time. And so that kind of also leads me towards the local flood theory is that people could have remembered this. And, you know, we’ve done studies and oral traditions can actually last for 1000s and 1000s of years without changing their essential format. So, you know, I don’t think it’s all that unlikely that there was a catastrophic flood, and people remembered it, and that came to us through these flood stories flood myths all across the ancient Near East. Yeah, I think that’s an excellent point. People will people will point and say well, like you just said every culture has a has a flood mass. There can only be one true blah blah blah, or they’re all just copying each other. But I think it’s very legitimate to say no they all generationally remember a singular event. And then they’re interpreting it in different cultural ways. Because over time, you know this. So the way oral traditions work is they generally cut out as much irrelevant information as they can manage, you know, and just keep as much relevant information as they can keep, you know, as you look at the story of Cain and Abel, that’s probably a result of a very long oral tradition, eventually being put down. And it’s like that story is so condensed every single verse has profound meaning available. That’s why I love it. Yeah, yeah. First two chapters of Genesis. Yeah, yeah. So anyway don’t underestimate cultures that didn’t have writing they could be quite sophisticated. Well that’s all the slides I’m going to cover for tonight. Oh, this is important. We will not be having any live streams next Wednesday because it’s Holy Week, and we will be continuing on the 15th. Believe the 15th of April. Yeah, yeah, the math adds up the 15th of April. I’m going to put that in my calendar right now. So you don’t forget. Because you’re not coming back for Holy Week, are you? No, we’re, as far as I know we’re doing our own Holy Week here at the St Paul Seminary. Well it’s probably going to be a little more. Probably going to have one of the most liturgical celebrations of Holy Week because it’s going to be me father. Yeah, I think we’re live streaming. Yeah, a lot of it on the Archdiocese website and St. Alphonsus is live streaming ours too. So, yeah, so this Holy Week will look different for everybody, but yeah, please still make it a good Holy Week. Yeah, well there’s certainly, you know, God will provide the church, the mystical body of Christ doesn’t shut down on account of a plane, you know, we’ve, we’ve survived plagues before. We’ve survived worse plagues and we’ll make it through this one. Yeah, and looking ahead at your slides here, Deke and Eric, it looks like next, next time we’re meeting, we’re transferring genres of scripture. Yeah. From the mythical genre of Adam and Eve can enable Noah’s Ark to patriarchal narratives, which is a lot more historical. Yes, yes, we’re getting out of the primeval history of man and getting something to something a little closer commonly dated about 1800 to 1600 BC, which is still a long time ago, but it’s not even as old as Egypt, you know, Egypt dates back to like 32 BC, even farther than that. Egypt’s old. So we’ll be talking about Abraham and Moses and David and the major figures and in Jewish and then ultimately Christian history as well. So it’ll be a lot less talk of can we believe this happened? Can we reasonably believe this or that? No, it’ll be this is a depiction of a historical event. Yeah, yeah. In certain respects. Right, right. You got to remember that the ancient genre of history was pretty loose. So even if you read Herodotus, who was a Greek historian in the third century BC, he’s the one we get. Remember the movie 300? Well, that was based very loosely on his account of that war. And even he will like, you know, write down a conversation between the king and his advisors. And it’s like, well, how do you know what they said? And it’s like, well, okay, they didn’t say this exactly, but they said this generally. So, you know, no problems. Right. It’s like taking notes in class. Yeah, yeah, that’s about perfect actually. And then using that to recreate a narrative. Right. Anyway, this is all things we’ll talk about in a couple weeks. So I want everybody to have a really good holy week. Pray for us at the St. Paul Seminary. And Eric and I, as we’re still getting our ordination date figured out. Yeah. Yeah, that’s kind of up in the air right now. All right. You want to close us out, Deacon Eric? Sure. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. At the Savior’s command informed by divine teaching, we dare to say, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. All right. Well, take care. Thank you, everybody. Yes, thank you, Langdon. Thank you.