Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
According to Romans 5:20, when “sin abounded, grace abounded all the more,” so, if we are in “the worst crisis of faith in the Church’s history,” as Cardinal Raymond Burke has observed, it follows that it must also be an unprecedented time of grace for those who open their hearts and minds to God. Indeed, it is “the best of times and the worst of times”: the “best of times” for those who love the Truth, and “the worst of times” for those who “exchange the truth for a lie.” And this principle holds true on every front in the war between the creation-based culture of life and the evolution-based anti-culture of death.
“Beauty Will Save the World”
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, the saying “Beauty will save the world” is attributed to the novel’s main character, Prince Myshkin. Although Prince Myshkin is not able to save his society from destruction by so-called Enlightenment-philosophy and evolution-based ideologies in the decades leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, his words are prophetic of the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Era of Peace that will take place after the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart. The young Catholics who publish the magazine Stock and Stone have just published the third issue of their magazine. It is a feast for the eyes, for the ears, and for the soul, offering us an oasis of beauty in the desert produced by the evolution-based anti-culture of death and deformity. I urge all of our readers to purchase a copy of their magazine at this link which includes a beautifully-illustrated article from the Kolbe Center in every issue. The outward beauty of the magazine expresses the interior beauty of the souls of the young Catholics who have rejected the modernist caricature of the Catholic Faith that has been offered to them by most Catholic schools and universities and who have rediscovered and embraced the Faith of our Fathers.
New Evidence for Dinosaur and Human Coexistence
The publishers of Stock and Stone belong to the same generation as my grandson, Owen Dominic McClain, shown here measuring a footprint in the Paluxy River bed where dinosaur and human footprints have been found in the same Cretaceous rocks. (See the article by Kolbe advisor Ademar Rakowsky at this link for more information). I have no doubt whatsoever that Owen’s ability to embrace and live the traditional Catholic Faith as a young adult has been greatly enhanced by his involvement with the work of the Kolbe Center since early childhood. One of the most exciting areas of research that Owen was able to be involved in from a very early age was the discovery of multiple lines of new evidence for dinosaur and human coexistence, especially through Carbon-14 dating of dinosaur bones and chemical analysis of soft tissue from dinosaur remains. In 2010, paleontologists from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology found a mosasaur fossil containing cartilage. In 2011, a group of Swedish researchers published their discovery of soft tissue in the bones of another mosasaur, allegedly 70 million years old. In 2014, another group of researchers found intact, flexible proteins in worm sheaths buried in rocks allegedly 551 million years old. The discovery of so many pieces of organic material in a remarkable state of preservation at every level of the so-called geological column strongly testifies to the rapid and recent burial of these plants and animals in the sedimentary deposits of a world-wide Flood.
In recent decades, significant amounts of C14 have been found in coal, in so-called fossil fuels and in dinosaur bones, strengthening the grounds for skepticism about the ages of tens of millions of years that have been assigned to them by the conventional geologic time scale. Dr. Thomas Seiler, Dr. Jean Pontcharra, Hugh Miller, and other members of the Kolbe Center’s advisory council have been able to benefit from the improvement of Carbon-14 dating made possible by the development of the accelerated mass spectrometer (AMS), a machine so accurate that it can actually count the number of Carbon-12 and Carbon-14 atoms in a sample! A paper by geophysicist John Baumgardner and his colleagues reported that coal samples from deposits assigned ages from 30 to 320 million years before the present contained C14 in roughly the same amounts, far above the detection limit, strongly suggesting that the plant material that forms the coal deposits all over the earth was laid down rapidly, thousands, not millions, of years ago. At the Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting in Singapore in August 2012, another team of researchers, led by physicist Thomas Seiler, presented their published results of C14 testing of 20 different fragments of dinosaur bones from Texas to Alaska, showing that all of the bones contained C14 in the same amounts as the bones of wolves and mammoths and other creatures that are known to have lived together with man less than ten thousand years ago. Taken together, all of these findings call into serious question the standard geological time scale and confirm the Biblical chronology of Earth history, as upheld by all of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church.
Bluff and Bluster
Catholics charged with teaching the truth about the origins of man and the universe ought to be sharing this information with their students, but too often they are intimidated by the bluff and bluster of atheistic and theistic evolutionists whose supercilious dismissal of the evidence bullies them into silence. It is high time that Catholics stopped allowing themselves to be bullied and acknowledged that the emperor of evolution is not wearing any clothes. If this were not true, we would expect the champions of atheistic and theistic evolution to offer a reasonable defense of their faith in long ages of evolution in response to the new scientific discoveries. Instead, we hear nothing but bluff and bluster from both camps. For example, when confronted with evidence that C-14 has repeatedly been found in dinosaur bones by world-class laboratories using accelerated mass spectrometry, one of the most popular God-hating evolutionists on the internet, P.Z. Myers, demonstrated a marvelous faith in evolutionary dogma and its mythical millions and billions of years. Heaping scorn on the AMS results, he told his disciples:
The age of the specimen [dinosaur bone] is not in question, and even if it were, carbon dating is so absurdly inappropriate and useless that only an ignorant clown would ask to do it . . . (quoted in Dr. Kevin Anderson, Echoes of the Jurassic (Chino Valley, AZ: Creation Research Society, 2016), p. 43).
Here we see that rather than commending other scientists for doing real empirical science to test the unproven assumptions of evolutionary dogma–or, alternatively, proposing replication of the test by another laboratory of his own choosing–Myers found it easier to dismiss them as “ignorant clowns” for even daring to put his evolutionary dogma to the test. He then went on:
It doesn’t matter what number would come out of the measurement, it would be spurious, irrelevant, and uninterpretable . . . except that C14 does have an upper bound of 50,000 years, whatever number reported would be less than that, which is exactly what the creationists are trusting would happen. They’d love to hold that yardstick up against the mile long object and triumphantly announce that it’s only 36 inches long (quoted in Dr. Kevin Anderson, Echoes of the Jurassic (Chino Valley, AZ: Creation Research Society, 2016), p. 43).
Unintimidated, microbiologist Dr. Kevin Anderson exposed the patent sophistry of Myers’ remarks:
Myers’ reasoning is very revealing and extremely flawed. Why would C-14 analysis be “absurdly inappropriate”? It is only inappropriate because it does not fit his assumptions. Since Myers knows that dinosaurs are millions of years old, he assumes that C-14 cannot be used to date these fossils-they are too old. If they are too old, they should be “carbon dead.”
However, they are not carbon dead. Why? Myers simply dismisses this question as absurd. How is the question absurd? It is not a matter of measuring a mile with a yardstick. This is a false analogy. If the mile fits within a yardstick, then either the length is not really a mile, or it is not really a yardstick.
C-14 is present in dinosaur fossils for a reason. Whether that reason is contamination, sample error, or original C-14, Myers must account for the source of this C-14. This he fails to do. The fact that there is C-14 remaining in these fossils is far easier for him to ignore than to explain (Dr. Kevin Anderson, Echoes of the Jurassic (Chino Valley, AZ: Creation Research Society, 2016), pp. 43-44).
Dr. Anderson goes on to explain why all of the explanations for the presence of C-14 in dinosaur bones-other than the straightforward interpretation that it is original C-14-do not hold up under scrutiny. But P.Z. Myers’ faith in evolutionary dogma is so boundless that he does not even deign to give his disciples an alternative explanation for the empirical evidence. It is important to understand that P.Z. Myers is a spiritually sick man who publicly desecrated a Sacred Host a few years ago. To my knowledge, he has never repented of his sacrilege. I do not expose his atheistic sophistry now to foment hatred against him, but to show that he is a bully who must not be allowed to silence those who defend and proclaim the truth. Rather, let us proclaim the whole truth of the Catholic Faith ever more boldly, especially the fundamental doctrine of creation, offering up the abuse that we suffer for the conversion of sinners, like poor P.Z. Myers. Please join me in praying at least one Memorare for his conversion.
Desperate Attempts to Dismiss New Discoveries
One would think that theistic evolutionists and progressive creationists who profess to believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ and in Sacred Scripture would be more willing to fairly examine the powerful new evidence for dinosaur and human co-existence and a global Flood. But, sadly, that is not the case. One of the leading progressive creationist websites was almost as dismissive of the new evidence for dinosaur and human co-existence as atheist P. Z. Myers. Faced with the discovery of collagen and intact proteins in dinosaur bones conventionally dated at 68 million years old, Fuzz Rana and Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe wrote the following in regard to the discovery of soft tissue in the horn of a Triceratops:
collagen (or at least fragments of it) could survive 68 million years in an environment devoid of water, oxygen, and microbes given its structure (F. Rana, article on reasons.org website, August 10, 2011) . . . If a sample is isolated from any exposure to bacteria and oxygen, then the soft tissue evidence easily can be preserved for over a hundred million years. Tissue inside a tooth or a horn, where the tooth or horn is quickly buried by mud or volcanic ash, will be effectively cut off from bacteria and oxygen (H. Ross., article on reasons.org website, March 2, 2015) (quoted in Dr. Kevin Anderson, Echoes of the Jurassic (Chino Valley, AZ: Creation Research Society, 2016), p. 29).
As Dr. Kevin Anderson points out in Echoes of the Jurassic, this is a “simplistic view” which:
fails to provide any substantive answer [to the question of how soft tissue could be preserved for 68 million years]. Moreover, the horn was found buried only 30 cm (12″) from the rock surface. At this shallow depth, the horn would have been exposed to the extreme temperature fluctuations of the Montana location. Such temperature changes accelerate (not preserve) tissue degradation.
Since all rocks are porous to some degree, fossils may potentially be exposed to rainwater infiltration and percolating shallow groundwater. Microbes and dissolved oxygen can be introduced to buried fossils by this water. When we removed the Triceratops horn, the lower half was damp from the pooling of infiltrating rainwater. Also, the base of the horn was partially exposed; allowing frequent and easy penetration of rainwater and mud.
In fact, after excavating the horn, I noticed [that] some of the larger pieces were rather wet and muddy. I turn[ed] to my colleague Mark Armitage and questioned if there was any possibility that tissue could still be present (and I did not even consider the horn millions of years old). Yet the horn did have significant amounts of soft, pliable tissue. It is inconceivable to me that a horn in such poor condition could still retain tissue and such well preserved bone cells . . . for more than just a few thousand years, let [alone] for over 65 million years (quoted in Dr. Kevin Anderson, Echoes of the Jurassic (Chino Valley, AZ: Creation Research Society, 2016), p. 29).
Dr. Anderson goes on to expose the absurdity of Rana and Ross’s supercilious dismissal of the most straightforward interpretation of the evidence that the dinosaur horn was, at most, thousands, and not millions of years old:
I am not aware of the existence of sterile mud and definitely not of sterile rainwater. Most fossils, and certainly the Triceratops horn, were not “cut off from bacteria.” In fact, bacteria and other microorganisms permeate deep into rock formations, and are even found actively metabolizing at depths of thousands of feet. Thus, the Triceratops horn and other tissue-containing fossils were not buried in sterile, bacteria-free environments. Rather, they would have been exposed to numerous types of microorganisms. This is hardly a suitable environment for extensive tissue preservation . . .Even the absence of oxygen does not assure the absence of microbial activity. As already mentioned, many anaerobic microorganisms can degrade complex biological molecules, such as proteins, lipids, and polysaccharides. Tissue contains high amounts of these biomolecules, making it very vulnerable to the degradative activity of bacteria and other microbes . . . What research supports RTB’s dismissive conclusion? There is no basis to claim that preservation for 100 million years is “easy.” Neither is there a basis to claim that all tissue-containing fossils were dry, sterile environments. This response literally appears to be just “making it up” (Dr. Kevin Anderson, Echoes of the Jurassic (Chino Valley, AZ: Creation Research Society, 2016), pp. 31-32).
I have taken the time to quote extensively from the late Dr. Anderson’s book because I agree with geologist Dr. Tim Clarey that Echoes of the Jurassic remains “the best book to date on the dinosaur soft tissue discoveries.” I encourage as many Kolbe members as possible to obtain the small, readable book, learn the essential contents, and use them to defend the sacred history of Genesis and to refute the long ages of evolutionary mythology.
Day Three of “How the World Was Made in Six Days”
We know that many of our readers have been praying faithfully for the successful completion of Day Three in our DVD series “How the World Was Made in Six Days.” I am delighted to inform you that by the grace of God, through the prayers of Our Lady of Fatima and through your prayers, the trailer for Day Three can now be viewed at this link and the streaming version of “Day Three” and pre-order of DVDs should be available on Wednesday, February 11, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Novena to the Holy Face
Tomorrow the Novena to the Holy Face begins. We have explained in previous newsletters how the Devotion to the Holy Face provides an antidote to the diabolical deception of human evolution and a powerful way to make reparation the sins and offenses that have resulted from the abandonment of the true Catholic doctrine of creation. Please join us in praying the Novena to the Holy Face at this link.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata, in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
P.S. Today is a First Saturday. Please be sure to answer Our Lady’s appeal for the First Saturday devotions as described by the Fatima Center at this link.
P.P.S. One of the leading promoters of Devotion to the Holy Face, Fr. Lawrence Carney, will also serve as chaplain for the Kolbe Center’s annual leadership retreat from July 3-9 at the Catholic Conference Center in Hickory, North Carolina. For more information and to register, please contact Hugh Owen at howen@shentel.net.
