Latest / Catholic Spirit Radio / Being Catholic #381: Unveiling the Universe: From Big Bang to Human Soul

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Being Catholic #381: Unveiling the Universe: From Big Bang to Human Soul · Catholic Spirit Radio

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This is Being Catholic with Bob Johnston on Catholic Spirit Radio.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston, and you're listening to Being Catholic right here
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Illinois and growing thanks to you We're going to have a great show for you
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today I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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We are going into a little bit of cooler weather, it seems, and coming into August here.
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And that is really nice. We've had some hot weather during the summer.
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And as I've mentioned, I'm here with my wife, Lynn.
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And maybe we'll talk a little about some contemporary things today.
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And also, I've got an article that's sort of interesting about the cosmos.
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And we'll talk about that if we have the time and I think we will before we
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start. I'm going to turn this over to Lynn.
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Hi. Beautiful weather out. Almost feels foolish. I'll take it, boy.
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You can give me more of that, Lord. I'll be very happy.
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Talking about donations, you know, we're trying to get the Rockford.
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We've got a transmitter up there near Rockford, and it transmits out.
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But because of the terrain there, we need a booster, more or less,
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what I would explain it as, to get all of Rockford covered.
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And people that are listening, if you're listening up in your Rockford area,
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we could use some financial help.
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Putting these translators up is not cheap.
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We have a bargain booster in mind, and we're getting that for $25,000, and that is a bargain.
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or deposit $25,000 through our website or however you can do it,
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we would really, really appreciate it. And I'm sure there's somebody out there that can do that.
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Or if there's two or three people out there that can put that together,
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it would be very, very helpful.
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And this is how our station grows. And we've grown from a very,
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we're going to talk a little bit later here about a singularity,
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a point, and how it grows into something much bigger.
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And that's how we started, a little singularity that grew and grew and grew
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into something much bigger.
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And it did it because of people out there like you and because things came our
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way seeming sort of miraculously.
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And this is something that you can help make a miracle here, perhaps.
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So keep that in mind. Think of it. Mother Angelica, a cloistered nun of all
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people, started out with a transmitter in the garage.
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And he has a worldwide network now and we're part of it.
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But it's all due to people being so generous and God's smiling.
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That's money. You know, it comes like a miracle.
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Her life is interesting. You know, Raymond Arroyo wrote her biography and if
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you get a chance, read it. Mother Angelica.
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Okay, Bob. Okay. I was going to say, before we start, before I read this article,
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it's just interesting. There's so many things going on.
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I thought maybe you wanted to make some comments on that Sidney Sweeney thing
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that's going on. I had an article.
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Oh, I should say an article. I did a show a while back here,
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a month or two ago, the idea of keeping Hitler, you know, alive,
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the idea of Nazis and so forth alive.
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And here's the Sidney Sweeney ad, and we have the progressives calling Sidney
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Sweeney and people who are...
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Attuned to that ad calling them Nazis. And I've mentioned the last time when
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I did that article why there is this emphasis on keeping Nazism and the idea
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of Hitler and so forth alive.
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And the reason for it is because the progressives, the left or whatever you
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want to call it, depends on the idea of pushing, you know,
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diversity and an open society, which really means, as a code word,
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really meaning an attack on norms,
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you know, an attack on the status
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quo and, you know, attack on the regular morality and so forth of society.
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You can do that by saying, oh, we have to have, you know, an open society and
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tolerance has to be the supreme virtue of the day.
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And how do you promote that? Well, you promote it by saying,
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if we don't have an open society, and if we don't have supreme tolerance and
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so forth, we will revert to a society such as the Nazis have.
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We will devolve into a Hitler-type society. And so, therefore.
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You know, we have to have this open society.
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And so, of course, when along comes Sidney Sweeney advertising jeans and the
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advertisement says, you know, Sidney Sweeney has good jeans and there she is,
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a blonde, blue-eyed person.
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Wow, what a chance for the left to come out or the progressives,
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whatever you want to call them, to come out and promote the Hitler idea again
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that unless we have this open society.
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Of course, the open society is their particular version of open society,
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right, Lynn? Oh, damn, right. It's not.
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Anybody else's, of course, is shut off.
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That's perfectly okay to do. Their society, it seems, is a caricature of the regular society.
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In other words, it's okay in their society for a.
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Drag queen story hours to take place in which men dress up like women and exaggerate
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all the features of a woman far more than Sidney Sweeney ever does and so on
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and the high falsetto voices and everything else and stuff.
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That's perfectly okay as long as it's some kind of fake caricature of things,
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something to actually take down regular society.
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There's so many sexual in the winds or whatever in what they do.
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And there is this one blonde, blue-eyed person that comes out on TV looking
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very solemn and so forth and talks about all this.
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She's on the progressive side about how this ad is a double entendre.
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It's using genes and a double meaning, and therefore, secretly,
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it's really promoting Nazism and Hitlerism and so forth. and on the progressive
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left talking about eugenics.
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And I thought, I don't want to fall off the chair and start laughing.
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I thought, you know, Margaret Sanger, who started Planned Parenthood,
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which is, you know, sort of a favorite enterprise of the left.
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Margaret Sanger was a progressive, you know.
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And if you had things going back the way they were, It was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.
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Anthony, who were actually would be on the so-called conservative side today.
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They were the women who promoted the idea of against abortion.
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They were both, you know, anti-abortionists because people, you know,
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that promoted abortion in their eyes were exploiting women.
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I mean, abortion was a means of exploiting women for sex. And if they would
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have been against this ad by Sidney Sweeney, it would not have been because
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they thought she was a Nazi.
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It would have been because they thought they would have thought that the people
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that are paying and using Sidney Sweeney were doing it for purposes of promoting
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a product through sex and just exploiting women's sexuality in order to sell a product.
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And that's probably what they would have been against, not being against some kind of Nazism.
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They won't let Hitler die, will they? No, they can't, because as long as we
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keep Hitler and Nazism alive, they have a reason to promote the so-called open society,
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and they have a reason to promote the toxic virtue of tolerance,
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tolerance, tolerance, and they can get away with it. Right.
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I must confess, I had to ask Bob what that ad was all about.
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It went right over my head.
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Well, it was. The jeans. Yeah, they were just selling jeans. I think of the jeans.
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Right. They're selling blue jeans is what they're doing.
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They're not Nazis and neither is Sidney Sweeney. It has nothing to do with Nazism.
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They're selling blue jeans and they're using a play on words.
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You know, she has good jeans.
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Meaning, you know, she has a good configuration. She looks good.
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She's sexy. That's what she is.
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And sex sells, let's face it. And if you want to be against using sex to sell
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for women, that's one thing.
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But don't start calling people Nazis. Yeah.
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It's just crazy. But they have to keep this idea of progressivism open,
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the open society, so that they can constantly push this tolerance idea.
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And then, of course, they bend and use tolerance to destroy the regular norms.
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They can come out with all kinds of things that destroy the norms because they're
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out to raise, and that's R-A-Z-E,
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raise, you know, like a bulldozer raises things, and they're out to raise the
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regular society that we have, the regular norms, the Christian society,
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and replace it with their own.
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And the idea of Nazism and avoiding it through tolerance gives them the excuse to be able to do that.
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Right. You know, if you objected to the ad, the proper thing to object to is
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using a young girl, lady, you know, she's young,
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very young, as a sexual object.
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But not a word of that, it's colorism because of the genes. But she knows what
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she's doing and she's getting paid very well to do it.
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That's right. When you say girl, she's a big girl.
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Yeah. That's what I mean, the objections. To use Hitler, you know.
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It's like Jimmy Fallon says on the Jimmy Fallon show.
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He said, you know, it tells the left, those aren't hills to die on. Oh.
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Well. At any rate, we'll go into something else here.
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Something lighter and interesting, I always find some of the talking about history here.
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So I'm going to read an article here called The Seeds of God.
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It's by Edmund B. Miller in the magazine, The New Oxford Review.
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And it's in the July-August 2025 New Oxford Review.
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And the title of it is Three Critical Moments in the History of the Cosmos.
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And Edmund B. Miller teaches high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
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at a Catholic school there.
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And it's just an interesting article. And I'll add a little bit to it from one
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of the books that I think is a very good book that everybody should read,
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The Last Superstition, A Refutation of the New Atheists.
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I'll read some information from there, but I think it sort of fills this out a little bit.
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And that's a Phasier book? Well, yeah, that's by Edward Fazer, The Last Superstition.
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It's a very good book on the Aristotelian philosophy and very,
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very readable, very, very interesting. I recommend everybody read it.
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And it brings a lot of sense to understanding not only philosophy,
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but understanding the world and understanding how the real world actually works.
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So goes on here it says
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about a month ago I was in a casual conversation with a former student who said
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that though he accepts Christianity in most fundamental points the Eucharist
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is a teaching about which he is
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still unsure his exact wording was that he didn't know how that would work.
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His comment sent me to musing about the many things the workings of which I am totally ignorant.
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Perhaps my poor educational background explains why I don't know what fire is or gravity or light.
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However, if I were to shy away from the benefits of these and other things merely
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because I don't know how they work, my comings and goings in this world would
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be severely handicapped.
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There are certain mysteries, natural and supernatural, that consistently resist
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the firm grip of the human mind.
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Our acceptance of these ideas, however, is not based on cognitive mastery of
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all the details therein, but on
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the fact that they seem to correspond to a certain pattern of experience.
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British scientist Arthur Eddington, for example, set up an experiment in 1919
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that demonstrated, rather convincingly, that there are curvatures in the fabric of space.
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Wait, curvatures in what? The fabric of space? Space-time?
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This is all completely beyond us. Yet we do know that if we stretch out a bedsheet
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and put a tennis ball in its center, anything we roll across that sheet will
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be attracted to the depression caused by the ball.
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We have, then, a certain experience that helps us understand,
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and he puts understand in quotations because it doesn't really make us totally
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understand, but it gives us a little boost, to help us understand curvatures
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in space-time and the theory of relativity.
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I sympathize with my student in that I, too, don't know how the Eucharist works.
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Nevertheless, I do find that it fits into a certain pattern,
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a pattern of history and science. It's...
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It is a pattern of singularities of small things appearing out of nowhere and
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becoming very big things.
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And we're going to stop here and take a break and we'll come back and we'll
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talk about this. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic.
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We're back from our break, and I'm reading here from an article,
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The Three Critical Moments in the History of the Cosmos, and this appears in
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the New Oxford Review, and it's the July-August issue, 2025 issue,
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and it's talking about three critical moments in the history of the cosmos,
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And he's saying here that we can put the Eucharist in line with three critical
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moments in the history of our cosmos.
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And he says we can call them critical moments of life having to do with,
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first, the creation of the universe,
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second, the creation of life on earth, and third, finally,
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the relatively sudden appearance in Homo sapiens of a transcendent capacity,
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a capacity to understand things that he never did understand before, and we'll go into that.
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For each of these events, science can trace back a certain sequence of effects,
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but it stops, baffled in consideration of a final cause of those effects.
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These three critical moments have two shared characteristics.
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First, each emerges from a singularity, meaning a small primary point of origin.
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Second, each singularity seems to sort of pop into existence,
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apparently lacking any preceding causation.
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It's as though each event, each singularity were created from nothing.
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To illustrate, when we consider the creation of the universe,
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we are considering an event popularly known as the Big Bang,
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although most cosmologists would agree that this term is ready for the shredder.
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What happened was not really a Big Bang, but the sudden yet controlled expansion
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of the cosmos from a single, atomically small point, they call it a singularity,
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almost infinitely hot and dense, so hot that it would take 380,000 years of
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expansion before the universe was cool enough to allow the first elements to form.
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And I think in a program prior to this, I've talked about the fact that singularities
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are not just some kind of miracles where something pops into existence from nothing.
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And the fact is, is that people that insist that singularities pop into existence
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from nothing are insisting on that for one reason.
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They're insisting that they pop into existence from nothing because they're
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trying to avoid the idea of God is what they're trying to do.
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They're trying to protect their own atheism is what they're trying to do.
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And I pointed out that you think with an example, if we suddenly saw a bowling
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ball pop into existence on our table, we wouldn't sit there and say,
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oh, wow, look at that, a singularity. It popped into existence from nothing.
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No, we started looking for the cause. And even if we never found it,
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we'd still be scratching our heads and say, well, I guess I'll never really
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will know where that came from.
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But the whole idea of that would be that it came from somewhere.
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Something caused it. And so there are causes. And so if something seems to pop
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into existence from nothing, such as the universe, there was something that caused it.
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And that something may not be something we can put our finger on materially.
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And it may be something like God.
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There are many chapters in the eventual discovery of this original cosmic moment,
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chapters having to do with the perception of redshift in distant galaxies and
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microwave radiation suffused throughout the universe.
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The best chapter, though, is about how a Catholic priest, Georges-Lé Maître,
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had to explain to Albert Einstein the significance of his own field equations.
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When Einstein first began to suspect that the equations were telling the story
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of a shifting, unstable universe, he simply inserted into the equations a term
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that would bring stability back to his world.
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It's called the cosmological constant.
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Einstein inserted it because he believed that the material universe is a fixed, eternal reality.
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In truth, the universe is more akin to the floating islands of C.S.
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Lewis's book Per Elandra.
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And I haven't read that book, so I don't know what those islands are like,
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but he's pointing out that it's not the fixed material universe that we think of.
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Eventually, Einstein gave Father Le Maître a standing ovation.
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Other physicists, however, to this very day resist the idea of a beginning point
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and sequential expansion of the universe.
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The problem, of course, is that if there really was a beginning point in the
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history of the cosmos, then we must entertain notions of a someone outside that
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beginning point who caused that beginning point.
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And there's where we get with a lot of people and not necessarily a lot of scientists.
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There are a lot of scientists who are religious and they do believe that there
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was a creator, but there are some that do not.
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And so they resist the idea of a beginning point because it suggests that there
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had to be someone to start that beginning.
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To avoid this potential pitfall, some suggest that while we are now perhaps
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in a period of expansion, it was preceded by a period of contraction,
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and the cycle eternally revolves.
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Though this argument has a certain pagan appeal to it, scientifically,
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it doesn't work, as it assumes the material universe is eternal,
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a notion that is in flat contradiction to the law of entropy,
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which states in poetic form that things fall apart, the center cannot hold.
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And what he means by stating that in poetic form here is that Yeats' poem, right, Lynn?
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Yeah. The one where I think, what is it, slouching toward Gomorrah talking about
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the dissolution of Christianity and a new thing taking its place,
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some monster slouching toward Gomorrah to take the place of Christianity.
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He was talking actually in an early part of the 20th century.
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About what's sort of going on today, you know, the dissolution of our natural
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Christian world into something else, and there's something else that we're seeing going on today.
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Today, yeah, very.
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And that's why the people want to still believe in Hitler and Nazism,
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to keep this idea of the open society and to keep the idea of tolerance open
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so that they can use these things as weapons to constantly attack and destroy
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the society that Yeats is talking about, the regular Christian society.
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It's a society that was built by Christianity.
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They want that destroyed and a new society put in its place.
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And one of the best ways to do that is to run around constantly pushing this
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idea of diversity and tolerance and the caricature of all of the old morality and the old philosophy.
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And the idea that if we don't do that, we'll have Hitler helps them along.
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And that's why they're always assisting wherever they can on this idea of Hitler.
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I mean, Hitler's been dead for over 80 years, but they're not going to let him die.
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He goes on here, he says, Stephen Hawking made a more scientifically sophisticated
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attempt to avoid the God possibility in the appearance of the universe.
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The universe, he wrote, is a perfect balance of negative and positive energy.
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And what do you get when you average out the amount of negative and positive energy? Zero.
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There you have it. Proof that spontaneous generation from nothing as possible.
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I suppose that by the same logic, if two kids are perfectly balanced on a seesaw,
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there are actually no kids on the seesaw at all.
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And I have read Hawking's attempt at doing this, and it goes into a little bit
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more complexity than that.
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And actually, the best I could figure out,
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Hawking sort of turns a figure eight on his side and turns sort of something
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from nothing into sort of like a perpetual motion over a sideways figure eight
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is the best that I could come up with.
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And of course, he's a little bit more mathematical and all that,
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but I don't think he does a very good job of making the case myself.
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And he's saying here the same thing. It's a good try, but he sneaks in just
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a little tiny bit of matter that existed prior to, you know,
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the so-called expansion in Big Bang.
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And that sneaking in that little tiny bit of matter is still sneaking in. Yes.
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Sneaking in something that's eternally here, you know, and it doesn't work.
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No, it doesn't. And again, you can see what his whole purpose is to try to somehow avoid a creator.
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Another critical yet mysterious moment
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in the history of the cosmos is the appearance of life on our planet.
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Life has not been found in any other part of the universe, even though there
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are cosmic regions in which the conditions for life are actually better than they are here on Earth.
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And that's still a fact yet. It's
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not to say that we might not find life somewhere, but so far we haven't.
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And that is sort of strange if life is supposed to be ubiquitous,
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That is, you know, if it's supposed to spring up wherever all the chemicals
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and so forth are right, why aren't we finding it other places in the universe,
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you know, in more quantity?
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But we are, and they're still searching very hard for it. And,
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of course, even if we do find it, it's still not any evidence that there isn't a creator.
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But the fact is, it seems strange that so far we haven't found it anywhere except here.
28:53
In fact, that life exists on this planet, some consider to be sheer accident, even a farce.
29:01
See, for example, the first three minutes, a modern view of the origin of the universe.
29:06
And that's becoming a case more among some people now that life is a very rare accident.
29:11
For a while there, back, I remember when I was in high school and so forth,
29:15
chemistry and all that, life was pretty much considered by a lot of scientists
29:19
and science fiction writers as some kind of an inevitable thing.
29:23
All you had to have was a warm ocean or a warm pond and lots of slime and plenty
29:28
of different kinds of chemicals thrown in there together, have a little bit
29:32
of lightning and so forth or a long period of sunlight and voila,
29:36
all of a sudden we had life all over the place.
29:38
Only the thing is, why couldn't they ever reproduce it in laboratories or something?
29:44
There was always some excuse as why they couldn't. But after a while,
29:49
they gave up and said, well, maybe life is rarer than we thought, you know.
29:53
Anyway, goes on here, part of the understood definition of an accident,
29:58
though, is a statistically unlikely occurrence.
30:01
And for some writers and thinkers, the fact that we are statistically unlikely is exactly the point.
30:08
In other words, the precision tuning of many factors and forces makes our existence highly and likely.
30:15
And if you read sometimes of all the various things that we have to have on
30:24
our planet and in our solar system for us to be able to exist,
30:29
it's like having a formula that is very, very complex.
30:34
It's sort of like having one of those puzzles, you know, the Rubik's Cube puzzle.
30:43
Only one that is even more complex and far more complex than a Rubik's Cube.
30:48
And if you accidentally turned even one little knob off course.
30:52
It would be almost impossible to get the whole thing back together again as that formula goes.
30:57
You'd be sitting there forever trying to restore it to what it was and you couldn't figure it out.
31:03
It would be like trying to restore the Rubik's Cube after you distort it,
31:08
after you turn the knobs in different places.
31:11
It's a difficult thing to get it back. And it's the same thing here.
31:15
If you start thinking about the fact that, oh, I've read before some of the
31:19
things that have to come into existence. You have to have a moon,
31:21
for example, the size that we do.
31:23
It has to be about the same distance from our planet that ours is.
31:27
You have to have the sun about the same size and the same distance.
31:32
And the moon has to be able to cover the sun in the same way and eclipses and so on.
31:36
It goes on and on and on. There's all kinds of things that have to be in existence
31:39
according to, you know, some of these scientific studies before life can actually occur.
31:47
And that's why it occurred on our planet because we have all of those things
31:51
that coincide together and so forth.
31:54
Very, very complex. And if anyone gets out of line or whatever, life couldn't exist.
31:59
And so this is why life is very, very rare. or you'd have to have something
32:06
else somewhere in the universe somewhere else that was exactly like our place,
32:09
and that's very, very unlikely, and so on.
32:13
But it is possible. It would be possible, of course.
32:18
But at any rate, this is why people say it's unlikely there's life anywhere
32:22
else, you know, in the universe.
32:23
It's just probably, you know, just too many factors that would have to be in place.
32:28
And it's unlikely those could occur more than once.
32:31
So, you know, we don't know whether any of those are true.
32:34
But we do know that life is going to be a lot rarer than people thought.
32:39
I don't know. Well, I saw online this week, early this week,
32:44
that there were aliens, there's an alien ship or something seven miles long,
32:51
and it was hiding behind the sun, and it was getting, yeah, I don't know.
32:56
Then they find out it's some kind of a cork that goes back to the beginning
33:01
of creation or something.
33:02
Well, if it is an alien ship, I can understand why it's hiding.
33:06
It probably snuck out, took a look at the earth, and said, let's get the hell out of here. Yeah.
33:13
I don't want anything to do with them. Anyhow, the precision turning of many
33:20
factors and forces makes our existence highly unlikely.
33:23
Some call these occurrences of precision turning antropic coincidences involving,
33:29
for example, the precise balance between outward expulsion and gravitational
33:33
attraction in our expanding universe.
33:35
So that expansion does not occur so fast as to make cohesion impossible,
33:40
or so slowly that gravitational force overwhelms and implodes the cosmos.
33:45
You know, and that's another thing.
33:48
Even the whole universe, it can be considered miraculous in a sense that if
33:54
things went just a little bit one way too much or the other,
33:58
a little bit too much contraction or a little bit too much expansion,
34:02
and the universe would expand to the point where it would simply dissipate,
34:06
or if it contracted, it would contract to the point, again, where it simply
34:10
would dissipate in on itself.
34:12
And it doesn't do either one of those, so it has to be just right.
34:16
As another example of a finely tuned balance, consider the number of big stars
34:21
in our universe, the ones that produce the chemical elements of which man is
34:26
made, having spooed those elements into the cosmos before our sun existed.
34:30
Too many of these big stars, though, would create conditions too extreme for supporting life.
34:38
If we were to consider all occasions of such balance, and there are many more,
34:42
as you will discover through a quick internet search, we would find that the
34:46
overall odds of life on Earth are exceedingly unfavorable.
34:50
So unfavorable that Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick once proposed that,
34:55
in view of the very small odds of life's having formed here,
34:58
it must have been transported from somewhere else.
35:02
On the eve of its own demise, Crick proposed an advanced civilization elsewhere
35:09
in the universe launch the seeds of life into the cosmos, eventually to be planted here on Earth.
35:16
It's a theory called direct panspermia.
35:19
And it's evidence of just how far from the realm of science some will stray
35:23
in order to find a reason for our planet's existence, since real reasons are not close at hand.
35:29
And we're going to have to stop here and take a break. So stay with us. We'll be right back.
35:33
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Honey, what are we going to do for Mass this weekend? We'll be out of town and
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won't be here at our regular Mass time.
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Let's go online to check catholicspiritradio.com and find another Mass time.
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The website lists the regular Mass schedule plus most Holy Days of all the Catholic
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That's a lot in central and northern Illinois.
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Good. We'll easily be able to find another Mass time on catholicspiritradio.com.
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I heard that it has a huge list of Eucharistic adoration, too.
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You won't believe the number of churches that offer it. That's wonderful.
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The Eucharist brings me such peace. Are Reconciliation Times also listed at
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Yes, and they even have a community calendar that lists local Catholic events.
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Let's check that out too.
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Hi, this is Bob Johnston. You're listening to Being Catholic right here on Catholic Spirit Radio.
38:13
We're back from our break, and we're talking about three critical moments in the cosmos.
38:19
And we talked about the first two, and one was the creation of the universe in the first place.
38:24
The second was the creation of life on earth.
38:27
And finally, a third critical moment, and this is perhaps one of the most interesting
38:33
in our history, is when a certain species of the genus Homo suddenly began to act peculiarly.
38:42
Somewhere around 60,000 years ago, evolution and survival, from what we can
38:49
tell by the archaeological record, were no longer the primary concern of Homo sapiens.
38:57
Quite unlike its fellow animals, this creature became restless in pursuit of
39:02
ideals that have no practical benefit.
39:06
Beyond wanting to know how to build a good fire, he wanted to know what is true.
39:12
Beyond being able to communicate danger to his tribe, he wanted to communicate
39:17
abstract thoughts and emotions.
39:19
Beyond leaving behind crude maps and signals, he wanted to create designs of beauty.
39:25
Are these desires the result of evolutionary forces?
39:29
How could they be, since evolutionary forces strive for nothing more than adaptation and survival?
39:37
Well, these desires lend us no advantages in that regard.
39:41
The genus Homo, however, has not always demonstrated such longing for the transcendent.
39:47
Certainly, he has been around for a long time and has played its part in the evolutionary scheme.
39:53
About two million years ago, Homo habilis showed a capacity for the production and use of stone tools.
40:02
Then, Homo erectus, with a greater cranial capacity than Homo habilis,
40:07
migrated out of Africa to Europe, China, and Indonesia.
40:11
Afterwards, about 700,000 years ago, came Homo heidelbergensis,
40:20
demonstrating abilities with spears and fire.
40:23
Homo neanderthalensis, for his part, contributed to the evolutionary story and
40:31
advanced tool capacity, axes, blades, and awls.
40:35
So we're talking about a long stretch of time, more than a million years with
40:40
not much changing except for a larger migratory pattern and greater sophistication in tools.
40:47
In other words, here we have this homo species tracing along for over a million
40:55
years and really not advancing very much, making some tools,
41:00
finally using a little bit of fire, didn't look like he had much of speech or
41:04
anything along those lines, and living pretty much for thousands and thousands
41:09
of years in the same exact manner with the same exact tools,
41:13
pretty much in the same exact place,
41:16
not moving around much or doing much at all.
41:18
And then all of a sudden, 60,000 years ago, boom, all over the place,
41:23
He starts moving all over the world and starts doing things that he's never
41:27
done before. So the question is, what happened?
41:31
With Homo sapiens, however, and now he's called Homo sapiens, everything changes.
41:37
William Johnson and David Strayer point out that until Homo sapiens,
41:42
human evolution with all of its phase transitions was unspectacular.
41:48
He goes, Homo sapiens was still using the same kind of tools as Homo erectus.
41:53
Somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 years ago, though, the changes are so extraordinary
41:58
that they have been called a cultural revolution.
42:03
Ofer Bar-Yosef of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
42:08
summarizing this cultural revolution,
42:10
says it brought about rapid technological changes, emergence of self-awareness and group identity,
42:17
increased social diversification, formation of long-distance alliances,
42:22
the ability to symbolically record information.
42:26
In other words, we find in this period that which most certainly is not necessary
42:31
for survival, including painting, personal ornamentation,
42:37
pottery, and most significantly, evidence of language, suddenly,
42:41
inexplicably, man is seeking.
42:44
And the question is, why?
42:47
It's interesting to note that the folks who bear the above-licit characteristics
42:52
emerged from one line of hopeless sapiens in a single location in Africa, Baglow writes.
42:58
In other words, all of a sudden this change took place in a single place in
43:02
Africa, and the people that the change took place among began moving out from that place all at once.
43:10
That being the case, that is, the discovery of roots of the true human culture
43:14
in a specific place, population, and time, I think the ontological leap,
43:20
that is, that leap in being, to which Pope St.
43:23
John Paul II referred to during a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of
43:29
Sciences, can be connected more convincingly to an original parentage.
43:35
In other words, that sudden change can be connected to an atom and an Eve that came about.
43:43
So, whence came the universe? Who planted it there?
43:47
Whence came life on earth? And in the nature of man, how do we account for that
43:52
which evolution cannot explain?
43:54
Evolution cannot explain this. This was a change in the mind.
43:59
This was actually a creation of or a mind actually coming into existence.
44:05
St. Augustine would have answered these questions through the concept of rations
44:11
seminales, that is, seeds of reason.
44:15
These seeds, he believed, were planted into time and space by God at the moment
44:20
of creation, each seed to sprout in due season.
44:25
Every new star or planet, Every new species or type is the realization of a
44:30
potentiality implanted by God in the beginning.
44:38
In more modern terminology, rationed seminales might be called spontaneous generation,
44:43
the apparent growth of organic life from non-organic sources.
44:48
But my opinion, I told my wife I would expect it on it. Yeah,
44:52
I've been waiting for this for days.
44:54
What I think happened here was that man was ensouled.
44:58
At some point in time, you know,
45:00
man's going along like this and living pretty much on an animal basis.
45:04
He's got some basic tools and so forth, but he doesn't really have any transcendent
45:12
concepts. He's not able to hold immaterial, complex, transcendent concepts.
45:19
In other words, he doesn't really have a mind. He doesn't have a rational mind.
45:23
He doesn't have a rational soul.
45:25
The soul, the Catholic Church teaches, is that which causes life.
45:30
In other words, it teaches three kinds of souls.
45:33
We have the nutritive soul, and everything, all plants and so forth have a nutritive soul.
45:39
And this is the soul, you know, that takes in nutrients and so forth.
45:45
And the difference between something that is alive and not alive.
45:48
In other words, a blade of grass is alive and a rock is not.
45:51
And the blade of grass then would have a nutritive soul. And when the blade
45:54
of grass dies, the nutritive soul was out of existence. It's not transcendent.
45:59
And then an animal has a sensory soul.
46:02
This is a soul in which the animal is able to take in things through the senses,
46:09
hearing, smell, taste, feel, all of those kinds of things.
46:13
The animal is able to move around and so forth, and it also has life in a different
46:18
way than a plant, say, has life.
46:21
But again, the same thing. When it dies, the soul dies because the soul is not
46:25
a rational soul. It is not transcendent.
46:29
But a human being has the nutritive soul, and it also has the sensory soul,
46:35
but also the rational soul.
46:37
And the fact is, is that the mind is not material.
46:41
The mind is transcendent. And in other words, our brain may be material,
46:47
but our mind cannot possibly be material.
46:51
Because our mind can hold concepts and can hold ideas and so forth that are not material at all.
47:01
For example, if we take a triangle, and I've used this illustration before.
47:06
On Earth, we can look at a triangle.
47:08
We can conceive that it's a three-sided figure and it's closed,
47:12
but we also, as human beings, at some point came into the idea of understanding triangularity.
47:21
Which is an entirely different thing than the triangle itself.
47:24
We understood that not only does a triangle have three closed sides,
47:29
but a triangle has three exactly straight sides, and that a triangle has three
47:36
angles, and that those angles add up to 180 degrees,
47:40
and anything that does this has the form of a triangle, and if something has
47:45
that form, three angles,
47:48
180 degrees with three straight sides, then that trying then in its.
47:54
Put into something material, that thing then is a material triangle.
47:59
But we also understand that on this earth, in reality, that triangle is never perfect.
48:06
In other words, that triangle always, no matter how carefully we draw the lines,
48:10
no matter how perfect our tools are and so forth, or how perfect we think they
48:14
are, if we blow those tools up big enough and so forth, we will see imperfections in them.
48:19
They'll be quivering in line. The lines will never be perfectly straight.
48:23
The angles will never be perfectly 180 degrees.
48:26
No matter how carefully we draw them, they'll always be off by some tiny little
48:31
bit, no matter how tiny it is or how small it is.
48:34
In other words, in the real world, in a material world, we can't have a perfect
48:38
triangle, but our brain can conceive of a perfect triangle.
48:41
So there are things in our brain that are certainly not material.
48:47
If they were, in other words, if somehow our brain worked materially and it
48:52
recreated the form of a triangle, then there would actually be a real triangle in our brain.
49:00
And, of course, that triangle would also be imperfect, and our brain would not
49:03
be able to conceive of triangularity because in the real world,
49:08
triangularity doesn't exist.
49:10
If when we study geometry, for example, we study a science,
49:14
we study a form of mathematics that is perfect, and we understand that it is
49:19
perfect, even though when we put all that down on paper or no matter how carefully
49:23
we write it out, we can never make it perfect in the real world. But in our minds, we can.
49:28
So our minds are different than our brains. Our minds are something beyond the material.
49:39
And I think what happened 60,000 years ago is we were ensouled,
49:46
so to speak, if we consider the rational soul.
49:49
We were given the rational soul in some way that we are...
49:54
Able to be in contact with the mind of God in the understanding of the perfect
50:01
world, the world that Plato and Aristotle and others told us about the world of the forms.
50:07
The world of perfect mathematics.
50:09
We can understand in mathematics and so forth the perfection of mathematics.
50:14
We can understand perfect things and understand that concept.
50:18
And it's not possible if those things were actually put into real material,
50:22
they would be those things. And in the real world, those things can't be perfect.
50:26
So if our brains were the same thing as material, we can never have the concept
50:31
of perfection that we do in our brains.
50:33
We probably can't even imagine perfection. You probably can't even imagine the
50:38
perfect triangle in your brain, but you can conceive it.
50:41
And so that's what I'm getting at, Lynn, is that at some point.
50:45
The only way you can deny that is to deny that there are those universals themselves.
50:50
You can deny that there's such a thing as universal,
50:55
such as triangularity, or you can deny there are such things as propositions,
51:01
such as two and two is four, or
51:03
deny that there are such things as snow is white, which is a proposition.
51:09
But if any of those propositions were in your brain really, in the sense that
51:15
your brain had to formulate them materially somehow because the brain is material,
51:20
those things would actually have to be in your brain.
51:23
You would have to have a triangle that would suddenly take place in your brain
51:27
in some way or another, whether it was maybe a bunch of electrons forming a triangle or whatever.
51:34
But those things then would also be imperfect.
51:37
And if they're imperfect, you could have no concept of perfection. But you do.
51:42
We can see. And we have the same thing with the mathematics and so forth.
51:46
And what I'm saying is that at some point, people didn't have that transcendental.
51:51
Look at what happened after that 50,000 or 60,000 years ago.
51:54
There were people that climbed down in France.
51:59
You know, it wasn't France then, of course. It was just wilderness.
52:03
Oh, yeah, just wilderness.
52:04
They climbed down into caves and crawled through very narrow tunnels and everything else,
52:10
taking fire-making tools and so forth with them in order to build fires and
52:16
light torches and so forth so that they could paint those cave walls.
52:20
Those caves were in total darkness. They didn't live in those caves.
52:24
And they painted beautiful and wonderful paintings of animals and so forth,
52:29
and it showed those animals in movement and everything else.
52:32
And they were invoking the spirit world and invoking the idea of.
52:39
Calling forth the animals to hunt and so forth, things that they never did before.
52:44
Can you imagine that going down? There was no reason for doing those things for survival.
52:49
It wasn't a survival purpose. If you're going to survive, you go out and kill
52:53
an animal the best you can.
52:54
But they were invoking the spirits. They were inventing religion.
52:59
They were inventing and making sign language. Language is totally symbolic.
53:06
They were doing things with their minds that were totally transcendental,
53:10
you know, above the reality, above material that they never did before.
53:16
So something happened, and it happened in one place with one pair of ferrets.
53:20
And so the story of Adam and Eve is correct. And what happened is,
53:25
is I think the breath of God was breathed in somehow into man,
53:29
and his brain became capable of not being just material, but immaterial as well.
53:39
He developed the mind, and I think that's what happened.
53:43
Yeah, that's very possible. It makes more sense than when I saw in the movie,
53:49
that one movie where the monolith would come down and then man would evolve.
53:55
Yeah, that would be, in effect, that movie would be trying to make the space aliens gods.
54:01
But if they weren't really gods, then what made them transcendental?
54:04
Yes. And so on. You have to keep on asking those questions. Or you have to deny transcendentalism.
54:10
You have to deny universals and so forth, and that is almost impossible to do
54:14
because if you deny it, you can't even talk.
54:16
I mean, I can't get into it now, but the point is that when you start to deny
54:21
it, you just get into all kinds of—it becomes irridiculous and incoherent.
54:29
Ridiculous and incoherent. Anyhow, we're going to have to stop here.
54:32
But that makes sense. And, you know, we have the Mayer, Mayer, Manichaean heresy?
54:39
No, no, no, I'm not thinking of the heresy. I'm thinking how genetics can trace
54:44
back to the first woman. Yeah.
54:47
And we all have that strain. Yeah.
54:50
And it can be traced back to one woman.
54:53
So we can maybe see through our minds like we see through our eyes.
54:58
Our eyes don't see, but we see through them. And the same thing with our brain.
55:03
Some of the thoughts of our brain is not our brain itself. It's through our
55:08
brain somehow, but it's not material.
55:10
Yeah. And that's where we get the rational soul, and that's why our soul is
55:14
immortal, and that's why an animal soul is not.
55:17
Anyway, St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.
55:21
Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
55:25
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray.
55:27
And do thou, Prince of the Heavenly Host, by the power of God,
55:32
thrust into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wanders through the world for the ruin of souls.
55:37
Amen. You've been listening to Being Catholic with Bob Johnston.
55:41
On Catholic Spirit Radio, if you'd like to contact Bob, email bob at catholicspiritradio.com.
55:48
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