Category: Apologetics

How To Get Your Autographed Copy of The Fathers Know Best

Fathers Know Bes1-02 At last!

I’ve had a lot of people ask when the book would be available for pre-order, and now it is!

In fact, I’m pleased to tell you how to get your very own, autographed copy of the book–together with an exclusive audio interview that will not be available anywhere else.

Catholic Answers is doing a fundraising appeal based on the book because printing and properly promoting a book is expensive–particularly in the orthodox Catholic, non-profit world of niche publishing.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

As Karl Keating explains in a recent letter,

I want to launch this book with a bang, not a whimper

The book is ready for the printer. The text has been finished, proofed, and typeset. But this is a big book—about 400 pages—and to print it in a large enough quantity to get a good per-copy rate from the printer and to give it the initial public promotion it deserves . . . well, that takes cash that we just don’t have.

But—ahem!—you and our other friends do, and so I’m asking you to give us a hand in getting The Fathers Know Best printed and publicized. 

I’ve been involved in writing and publishing for a long time, so I know that bringing a book to fruition and getting it noticed (and sold!) is no easy thing. 

Each year more than 40,000 titles are published in the U.S., and it takes savvy and, alas, cash to get a worthwhile book “noticed” and reviewed and (as I think this one will be) praised, but that’s what needs to be done if The Fathers Know Best is to have the influence I think it ought to have.

In publishing, as in other areas, there’s a “window of opportunity.” 

If a publisher can make a big splash right from the start, then a book has a chance to carry itself, so to speak, and to go from success to success. 

But if a publisher isn’t in a position to print many copies or to give the book the marketing oomph it needs, even the best book will languish.

And The Fathers Know Best mustn’t languish, because it’s a book that can do an immense amount of good—both spiritual and intellectual—for countless thousands of people, both Catholic and non-Catholic.

That’s why I want to have a large first-run printing and an extensive right-out-of-the-gate marketing campaign. 

I want this book to “go viral”—because Christians of all stripes need it

To use a term common on the Internet, I want this book to “go viral,” which means to have publicity about it be self-sustaining so that more and more people can learn about—and learn from—this important book.

I hope you can help us pull this off. 

As I said, we need money to print a large number of copies of The Fathers Know Best—the more copies we order, the cheaper the unit cost and thus the lower we can set the retail price—and to undertake an extensive promotional campaign. 

I hope you might be one of those willing to help with a gift of $500 or $1,000 or even more. Or maybe you can afford to send us $100 or $200 toward this effort. Whatever you give, you have our thanks.

If you’re able to help us with a donation of at least $50, as a thank-you, we’ll send you in return two things: 

1. A copy of the book itself, of course, autographed by Jimmy Akin.

2. An exclusive audio interview with Jimmy about the book and its background. This interview will not be made available in the future and is available only as a thank-you to those who help with this project.

Perhaps you can tell from this letter that I’m excited about this project. I think Jimmy’s new book will do a lot of good for a lot of people. 

Over the years, I’ve learned of many people who, having stumbled across the Fathers, found themselves compelled to go where they didn’t want to go—into the Catholic Church.

They saw that the Catholic Church and Catholic beliefs go back beyond the Council of Trent, beyond the medieval councils, all the way to the earliest councils—and further back still, all the way to Christ. 

Won’t you help us help thousands come to see this truth?

You and I are witnesses to the truth of the Catholic faith—and I think we’ve had some success in that—but the most powerful witnesses I know, outside the Bible itself, are the Fathers of the Church. 

Please help us introduce them to today’s readers, both Catholic and non-Catholic. 

I’m excited about the book finally being available for pre-order, and I hope you will consider supporting it–and Catholic Answers as a whole–through a generous donation.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

Of course, you could simply wait a little longer and purchase the book, but I hope that you will offer your support in this way because it helps the ministry continue its work and it helps us do a decent print run and proper promotion for the book–maximizing the apostolic good that is done and helping Catholic Answers undertake more publishing projects like this in the future.

To give those who support this appeal added value, I’m going to be sitting down and autographing all the copies that are sent to those who donate.

I’m also–and I haven’t talked about this elsewhere–going to be personalizing the autographs by adding a citation to a relevant Bible verse to each one. That’s something I always do when I autograph things as a lagniappe–“a little bit extra.” Years ago when I was given a book by a Christian author, he wrote a Bible verse under his signature. I went home and looked it up, and I decided I liked the custom, so I always do that when I autograph.

And I don’t give the same verse to everybody. I’m going to be picking out a selection of Fathers-related Bible verses and using them for the autographs.

I wonder what your verse will be?

To add even more value for the donor, I recently sat down to record an exclusive interview with Patrick Coffin about the Church Fathers and the making of the book. We will be sending a copy of this on CD to those who generously respond to the appeal. It will not be aired on Catholic Answers live, will not be posted online, and will not be available in any other way in the future. It is exclusively a thank-you for those who are able to help the ministry through their generosity.

So I look forward to autographing a book for you, and I hope you can give to this appeal and help Catholic Answers maximize the apostolic good it can do though The Fathers Know Best.

CLICK HERE TO DONATE.

Are You Smarter Than an Atheist?

QuizTitle

I am.

At least according to a quiz put out by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life.

The quiz has 32 questions, of which atheists in America who took the quiz got an average of 20.9 questions right. American Jews got 20.5 right, American Mormons 20.3 right, American Protestants 16 right, and American Catholics 14.7 right.

I got all of them, but that’s nothing special since this is the field I work in professionally. I’m expected to know my own field. Give me a comparable quiz on another topic and watch the number plummet. I can say with great confidence that if you gave me a 32-question quiz on sports—something very large numbers of people would do very well on—I would be lucky to get even a handful of questions right.

However that may be, what are we to make of the numbers regarding the different groups? Pretty dismal for Catholics, right?

Not necessarily, and it depends on what you mean.

This is not a case of “Catholics don’t know their own faith but other groups do know theirs.” The quiz is not religion-specific. It’s pan-religious. So the majority of questions on the quiz do not relate to the faith of the person taking the quiz, but to other people’s faiths. And therein lies a significant reason for why the numbers line up as they do.

What do the three high-scoring groups have in common? They are all religious minorities in America. That’s significant because a religious minority has special reason not only to understand its own religion (so as to reinforce its intra-group religious identity) but also to understand the religions of those around it (because of the need to understand how to interact with the majority religion that surrounds it). A person in a religious minority has special reason to understand both the basics of his own faith and the basics of the majority faith. A person in the majority faith has special reason only to understand the latter.

A Jew in Israel or an atheist in China would have less reason to know the basics of Christianity than a Jew or an atheist in America.

When you look at the two mainstream American religious groups—Protestants and Catholics—they score both less than the minorities and quite close to each other (only 1.3 questions separating them, which may well be within the poll’s margin of error).

Then there’s selection bias in who chose to take the poll. Perhaps atheists are more motivated to take a (rather long) 32-question quiz than Catholics. Who knows? This is a perennial problem of surveys.

The questions in the poll are also likely to distort results in other ways, too. I counted at least three questions that were Mormon-specific but only two that were Catholic-specific. Who is that going to advantage?

There were also three questions on what public school teachers are and aren’t allowed to do in America regarding religion. That is a subject that atheists will be far more focused on (and thus likely to get right) than ordinary Christians. (It’s also worth noting that Catholics have their own parallel school system and many do not even use the public schools, giving them less reason to be familiar with the details of what is allowed.)

These last questions also aren’t actually about religion but about American politics regarding religion. Something similar applies to another set of three questions regarding what the majority religion is in particular countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan). Those aren’t questions about religion but about the demographics of other countries. (Hey, everybody! Quick! What’s the majority religion in Gambia? It sure tells you a lot about religion if you happen to know that the answer is Islam, doesn’t it? You’re much more informed about religion if you know that.)

So . . . it’s not the most informative quiz in terms of religious knowledge. Nor is the news for Catholics as bad as the raw numbers suggest. The quiz simply isn’t a test of how much Catholics know about their own faith.

That’s not to say that Catholic religious education hasn’t been a disaster in the last generation. It has been.

That’s not exclusively the fault of the clerical class. Parents in many families did not do their part to see to their children receiving a proper religious education. But when many elements of the clerical class have been actively and deliberately subverting the teaching of Catholic doctrine, it’s going to contribute to the poor state of religious knowledge among Catholics today.

One bit of sort-of-encouraging news from the Pew survey was that 55% of Catholics were able to correctly identify their Church’s teaching regarding the status of bread and wine in the Eucharist. That’s not nearly what it should be, but it’s at least better than the Gallup poll a number of years ago that started the false rumor that it was far less.

This quiz isn’t the greatest, but quizzes are fun, so have at it . . .

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN AN ATHEIST? (Be sure to write down your answers as you go; the answers are given at the end of the last question.)

MORE FROM THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR.

Oh, and as Columbo Would Say . . .

. . . "just one more thing."

Another thing I've been up to is setting up a blog on the Church Fathers in conjunction with my forthcoming book The Fathers Know Best.

CHECK IT OUT!

I've got a lot of cool stuff planned for it. In fact, just yesterday we taped a series of web videos with little-known facts and surprising stories about the Church Fathers. I'll let y'all know when they're out. Hope you enjoy them! (And the rest of the fascinating material I'm going to get into. :-D)

Here's a sneak peek of a near-final cover design for the book . . .

Frs 

Click to embiggen.
 

Stephen Hawking’s Cosmic Slot Machine (Part 2)

In their new book, The Grand Design, co-authors and physicists Stephen Hawking (pictured) and Leonard Mlodinow argue that God is not necessary to explain the existence of the universe as we experience it.

Why not?

After all, if you look at the universe it looks suspiciously like it has been deliberately designed with us in mind. This is something that Harking and Mlodinow go into in some depth. They point out, as have many theistic apologists, that the laws governing our universe seem finely tuned to allow the existence of life. There are any number of constants—the gravitational constant, the mass of the proton, etc.—that are set at just the value needed to allow life to exist. If any of these constants were off by even a small amount, life would not be possible. It therefore appears that our universe has been intelligently designed to allow for life, which implies the existence of an intelligent designer.

In apologetics, this argument is sometimes called the argument from design from cosmological constants.

In their book, the two authors try to provide an alternative account of the universe’s origin that does not require an intelligent designer.

In the account they sketch they claim that ours is not the only universe. In fact, ours is only one of a vast number of universes, all of which pop into existence out of nothing as spontaneous creations. What’s more, the laws of physics take on every possible permutation in these universes, so there are vast numbers of them out there where the cosmological constants are different. So there isn’t a single uni-verse but a multi-verse in which every possible flavor of individual universes occur.


KEEP READING

Stephen Hawking’s Cosmic Slot Machine (Part 1)

I’ve read a number of books by Stephen Hawking (pictured) and Leonard Mlodinow, writing both together and separately. I’ve enjoyed them. They’re informative and funny, and they make clear some pretty deep concepts of physics and mathematics—without burdening you with a bunch of equations (that’s some trick).

But their new book The Grand Design
was a disappointment.

It’s a short read, which is fine, though I was surprised when I discovered that the last 25% of the alredy-short book to be composed of back matter (an exotic form of matter discovered by publishers; it consists of glossaries, indexes, author bios, acknowledgements, and the like).

Despite its brevity, it does a good job making clear some pretty far-out physics concepts, many of which are also treated in similar works, including Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s previous books. It is also nicely laced with humor.

What is disappointing is the way the book treats philosophy and theology.


KEEP READING.

Why So Few Gospels?

A correspondent writes:

I’m just in need of a helping hand from you, because I’m in the middle of a debate with a muslim friend.

While we’re in the middle of discussion, he happen to addressed me with a question that blew me away, because I don’t have any idea on how I could tackle his question.

This is what he said, “Could you also tell me that there are hundreds of Gospels, then how come only four made it through the New Testament?”

I know that the “Books or Gospels” contained in the New Testament are all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but I think there are much more broader explanation regarding this matter.

I hope you could give me a helping hand regarding this subject Sir. I would really appreciate it if you could give me at least a brief explanation and answer regarding this.

The correspondent is correct that the canonical gospels are inspired by the Holy Spirit and false gospels aren’t. The question is how the Holy Spirit guided the Church into a recognition of which were inspired and which weren’t.

Here’s how that happened . . .

I don’t know that there are literally hundreds of gospels (that would mean 200 or more), but there are a large number of purported gospels that were written between A.D. 100 and A.D. 400. There may have been hundreds written back then (and people continue to crank out false gospels even today, like the Aquarian Gospel of Levi), but only a few dozen survive from those centuries.

The reason that they are not in the New Testament is that they are all fakes. The Church recognized them as such because (1) they often theologically contradicted the canonical gospels that had been passed down from the apostles and their associates and (2) they showed up out of nowhere, with no history of having been read in the churches down through the years.

The canonical gospels, by contrast, all date from the first century, they were written by the apostles or their associates, they were given to the first churches to read, and the churches read them all the way down through history. Also, the doctrine contained in them agreed with the doctrine passed down by the apostles to the bishops and handed on by them.

The later-written “gospels” thus were spotted as phonies because they had not been passed down like the others and they contained bad doctrine.

Eventually, as a warning to the faithful who might be confused by the new gospels, some of the early Church councils—like Rome in 382, Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397 (among others)—published official canon lists naming the specific books of Scripture that had been handed down as sacred from the time of the apostles.

Incidentally, the image is Matthew 23:3-15 from an Arabic New Testament. (Note also that it reads from right to left.)

Hope this helps!

Remember This Post 10 Years From Now

Lemaitre_University It may come in handy.

Here's why . . .

The gentleman on the left is Fr. Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, physicist, and astronomer who happens to be "the father of the Big Bang." He was one of the first to publish in support of the idea of an expanding cosmos that took its start in a highly compressed state that Lemaitre referred to as a "primeval atom."

Einstein at first dismissed Lemaitre's hypothesis, which radically departed from the intuitions of physicists and cosmologists back then. But then Edwin Hubble's work backed up Lemaitre and Einstein reversed himself.


So why am I writing about this?


Partly just because I like science but also because there is an apologetic issue here.


Ever since the Big Bang theory has become widely accepted, it has been easy for Christians to point to the event as the start of everything and the moment of God's creation. It could be taken as a scientific validation of one part of the Kalaam cosmological argument for God's existence and thus as evidence for the Creator.


And maybe it is.


But maybe it's not.


For a time there was an alternative hypothesis that had a great deal of currency in scientific circles that maybe we lived in a gravitationally closed universe that oscillated between Big Bangs and Big Crunches and that the event that happened 13.5 billion years ago was just one of the cusps in an endless series of them, so that there was no ultimate beginning.


That view's stock fell precipitously a few years ago with the discovery that the universe is not just expanding but that it's expansion is accellerating due to what is now called dark energy, which actually makes up three quarters of all the mass-energy in the universe. 


Because the universal rate of expansion is increasing, it does not appear that gravity can close our universe and cause a Big Crunch, without which one leg of the oscillation cycle wouldn't be there.


Since the discovery of dark energy, Christian apologists have felt on particularly safe ground pointing to the Big Bang as the plausible moment of creation.


And even in the decades before we knew about dark energy, the idea of the Big Bang had so permeated modern Christian thought that it became very easy to read Genesis 1 and identify the Big Bang with the moment that God said, "Fiat Lux"–"Let There Be Light."


Though that's not actually the way Genesis depicts the beginning. 


Here's the way Genesis 1:1-3 reads:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 
2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 
3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.

See what I mean?

Light gets created in verse 3, but we already have a darkened universe–complete with waters–in verse 2. Then, as part of making the world a suitable place for habitation, God turns on the lights and starts making other changes, until everything is ready for man.

Either way, we shouldn't be too quick to try to fit the Big Bang into the framework of Genesis 1. As I've written before, Genesis 1 is best taken not as a chronological account of God's work but as a topical organization of God's work that structures the different categories of what God did around the framework of a week.

I think that's what the ancient author meant the original audience to understand by the text, as a careful reading of it shows.

But if we shouldn't try to fit the Big Bang into Genesis 1, can we at least point to it as the moment of creation from a scientific point of view?

T
here has certainly been a strong inclination on the part of many to do so. Pius XII had such an inclination, which caused Lemaitre to have kittens, afraid that the pontiff would try to do too much theologically with the concept. (HERE and HERE.)

Hypothetically, we could identify the Big Bang as the moment of creation.

But hypotheses can have rival hypotheses, and we should try to test to see which hypotheses are more likely correct.

That's what the folks behind LISA are planning to do.

LISA–the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (INFO HERE)–is a set of satellites to be launched in the next decade or so. They will be placed in a massive triangular formation in space and connected by laser beams which will allow LISA to detect gravitational waves.

This will make LISA the largest gravitational wave detector in existence, powerful enough to detect events within a microscopically small fraction of a second after the Big Bang–far closer than we've been able to measure before.

Now here's the thing . . .

LISA is hypothetically able to find evidence that would allow scientists to distinguish between different pre-Big Bang cosmologies.

In other words, LISA may allow us to "look" beyond the Big Bang and "see" something there. For example, LISA might detect signs that the Big Bang occurred when two of the branes postulated by brane cosmology collided with each other. Or it might reveal evidence of a parallel universe that our universe budded off of.

Or it might reveal nothing of the kind, leaving the appearance that the Big Bang was, itself, Event One.

If the latter is the case then the apologetic use of the Big Bang will be strengthened, just like it was strengthened when dark energy was discovered, as competing hypotheses will be made less likely.

But the opposite could happen, too. The apologetic value of the Big Bang would be diminished if evidence emerges of a pre-Big Bang universe.

That's no threat to the Christian faith. The faith holds that God created the universe in the past but it does not require that the Big Bang represent the moment of creation. Christians held that there was a moment of creation for ages before the Big Bang emerged as a scientific hypothesis, and if it is later shown that the Big Bang was not the moment of creation then we can simply infer that the moment of creation was father back in time than that.

Christian faith is more than capable of surviving any such discovery.

However, in the short run it would shake some people up, just as it shook people up when modern paleontology and biology started to provide support for the theory of evolution.

It certainly helped, at that time, to point out that some authors had been writing about the compatibility of evolution and the Christian faith for quite a while. This wasn't a threat to the faith because it didn't contradict the faith.

The same thing is true for the idea that the Big Bang is not the moment of creation.

So remember this post ten or so years from now when LISA gets launched.

It may come in handy for someone you know.