Wouldn't that have been a very important and pertinent thing to note in his 700 page book intended to disprove the Flat Earth? Hm...
When was the last time Sungenis espoused lunar landing denial publicly?
If he does believe it he certainly managed to never tell me so in any of his docuмentaries, books, videos and articles I've read from him.
Is that just a coincidence or does he crave that all-important scientific respectability?
So his book portrays FEs as some conspiratorial loons but he neglects to mention he doesn't believe in the moon landing? GIVE ME A BREAK!
Thanks for your inquiry ServusInutilisDomini.
If you would take a look at Sungenis' relatively recent book Scientific Heresies and Their Effect on the Church (
https://www.kolbecenter.org/product/scientific-heresies-and-their-effect-on-the-church-e-book-pdf/) you would clearly realize that Sungenis has not made any sort of peace with the moneyed corrupt scientific establishment. Just the opposite!
Sungenis has been at war with the $/scientific establishment (and not just on the geocentrism issue) long before CathInfo came into existence. He has consistently called them out and he called them out in a major way in his huge
Galileo Was Wrong -- The Church Was Right book in which he clearly demonstrated for example that the numero uno iconic god of modern science the Jew Albert Einstein was a major fraud/plagiarizer, serial adulterer, wife abuser and one who abandoned his out of wedlock daughter since infancy. He went on to describe how the scientific establishment has been notoriously compromised in countless ways both on a personal level and on an institutional level.
Sungenis has personally made himself easily accessible to the public who wish to question him on things. It's a real shame that his detractors on CathInfo do not take advantage of this opportunity to air their grievances, differences, and questions with him personally. He has a great track record of not shying away from difficult/inconvenient questions, but don't take my word for it inquire of him yourself.
I guarantee you that Sungenis does not in your words, "crave that all-important scientific respectability." One who apparently did crave it was Karl Keating to whom Sungenis wrote the following letter, after which Keating eventually went on an all out sustained rampage against Sungenis for Sungenis supposed great error of promoting geocentrism.
Dear Editor,
Re
This Rock 7-8 2003:
Fr. Stravinskas is a real stand-up guy, as he lets the real Vatican II stand up to view, shattering myths of interpretation by both Catholic left and right wings. Bravo, Fr. Peter; you are aptly named, an apologetic rock.
Contrarily and sadly, Karl Keating takes a severe doctrinal left turn in the following article as he escorts us on an emotional trip through the Grand Canyon. The majestic view and minuscule evidence of erosion seen now justify a quantum leap off the rim of sound theology and science into a logical chasm. With a touch of New Age affectation, the modernist mantra of an old Earth is embraced: the secular dogma of uniformitarianism, a mouthful that implies “the present is always the key to the past.”
Mr. Keating is apparently unaware of a new breed of creation apologists, like those at the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation at
www.kolbecenter.org, who have rediscovered the creation truth where it always was, in the Magisterial view of Revelation, before the waves of modernism inundated Catholic thought. The charge of irrational “fundamentalism” leveled against some “Young Earth” Catholics is not applicable to these Leonine defenders of the Catholic doctrine of creation. Indeed, the charge has been heard before and answered on Kolbe’s website.
The defenders of creation have independent and compelling arguments for special creation from Revelation—the real alternative to Darwinism, not theistic evolution—and for a young Earth from objective natural science, with no need to link the two in rejecting evolution and the old earth. Their belief in a young earth flows from a literal reading of Genesis according to the exegetical principles of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical
Providentissimus Deus, reinforced by the overwhelming majority of the Fathers of the Church, whose interpretations informed the orthodox Magisterial view for 1900 years. This view is now apparently all wrong—an about-face that has sowed seeds of doubt in the Catholic community as to what other errors the Rock of Peter may have endorsed in the past. For example, the Scriptural revisionists say that the Hebrew word
yom, thought by the faithful for millennia to mean
day, has been corrected by today's science speculations to mean
eon. Yet in
Arcanum 5 Pope Leo XIII said:
We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth....
Poor Pope Leo lived in the pre-modern era and didn't know that the orthodox belief of the Church on literal interpretation of the Genesis “day” would be revised by Biblical critics and by well-meaning but misguided Catholic apologists. He only had the Spirit to guide him.
Young earth scientists avoid misinterpretation of the fossil record evidence of the Great Flood and false dating of rocks by rejecting the metaphysical premise of science modernists: immutable physical laws static forever, without exception. Defenders of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation reject evolution as totally alien to Revelation and the nature of man, implying the existence of original sin, death and decay before the Fall. The defenders of creation reject evolution by positive mutations as unproved myths, for which a specific process capable of testing has not even been proposed. Darwinism has all the value of yesterday's newspaper, its specific predictions to date: Zero. Support of evolution is a house built on sand, not one founded on rock—the rock of faith in Genesis, endorsed by the rock of ages.
Why fret that the young earth position will bring the Church into disrepute, when every day brings news of more clerical sex scandals, triggered by rejection of orthodox doctrines like biblical inerrancy? Why not anguish instead over misguided apologetics that chooses the speculation of materialists over common sense and the Word of God? We have no fear of the world's disdain; the Lord foretold that we would be mocked in His name, even as He was.
The true history of the Grand Canyon cannot be uncovered by observing present-day natural processes. Indeed, a recent geological event highlights the danger of an uncritical faith in uniformitarianism. We invite the author to go 800 miles northwest to Mt. St. Helens and reflect on the “Little Grand Canyon,” 100 feet deep, lined with multiple strata, a small version of the Grand Canyon only 2% of its size. Imagine that
this canyon was formed over millions of years by a trickle of water slowly slicing through the sediments. Then let reality set in: The canyon was formed in a few months by a huge mudslide after the eruption, followed by water flowing from the melting snowcap runoff. The strata layers in the mud were exposed in less than a day! Pick up a rock from the lava domes that formed there. Then realize that modernist claims to prove terrestrial ages in gigαyears by radiodating rocks were made to look quite foolish when geology labs dated these very lava rocks from the mountain as having been formed up to 3 million years ago! These rocks were undeniably formed 20 years ago... Yet wasn't the author concerned that “young earth” Catholics would bring the Church into disrepute?
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2/4305news5-17-2000.asp http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/magazines/docs/v23n3_radio_dating_rubble.asp Rather than conjuring up the irenic reflections described in the article, an orthodox believer in the patristic understanding of Genesis would wonder at the power of the global deluge recorded before his eyes in the walls of the Grand Canyon. He would tremble in awe at the visible proof of the Father's wrath at sinful mankind and at the power of His mighty hand, unleashed in Noah's Flood, gouging out this awesome scar using only the first matter of creation—water!
Incorporating evolutionary propaganda with “visceral” apologetics—completely divorced from objective faith and reason—can only produce an ineffective type of apologetics—an inevitable harbinger of future apologies.
What do Andy Warhol and Karl Keating have in Common? In the July/August 2003 issue of
This Rock, founder and president of
Catholic Answers, Karl Keating, says that advocates of a young earth (i.e., an earth 10,000 years old, or less) are akin to those who “garner for themselves Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame.”
1 As Mr. Keating opens his piece, besides his pejorative use of a quotation from Andy Warhol, he sprinkles his introductory paragraphs with caustic words such as “fundamentalist,” “eccentricity,” “new baggage,” and other such verbiage. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that Mr. Keating is hardly qualified to draw the grandiose conclusions he reaches in his article. He has little or no science background or training, and he doesn’t advertise a theological degree.
Mr. Keating admits in his August 12 “e-letter” that because of his expose on the age of the earth “some of
This Rock’s readers of the article threw up their hands and declared that Keating has sided with atheists and secularists and has gone over into the evolutionist camp.” Although Keating never denies that he is in the evolutionist’s camp, he tries to diffuse the complaints by contending that, even if evolution was not correct, “we still don’t need to believe in a young earth.” By shifting the burden away from evolution to the age of the earth, Keating thinks he can save face in front of his nervous audience, but at the same time, he creates enough doubt about a literal interpretation of Genesis that his reader finds himself the victim of a clever shell game.
Interestingly enough,
This Rock magazine has made a trademark for itself in the last 20 years with a feature entitled “The Fathers Know Best.” In this feature, Mr. Keating shows that when the Fathers were presented with passages of Scripture that non-Catholics insisted on turning into symbols they doggedly adhered to the literal interpretation, no matter how absurd it appeared to their critics. For example, Catholics have been ridiculed for centuries for adhering to literal interpretations of such passages as Matthew 26:26 (“This is my body”), or others such as John 3:5 (“unless you are born of water and the Spirit”) or John 20:23 (“whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven”). Despite the criticism, for 2,000 years the Catholic Church has never changed her belief about those passages. Why? Because that’s what was handed down to her by the unanimous consent of the Fathers of the Church. When it comes to the earth’s origins, however, suddenly Mr. Keating gets cold feet. Even though ALL of the Fathers believed in a young earth, and none of them espoused a theory of evolution, Mr. Keating feels not the slightest compunction in dismissing their testimony.
Moreover, rather than admit to his audience that he is rejecting the Fathers’ testimony on the origins question, Mr. Keating forces another shell game on his readers. He puts the blame for belief in a young earth on Anglican bishop James Ussher who, according to Mr. Keating, “tallied the ages of the people names in Genesis...and worked backward from known dates in ancient history.” Thus, Mr. Keating makes it appear as if this is all a Protestant invention. From the carefully selected information in his article, his readers would never know it was the Fathers of the Catholic Church who, after the ancient Jews, were the very ones who adopted the literal reading of the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11, fifteen hundred years before Ussher was born (1581-1656).
The Fathers Against the Greek Evolutionists: Not only did the Fathers not opt for an old earth or espouse evolution, they were in direct opposition to the Greek philosophers and academicians who, as
Washington Times book reviewer Charles Russeaux states, (commenting on Jack Repcheck’s new book on dating the earth):
Seeing seashells on Malta’s mountains led Xenophanes to formulate his ideas of geological change in the earth fifth century BC and earned him the title “Father of geology and paleontology.” About 600 years before Christ, Anaximander theorized that humans evolved from fish.
2 Hence, long before Darwin, the Greeks had been espousing the theory of evolution for quite a while. Seeing these kinds of teachings among the Greeks, the Fathers wasted no time in denouncing them.
3 The best critic of the Greek evolutionary ideas was St. Basil of Caesarea. He writes concerning the Greeks:
Some had recourse to material principles and attributed the origin of the Universe to the elements of the world. Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules...by their union formed the nature of the visible world. Atoms reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths and the most durable bodies owing their consistency to the strength of their mutual adhesion...Deceived by their inherent atheism it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that all was given up to chance.
4 Having similar experiences with the Greek scientists, Hippolytus of Rome (d. 235), writes:
But Leucippus, an associate of Zeno...affirms things to be infinite, and always in motion, and that generation and change exist continuously....And he asserts that worlds are produced when many bodies are congregated and flow together from the surrounding space to a common point, so that by mutual contact they made substances of the same figure and similar in form come into connection; and when thus intertwined, there are transmutations into other bodies, and that created things wax and wane through necessity...”
5 Thus St. Basil concludes: The philosophers of Greece have made much ado to explain nature, and not one of their systems has remained firm and unshaken, each being overturned by its successor. It is vain to refute them; they are sufficient in themselves to destroy one another.
6Hence, in this instance, Mr. Keating keeps intellectual company not with the Fathers, but with the Greeks whose ideas were condemned by the Fathers. In any case, since Mr. Keating is offering a new twist in the Creation/Evolution debate, that is, that “one does not need to posit a young earth to argue against evolution,” he insists that:
If evolution could not have occurred over the last 6,000 years, is there some dynamic that insists it likely would have occurred if the time in question were 60,000 years or six million years or six billion years? Even if one works from the position that evolution is a false theory, there is no evident reason to plump for the young earth hypothesis.
What Mr. Keating casually dismisses, of course, is that for the last 1900 years Catholics have used the testimony of Scripture as the basis for why they believe the earth is a few thousand years old, and most of them did so without any recourse to the theory of evolution. They simply believed Scripture’s testimony as it was handed down by the Fathers and medievals. But dependence on Scripture and patristics doesn’t seem to be in Mr. Keating’s repertoire. Jaded as he is by the modernist hermeneutic and theoretical science, Mr. Keating’s “Bible” has become the Grand Canyon – or at least, HIS interpretation of the Grand Canyon.
Keating’s Trip to the Grand Canyon:We find that Mr. Keating’s whole tirade against “fundamentalists” and “Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame” seekers is centered on one trip he recently took to the Grand Canyon. He writes:
In the part of the Grand Canyon where I was, the drop from the rim to the river was 4,600 feet, or 55,200 inches. If one inch were lost per century, it would have taken 5,520,000 years to form the Grand Canyon. (This is within an order of magnitude of the figure geologists give. For my purposes here, this rough approximation is sufficient). Now consider advocates of a young earth. They claim the earth is only 6,000 years old. If so, for the Grand Canyon to be as deep as it is, it would have to have been worn away not at one inch per century but at 920 inches per century.
Later in another paragraph he elaborates:
Lying in my sleeping bag, staring up at the Redwall, contemplating the massiveness and solidity of it all, I knew viscerally that what I saw was not formed recently. It could not have been. I did not have to engage in the thought experiment to realize that, of course. The hike from rim to river and back again contained its own internal testimony. Anyone with open eyes and aching feet had a proof that was strong even if not syllogistic. I had no need to know with exactitude how old the earth is, but the rocky halls about me testified that it is far older than 6,000 years – or even a hundred times that.
Although Mr. Keating tries to distance himself from evolutionists, nevertheless, he must adopt their arguments on the formation of the Grand Canyon, for that is all he has to depend on. Consequently, Keating will find himself in line with the theory of James Hutton (d. 1797) and Charles Lyell (d. 1875) who postulated that the rate of erosion and sedimentation in past time was the same as it is today. Otherwise known as “uniformitarianism,” it is the belief that since the beginning of earth’s existence, all natural processes have remained relatively constant and unchanged. The opposing view is catastrophism, which is held by many biblical scientists. (Even a few secular scientists have adopted at least portions of it).
7 It is their view that grand edifices such as the Grand Canyon were formed by sudden and cataclysmic disruptions in the earth’s normal processes. The most likely of these cataclysms is the world-wide deluge recorded in Genesis 7-9, which according to the Genesis genealogy, happened between 4500-7000 years ago, and which formed its characteristic rock structures in a matter of days or weeks.
Assuming, as they did, that uniformitarianism was correct, Hutton and Lyell calculated the age of various strata around the world from known rates of sedimentary deposition. There was one problem, however. Their calculations were hypothetical, since all the differing stages of strata deposits that they assumed as evidence for their theory
were never found together in one geological formation. Deciding to ignore this anomaly, evolutionists proceeded to date rock strata based on the principle of superposition, that is, that lower strata were older than higher strata, even though they had no proof that this was correct.
The upshot? If uniformitarianism is wrong, then Mr. Keating’s dependence on long periods of erosion to explain the formation of the Grand Canyon is wrong. Since there is no proof for uniformitarianism, then, as much as Mr. Keating wants to distance himself from evolutionists, he still sinks with their ship. We will see how this develops as we examine the rest of Mr. Keating’s article.
How Was the Tonto Group Formed?Later in his article Mr. Keating describes his visit to the Tonto Platform of the Grand Canyon. He writes:
Other layers are made of debris or sharply eroded, softer rock and are caned at about 45 degrees. The Tonto Platform, about a thousand feet above the river, is the closest one comes to the horizontal, but it undulates constantly and is never truly level...At an elevation of about 3,000 feet, the scrub-covered Tonto Platform – which is nowhere really level – allows one to traverse the Grand Canyon more or less horizontally. The Tonto Trail...runs for about 92 miles.
For the record, evolutionists believe that the Tonto edifice of the Grand Canyon was formed during the 70-million year Cambrian period, since it contains many fossils associated with the “Cambrian explosion.” But again, this is all based on the unproven and anomalous theory of uniformitarianism. Evolutionists have found no fossils before or after the Cambrian period, and the fossils in the Cambrian period appear without any evidence of preexisting ancestral forms.
The Work of Johannes Walther: Other secular scientists have proposed a different scenario. A few years after the work of Hutton and Lyell came the geological studies performed by Johannes Walther in the latter nineteenth century. Walther began his studies by examining sedimentary deposits that stretched from land to ocean. To test a hypothesis, Walther drilled out a vertical cylinder of sediment midway in the advancement. He found that the various layers in the cylinder were in the same order as the leading edge of the advancement into the ocean. From this evidence he reasoned that the layers were being laid horizontally (not vertically, as Hutton and Lyell had proposed).
Walther performed the same testing in the bay of Naples. He found that after drilling out a vertical column of sediment, it revealed the same sequence of layers as the sediments lying horizontally. He concluded that Hutton and Lyell’s theory (i.e., that layers on the top were forming later than the layers on the bottom) was wrong. After Walther, however, little experimentation was done to exploit his discovery.
In 1965, however, the American geologist Edwin McKee found evidence of Walther’s horizontal sedimentation in one of the branches of the Colorado River after it overflowed its banks from a torrential rain. The stratified layers reached a thickness of twelve feet in only forty-eight hours, and showed the same particle sorting and bedding planes as in all other sites previously investigated by Hutton and Lyell. Hutton and Lyell would have had to interpret McKee’s evidence as interruptions in sedimentation wherein one stratum would have hardened before the next layer was placed on top, but, of course, this type of hardening would be impossible within the space of forty-eight hours.
Horizontal sedimentation was also confirmed by experimental evidence from coastal marine floods. In the 1970's and 1980's several teams of scientists bored vertical columns in the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. To their amazement, they found that their samples confirmed Walther’s theory. Thus, not only were layers of sediment being laid horizontally in bays and beaches, but also in the deep sea. Germane to our topic is the fact that the same tests were performed on the Grand Canyon, and with the same results–the deposits showed evidence of having been laid down horizontally, not vertically.
With this evidence in hand, various other scientists set out to confirm or deny this intriguing phenomenon. In the 1994 publication,
Grand Canyon: A Monument to Catastrophe, geologist Stephen Austin offers an explanation by citing the work of sedimentologist D. M. Rubin on the relation between hydraulic conditions and stratified structures in San Francisco Bay, which Rubin had originally published in
Sedimentary Geology. Rubin found that with a certain speed of current, depth of water, and size of sedimentary particles, a specific sequence of layers was formed. Austin also refers to Jay Sufford’s work in
Sedimentary Petrology, which summarized a series of thirty-nine flume experiments on the relations between hydraulics and stratification, and which found the same results as Rubin.
8 To his amazement, Austin discovered the same sequential depositing of layers in the sedimentary rocks of the Grand Canyon as those in Rubin’s experiments. One of these was the 800 kilometer sample of the Grand Canyon, which Keating recognized as the Tonto Platform. It comprises three layers which extend east to west. The upper layer is made of limestone; the middle layer of clay; and the lower layer of sandstone. As predicted by Walther, the same sequence of layers is found side-by-side as those found from top to bottom.
From this evidence, Austin determined the hydraulic conditions which would have been necessary to form the horizontal layers observed in the Tonto Group. Austin found that a velocity of water moving at two meters per second, and causing the water to rise nearly 2,000 meters above the ocean level, would have been sufficient. He further found that all this could happen within a matter of two days (not millions of years). Not surprisingly, the velocity of the water needed to build the Tonto Group corresponded precisely with the velocities discovered in the thirty-nine flume experiments performed by Jay Sufford.
How Was the Grand Canyon Formed? Thus, sedimentation normally occurs as follows. Advancing water travels at differing velocities. Heavier or coarser particles deposit before lighter particles in a fast-moving current. As the water level increases, the speed of the current decreases, and at that point the sediments deposited are proportionately finer,
yet all of the particles would be deposited at or near the same time, resulting in the sandstone-clay-limestone sequence we see in the Grand Canyon. During the point at which the river or ocean arrived at its maximum level there would be little or no current. The finest particles would deposit at a rate of about 2 centimeters per day. (This, of course, shows that superposition does, indeed, occur, but not over millions of years). This process would be interrupted when, as the waters began to subside, the current reappeared.
The curious feature about the layers in the Grand Canyon, and all other sedimentary depositions, is that the layers are almost perfectly bordered against one another. That is, you see a few vertical feet of limestone layer with hardly any variation in the width of the layer extending for hundreds of feet. The next layer of clay, or sandstone, is just as perfect. That doesn’t happen very easily with vertical sedimentation dependent on the bottom layer hardening before the top layer is added. Conversely, it occurs quite easily in horizontal sedimentation.
Moreover, it is quite unlikely that erosion over millions of years could have produced what we see in the Grand Canyon, for erosion is not locale specific. It erodes all that it touches uniformly without distinction. Cataclysms, on the other hand, are locale specific, as well as possessing the tremendous forces necessary to make dramatic changes in the landscape (as we see in the Grand Canyon), and they do their damage in a matter of days or weeks, not millions of years.
As for the huge gorges in the Grand Canyon, they would have been formed as the water from the cataclysm began to recede. As it recedes, it creates velocities of current that are sufficient to cut deep gorges into the lightly-packed sediments deposited during initial stratification. This does not happen today on a similar scale because the sediments, over thousands of years, have become hardened, and thus relatively resistant to effacing.
I say “relatively resistant” to effacing, because not too long ago we had even more proof that gorges the size of those in the Grand Canyon can be formed in a very short time. In 1980, Mt. St. Helens erupted. The most remarkable things have happened in the years following the eruption. In the May 2000 issue of
National Geographic, geological scientist Peter Frenzen writes concerning a canyon cut by the water flow created by the eruption: “You’d expect a hard rock canyon to be thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old, but this was cut in less than a decade.” Not only were the geologists shocked, but ecologists were just as surprised. Ecologist David Wood writes: “All of us were surprised at the rate at which this landscape was colonized again. We were thinking, Gosh, how long is it going to be before anything come back here?” The rest of the article answers the question: “Within just a few years scientists found flora and fauna pioneering in the niches created by the eruption’s various geological disturbances.”
9 In conclusion, apparently unknown to Mr. Keating, there is abundant experimental evidence to suggest that the Grand Canyon was made in a matter of weeks or a few years, and not over millions of years. Conversely, since the stratification theory used by evolutionists has never been proven experimentally, only assumed, they can raise few legitimate objections to these findings. As a result, their whole theory of the geologic column, including the multi-millions of years separating the Cambrian from such periods as the Jurassic or Pleistocene, will have to be discarded until they can provide experimental results to support their geological speculations.
10 In the meantime, I wish to thank Mr. Keating for allowing me to make this evidence available to the public.
Robert A. Sungenis, M.A. Catholic Apologetics International
******************************************************************************************************
Sungenis on NASA's connection to Faked Moon Landing via this video on his site:
https://www.geocentrismdebunked.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/CAI-Stanley-Kubrick-and-Moon-Landings.jpgSungenis on NASA's connection to UFOs and Crop Circles:
https://www.geocentrismdebunked.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Sungenis-on-UFOs-and-Crop-Circles.png
Topic: Answering the Flat Earthers - Robert Sungenis Live | Wed, Oct. 19 2022 (Read 15918 times)