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This paper is written in two parts. The first explains and documents the Roman Catholic Church's position on justification. The second part presents the true gospel in contrast to the Catholic Church's position. If you want to go straight to the gospel presentation for Catholics, simply scroll down the page. Because of the great emphasis on Sacred Tradition within the Catholic Church and because so many Roman Catholics appeal to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, the Word of God is often placed after the Catholic Church itself in relation to authority. Because of this, many Catholics appeal to...

If we are to believe the wisdom received by early medieval (southern) European scholars, the northernmost parts of the continent prior and after the fall of the Roman Empire was not only cold, barbaric and uninviting. It also was inferior. Pretty much like people of today not having visited Scandinavia and Finland would describe it. In fact, certain Romans and Arabs did actually pay visits to frozen, godforsaken "Thule". What did they meet with? Although they were not all that impressed with certain aspects of Nordic culture, like eating habits, they understood the Vikings had developed forging, warrior code and...

Monsignor John Scully died Friday while consecrating the bread and wine at an 8 a.m. Mass at St. Stephen Catholic Church. He had been a priest for 62 years. "It was precisely how he wished to go and would have scripted it had we any power over the time of our death," Bishop Robert Lynch wrote on his blog. Scully, 86, was a priest in residence at the Valrico church. He was born and raised in Boston, and will be buried there next to his parents, Lynch said. Scully did many things during his decades as a priest in Florida....

God didn't create the universe, Stephen Hawking says in his latest book, "A Grand Design." Rather, the renowned physicist writes, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing." Everything – created from nothing? The assertion begged a reply from the author of "Nothing Created Everything: The Scientific Impossibility of Atheistic Evolution." "It is embarrassingly unscientific to speak of anything creating itself from nothing," said Ray Comfort, a best-selling author and acclaimed minister who's confronted and confounded some of the world's most accomplished atheists. "Common sense says that if something possessed the...

A handful of prominent evangelical activists are defending their decision to attend television host Glenn Beck's conservative rally in Washington this weekend after some Christians complained that evangelicals shouldn't be partnering with Beck because of his Mormon faith. "There is no need to 'de-Christianize' each other over the matter," wrote Jim Garlow, an influential California pastor, in a five-page memo this week arguing that evangelicals can attend Beck's rally and partner with the television and radio personality in good conscience. "Glenn Beck is being used by God - mightily," Garlow wrote in the memo, which was obtained by CNN. "The...

According to the tradition, Imam Ali Ibn Abi-Talib (the prophet's cousin and son-in-law) prophesied that at the End of Times and just before the return of the Mahdi, the Ultimate Saviour, a "tall black man will assume the reins of government in the West." Commanding "the strongest army on earth," the new ruler in the West will carry "a clear sign" from the third imam, whose name was Hussein Ibn Ali. The tradition concludes: "Shiites should have no doubt that he is with us." In a curious coincidence Obama's first and second names--Barack Hussein--mean "the blessing of Hussein" in Arabic...

Just read The World Turned Upside: The Global Battle Over God, Truth, And Power by the British agnostic, Melanie Phillips. Inside you’ll discover a collection of wonderful quotes, from David Horowitz to Peter Staudenmaier, and other words of encouragement, for the friends of free speech. Most courageously though, Phillips supports the position that Christianity and science are more than friends. As Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas believed, God’s universe was supremely rational (p.327): This is why many scientists from the earliest times onwards have been Christians and Jews. It is why Francis Bacon said that God had provided us...

Fresh tissues continue to be found in supposedly millions-of-years-old fossils. These un-replaced, un-mineralized, still-soft tissues come from animals or plants that were preserved by some catastrophic event.1 Each specimen looks young, and a direct inference is that its host rock must also be dated as thousands, not millions, of years old. And the fresher the meat, the more ridiculous are the evolution-inspired claims of great antiquity for the rock in which it was discovered. These tissue finds are typically accompanied, in either the technical literature or science news, by the phrase "remarkable preservation." If one is to believe in the...

In recent decades, soft, squishy tissues have been discovered inside fossilized dinosaur bones. They seem so fresh that it appears as though the bodies were buried only a few thousand years ago. Since many think of a fossil as having had the original bone material replaced by minerals, the presence of actual bone--let alone pliable blood vessels, red blood cells, and proteins inside the bone--is quite extraordinary. These finds also present a dilemma. Given the fact that organic materials like blood vessels and blood cells rot, and the rates at which certain proteins decay, how could these soft tissues have...

In the summer of 2002, record rainfall in the Texas Hill Country overfilled Canyon Lake. Water coursed over the top of its dam and carved huge, steep-walled canyons through the limestone bedrock downstream. The scoured riverbed, now called Canyon Lake Gorge, is over a mile long and has been cordoned off for scientific study. After studying the area for the last eight years, scientists are now making the same kinds of conclusions about rapid, catastrophic processes having sculpted the earth that creation geologists have been teaching for decades. In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, geologists Michael Lamb and Mark...

First Draft of the Neandertal Genome Sequence Released by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D.* The highly anticipated initial draft assembly of the Neandertal genome was announced at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the United States and at a European press conference.1 This genomic milestone involves approximately 3 billion bases of ancient human (Neandertal) DNA sequenced so far, which is the same amount of DNA contained in one set of human chromosomes or a single genome coverage. This is a major event in the booming scientific field referred to as “paleogenomics,” a discipline that...

A recent high-profile article in the journal Nature released the results of a study with implications that shocked the scientific community because they contradict long-held claims of human-chimp DNA similarity.1 A previous Acts & Facts article showed that much of the research surrounding the often touted claims of 98 percent (or higher) DNA similarity between chimps and humans has been based on flawed and biased research.2 The problem is that the similarity has been uncertain because no one has performed an unbiased and comprehensive DNA similarity study until now. And the results are not good news for the story of...

Rock-solid proof? July 28, 2008 09:49 am — By David May editor@mineralwellsindex.com A slab of North Texas limestone is on track to rock the world, with its two imbedded footprints poised to make a huge impression in scientific and religious circles. The estimated 140-pound stone was recovered in July 2000 from the bank of a creek that feeds the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, located about 53 miles south of Fort Worth. The find was made just outside Dinosaur Valley State Park, a popular destination for tourists known for its well-preserved dinosaur tracks and other fossils. The limestone contains...

“The wicked flee when no one pursues them, but the Righteous are bold as a lion”Prov 28:1 Islam is an extremely sensitive religion. The Ummah cannot stand anything that even remotely smacks of criticism. It flies into a rage when cartoons are printed mocking their “prophet”. People have been killed because of false rumors spread about prison guards handling Korans insensitively. The West is lectured constantly about the need to be sensitive, in spite of the fact that Western societies have bent over backwards to show ‘tolerance’ and sensitivity to our psychologically fragile Muslim guests. Why the extreme touchiness? I...

Even though the Bible was completed 2,000 years ago, long before the invention of the microscope, the telescope, satellites, etc. it does not contain any scientific errors. This might be considered a miracle in itself. Without exception, every ancient religious writing has certain unscientific views of astronomy, medicine, hygiene, etc. The Qur’an says in Surah 18:86 that the sun sets in a muddy spring. Qur’an 18:86 “…when he reached the setting-place of the sun, he found it setting in a muddy spring” The only exception to these kinds of errors, among ancient religious writings, is the Bible. Not only is...

Introduction The famous evolutionist Julian Huxley once said, "Any view of God as a personal being is becoming frankly untenable. The difficulty of understanding the functions of a personal ruler in a universe which the march of knowledge is showing us ever more clearly as self-ordered and self-ordering in every minutest detail is becoming more and more apparent" (Essays of a Biologist [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923], p. 217). His sentiments were echoed by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell: "That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin,...

Canada’s Macleans news site recently published an article titled “Darwin movie too evolved for U.S. audiences”. The article refers to the decision of US film distributors to “pass” on the film “Creation”—the dramatized story of Charles Darwin’s struggle while writing the Origin of Species. The refusal to distribute a film premiered and acclaimed at the Toronto Film Festival seems to have again roused the Canadian media’s scorn of the “backward Americans” of which—according to Gallup—only 39% believe Darwin and his evolutionary theory. It is interesting how very differently the Canadian and world media treated America during WW II when far...

At National Review Online, conservative curmudgeon John Derbyshire has weighed in on the Climategate scandal by encouraging conservatives not to jump on the anti-science bandwagon. I share his worry and find his advice is good so far as it goes; but I think Derbyshire’s defense of science might actually encourage the skepticism he wants to prevent. Most of the trouble comes from his invocation of the word “science,” and his claim that science has a magisterium.His article is called “Trust Science.” I’m not sure what that means. What is “science,” and how do we “trust” it? Imagine if someone said:...

Last February I mentioned the events that would commemorate the life and work of Charles Darwin in 2009. I had no idea at the time that I would be invited to participate in one of these events. But there I was, precisely 150 years after On the Origin of Species first appeared, seated with other scientists in front of a packed room that featured, among other interesting things, a life-sized model of a baleen whale. The venue was the National Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, and the occasion was a panel discussion titled Design without a Designer? [1]...

With millions of eyes on Copenhagen, this seems an appropriate time to ask whether ID thinking has any relevance to understanding the Earth's environment. Can design concepts help us weigh the diverse and often conflicting messages? I think ID is helpful, because features of the Earth's environments and ecologies start to take on new meaning. In this blog, I am thinking particularly of negative feedback mechanisms. Human design engineers will use negative feedback to promote stability and positive feedback to amplify an input signal. They select the mechanisms they need to achieve the desired effect. By analogy, if the Earth...