Email sent to Bishop Leonard Blair, Archdiocese of Hartford on June 29, 2015Dear Bernadette,
This is a draft of a letter I'm planning to send the Members of the Committee Evangelization and Catechesis if someone does not meet with me so I can explain these matters and listen to their opinions and reactions:
The Magis Center (http://www.magiscenter.com) has six cardinals and bishops on its board and promotes the intellectual and moral error that recent discoveries in physics should be used to persuade people that God exists. The Magis Center is supporting the nonsense that a “trans-universal (supernatural) power” created the universe because there is no other explanation for its origin 13.7 billion years ago (Big Bang), the “fine-tuning of physical constants,” and the vagaries of quantum mechanics. In my opinion, this is pseudoscience and undermines the reasons to believe in Jesus.
There are two arguments, not proofs, for God’s existence. One is based on the existence of humans and the other on morality. They both can be summarized as follows: FREE WILL + HAND WAVING
The arguments promoted by the Magis Center and many others, I must admit, is this: BIG BANG + CIRCULAR REASONING
The Magis Center also promotes the theory that the Shroud of Turin is authentic and is helping the American Journal of Physics cover-up a mistake it made in publishing an absurd article about biological evolution and thermodynamics. I’d like an appointment to explain to you why the Catholic Church should withdraw its endorsement of the Magis Center. I have already written about these three issues:
http://www.dkroemer.com
http://www.pseudoscience123.com
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=David_Roemer
http://rationalcatholic.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-theology-of-science-fiction-iv-end.html
The last link contains an exchange with Robert Kurland who was once affiliated with the Magis Center.
Concerning my slideshow (http://www.holyshroud.info) about the Shroud of Turin, which the USCCB has tried to suppress, I translated it into six other languages. From May 18 to June 27, there have been 4891 visits to theses websites. In this same time period, there have been 724 visits to the site where I posted my canonical complaint against Cardinal Dolan.
Very truly yours, David Roemer
Letter faxed and emailed to bishops affiliated with the Magis Center and the Committee for Evangelization and Catechesis of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (July 2015)
Dear Bishop Serratelli,
Since I live nearby (my parish is the Church of Notre Dame in Manhattan) and you are on the Committee for Evangelization and Catechesis of the USCCB, I am requesting an appointment to explain to you why the Catholic Church should withdraw its support of the Magis Center (http://www.magiscenter.com). The Magis Center says that the Shroud of Turin is authentic and that God caused the Big Bang. There is very little evidence that the Holy Shroud is authentic and no evidence at all that God caused the Big Bang. The Magis Center is also playing a negative roll in the culture war in the United States about the teaching of evolutionary biology.
Quentin Lauer, S.J., was my philosophy teacher at Fordham College. One day a student asked a question about faith in Jesus and he shouted at the top of his lungs, “I don’t maintain it. I assert it with every fiber of my being.” This profession of faith was a reason for all of us in the class to believe in Jesus because Fr. Lauer was a paragon of reason. He did not think God caused the Big Bang and did not misrepresent our salvation history.
My writings about science and religion are at http://www.newevangelization.info. Most pertinent are my reviews of the books by Stephen Barr, Robert Spitzer, and Michael Augros under “Science” and “Science Metaphysics, Philosophy, Theology and History, of the Holy Shroud” under “Essays.” I filed a canonical complaint against Cardinal Dolan for suppressing my slideshow/lecture about the Shroud of Turin (http://www.dkroemer.com). I am also trying to get the American Journal of Physics to retract an absurd article about evolution and thermodynamics (http://www.pseudoscience123.com).
Very truly yours, David Roemer
cc: Archbishop Charles Chaput, Bishop David Ricken, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop Jose Gomes, Bishop Kevin Vann, Bishop Leonard Blair, and Bishop Frank Caggiano
Letter mailed to Gerhard Cardinal Müller of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on July 22, 2015
Your Eminence,
On February 21, 2014, I asked your office to correct the Archbishop of New York for suppressing my slideshow/lecture about the Holy Shroud. I made the same request of the Holy Father on October 1, 2014, and am now asking the College of Cardinals to correct the Pope. I translated the slideshow into 7 languages and created 7 websites. Yesterday, there were 244 visits to these websites. My correspondence with the Roman Rota is at a website titled “Complaint Against Cardinal Dolan.”
In my letter to Pope Francis, I mentioned another science-faith conflict that does not reflect well on the Catholic Church in the United States. It concerns evolutionary biology and I refer you to my website tiled, “Pseudoscience in the American Journal of Physics.”
I’v asked for a meeting with the Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to explain a third concern I have, but this request is being refused. My correspondence about this is at the above website under “Magis Center for Faith and Science.” I’v written a number of articles about this and gave the references to the USCCB.
The Magis Center is run by a Jesuit priest and promotes arguments for God’s existence based on science rather than metaphysics. Suppose the Jesuit is addressing an audience of atheists and God-fearing people. The audience has agreed to pay for the lecture afterwards if they liked the lecture. The Jesuit explains that there is no natural explanation for the Big Bang, so there must be a supernatural explanation. The God-fearers will pay up because it confirms their faith. The atheists will also pay up because the lecture will confirm their belief that people who believe in God are irrational and stupid. I would make less money because the atheists would not pay me a dime.
Asking the blessing of Your Eminence, I am, Yours respectfully in Christ, David Roemer
Handout for Lesson on the Errors of the Magis Center
Proof of God
Human beings are finite, and therefore compositions of essence and existence. God is an act of existence without a limiting essence. This is not only an argument for the existence of God, it is an historical reason to believe the human authors of the Bible were inspired by God (Exodus 3.14). A scientific reason to believe in the Bible is the discovery in the 1960s that the universe began to exist 13.7 billion years ago (Big Bang) because the Bible repeatedly says God created the universe from nothing.
The Magis Center argues that God exists because there is no natural explanation for the Big Bang. This argument is so irrational it is not even an argument. It is also pseudoscience because there is no evidence God caused the Big Bang.
Among the traditional candidates for comprehensive understanding of the relation of mind to the physical world, I believe the weight of evidence favors some from of neutral monism over the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism. (Thomas Nagel, “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” location 69 of 1831)
And certain properties of the human brain distinguish our species from all other animals. The human brain is, after all, the only known collection of matter that tries to understand itself. To most biologists, the brain and the mind are one and the same; understand how the brain is organized and how it works, and we’ll understand such mindful functions as abstract thought and feelings. Some philosophers are less comfortable with this mechanistic view of mind, finding Descartes’ concept of a mind-body duality more attractive. (Neil Campbell, Biology, 4th edition, p. 776 )
Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin
Gnostics probably created the Holy Shroud in the 1st or 2nd century using a crucified victim or volunteer and methods that have been lost to history. The Magis Center misrepresents our salvation history and practices pseudoscience by promoting the theory that the Holy Shroud is authentic.
There are only three classes of possibilities for the image formation: by human artifice, through natural processes transferring the image to the linen from a real crucified corpse, or by supernatural means. Of the third, not much can be said, because then all scientific discussion and all rational discourse must perforce cease.…But a lot can be said about natural processes. In terse summary, they can be ruled out definitely by the quality and beauty of the shroud image. (Mueller, Marvin, “The Shroud of Turin: A Critical Appraisal,” The Skeptical Inquirer, Spring 1982, p. 27)
“Entropy and evolution” (Am. J. Phys., Vol. 76, No. 11, Nov. 2008)
This article has an absurd calculation of entropy in order to prove that biological evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. It proves how irrational the scientific establishment in the United States is about anything touching on religion. The Magis Center is helping the scientific establishment perpetrate a number of frauds upon the American public about evolutionary biology.
The history of life presents three great sources of wonder. One is adaptation, the marvelous fit between organism and environment. The other two are diversity and complexity, the huge variety of living forms today and the enormous complexity of their internal structure. Natural selection explains adaptation. But what explains diversity and complexity? (Daniel McShae and Michael Brandon, Biology's First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems, location 78, Kindle)
By comparison, if we question how long it would take a high-speed computer to write randomly a specific Shakespearean sonnet, we are asking that all the letters of the words of the sonnet will come up simultaneously in the correct order. It is an impossible task, even if all the computers in the world today had been working from the time of the big bang to the present. Even to compose the phrase, “To be or not to be,” letter by letter, would take a typical computer millions of years. (Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, The Plausiblity of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma, page 32)
P. falciparum, HIV, and E. coli are all very, very different from each other. They range from the simple to the complex, have very different life cycles, and represent three different fundamental domains of life: eukaryote, virus, and prokaryote. Yet they all tell the same tale of Darwinian evolution. Single simple changes to old cellular machinery that can help in dire circumstances are easy to come by. This is where Darwin rules, in the land of antibiotic resistance and single tiny steps…There is no evidence the Darwinian process can take the multiple, coherent steps needed to build new molecular machinery, the kind of machinery that fills the cell. (Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, Free Press, 2007, p. 162)
In Behe’s view, these are examples of nothing more than a kind of “trench warfare” in which the two species have progressively disabled or broken parts of themselves in order to survive. Nothing genuinely new, novel, or complex has resulted from this struggle, and we shouldn’t expect otherwise. The reason, according to Behe, is that the sorts of changes we see in this well-studied interaction represent the limit, the “edge” of what evolution can accomplish. They can go this far and no further. A line in the sand is drawn, and the other side of that line is intelligent design. How does Behe know where to draw that line? (Kenneth Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for the American Soul,p. 67)
They [Pinker and Bloom] particularly emphasized that language is incredibly complex, as Chomsky had been saying for decades. Indeed, it was the enormous complexity of language that made is hard to imagine not merely how it had evolved but that it had evolved at all…..But, continued Pinker and Bloom, complexity is not a problem for evolution. Consider the eye. The little organ is composed of many specialized parts, each delicately calibrated to perform its role in conjunction with the others. It includes the cornea,…Even Darwin said that it was hard to imagine how the eye could have evolved…….And yet, he explained, it did evolve, and the only possible way is through natural selection—the inestimable back-and-forth of random genetic mutation with small effects…Over the eons, those small changes accreted and eventually resulted in the eye as we know it. (Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, pp. 59–60)
Considered thermodynamically, the problem of neo-Darwinism is the production of order by random events. (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “Chance or Law,” in Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences, The Macmillan Company, 1969, page 76)
Open Letter to Theology Department of Fordham University
I have asked to meet with the Presbyteral Council of the Archdiocese of New York to explain why the Catholic Church should correct the Magis Center, which is run by a Jesuit and has the support of three cardinals and three bishops. The Magis Center uses pseudoscience and misrepresents our salvation history to proselytize. I very recently had an insight into what would cause certain Catholic theologians to behave this way. Knowing that all Catholic theologians have a duty to assist the Magisterium, I am advising you about my request. I graduated from Fordham College in 1964 and got a Ph.D. in physics from New York University in 1971. My metaphysics teacher was Norris Clarke, S.J.
There are links to articles I have written about these matters on one of my websites ("Pseudoscience in the American Journal of Physics") under "Magis Center for Faith and Science." You will also find there my recent letter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as well as the handout I would use at such a presentation. My correspondence with the Holy Father about these matters is at another website ("Complaint Against Cardinal Dolan").
About three years ago, I communicated a criticism of Stephen Barr, who is a prominent physicist and advisor to the Magis Center, to two Jesuits in this department. My complaint against Dr. Barr concerns evolution and thermodynamics. Understandably, the two theologians did not feel qualified to get involved in such a matter, but they were wrong. Any layman can see why an article published by the American Journal of Physics titled “Entropy and evolution” is absurd. This is one of the things I want to explain the Presbyteral Council.
Very truly yours,
David Roemer
http://www.newevangelization.info
Letter to Pontifical Council for the Promoting the New Evangelization on September 16, 2105Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella
Via della Conciliazione 5
00120 Vatican City State
Your Excellency,
The Magis Center is located in California and has on its board three cardinals and three bishops. On July 22, 2015, I filed a complaint against the Magis Center for using arguments for God’s existence based on science (the Big Bang, fine-tuning) rather than metaphysics (a finite being needs a cause) with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
After writing that letter, I had an insight into why a Catholic theologian would think the Big Bang is evidence of God’s existence. Richard Dawkins refutes this argument incisively and correctly by saying: What caused God?
I sent emails and faxes and made telephone calls to the theology faculty at Fordham University, St. John’s University, and Georgetown University suggesting that I give a seminar to explain my insight. I also called and sent an email to the Rev. Msgr. Joseph R. Reilly S.T.L, Ph.D., who is the rector/dean of the Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University. I argued that theologians have a duty to assist the magisterium of the Catholic Church and should listen to what I had to say.
Since no one expressed an interest, I wrote up my ideas and submitted an article to Science, Religion and Culture. The editor is Gregg D. Caruso, who is a professor at Corning Community College in New York. I listed Msgr. Reilly and the chairmen of the theology departments of St. John’s and Fordham as my reviewers of choice.
If you want, I will email or fax the article (“Why People Believe God Caused the Big Bang”) to you. I would prefer to explain it in person where there would be give and take. Communicating with written documents requires intelligent and knowledgeable writing and reading.
Very truly yours,
David Roemer
347-417-4703
david@dkroemer.com
http://www.newevangelization.info
http://www.dkroemer.com
http://www.pseudoscience123.com
faxed to +39 0669869521
Letter to President of St. John's University on September 29, 2015
Dear Mr. Gempesaw,
On July 22, 2015, I sent a letter to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith criticizing a Catholic organization run by a Jesuit for helping the American Journal of Physics disseminate anti-religion propaganda about evolutionary biology, misrepresenting our salvation history by touting the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and for disseminating irrational arguments for God’s existence. I have not received a response yet. I am interpreting this to mean the Catholic Church wants me to educate its theologians in the United States about these matters. My correspondence with the Catholic Church is at these websites:
The Magis Center (http://www.magiscenter.com) has six cardinals and bishops on its board and promotes the intellectual and moral error that recent discoveries in physics should be used to persuade people that God exists. The Magis Center is supporting the nonsense that a “trans-universal (supernatural) power” created the universe because there is no other explanation for its origin 13.7 billion years ago (Big Bang), the “fine-tuning of physical constants,” and the vagaries of quantum mechanics. In my opinion, this is pseudoscience and undermines the reasons to believe in Jesus.
Among the traditional candidates for comprehensive understanding of the relation of mind to the physical world, I believe the weight of evidence favors some from of neutral monism over the traditional alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism. (Thomas Nagel, “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” location 69 of 1831)
And certain properties of the human brain distinguish our species from all other animals. The human brain is, after all, the only known collection of matter that tries to understand itself. To most biologists, the brain and the mind are one and the same; understand how the brain is organized and how it works, and we’ll understand such mindful functions as abstract thought and feelings. Some philosophers are less comfortable with this mechanistic view of mind, finding Descartes’ concept of a mind-body duality more attractive. (Neil Campbell, Biology, 4th edition, p. 776 )
There are only three classes of possibilities for the image formation: by human artifice, through natural processes transferring the image to the linen from a real crucified corpse, or by supernatural means. Of the third, not much can be said, because then all scientific discussion and all rational discourse must perforce cease.…But a lot can be said about natural processes. In terse summary, they can be ruled out definitely by the quality and beauty of the shroud image. (Mueller, Marvin, “The Shroud of Turin: A Critical Appraisal,” The Skeptical Inquirer, Spring 1982, p. 27)
The history of life presents three great sources of wonder. One is adaptation, the marvelous fit between organism and environment. The other two are diversity and complexity, the huge variety of living forms today and the enormous complexity of their internal structure. Natural selection explains adaptation. But what explains diversity and complexity? (Daniel McShae and Michael Brandon, Biology's First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems, location 78, Kindle)
By comparison, if we question how long it would take a high-speed computer to write randomly a specific Shakespearean sonnet, we are asking that all the letters of the words of the sonnet will come up simultaneously in the correct order. It is an impossible task, even if all the computers in the world today had been working from the time of the big bang to the present. Even to compose the phrase, “To be or not to be,” letter by letter, would take a typical computer millions of years. (Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, The Plausiblity of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma, page 32)
P. falciparum, HIV, and E. coli are all very, very different from each other. They range from the simple to the complex, have very different life cycles, and represent three different fundamental domains of life: eukaryote, virus, and prokaryote. Yet they all tell the same tale of Darwinian evolution. Single simple changes to old cellular machinery that can help in dire circumstances are easy to come by. This is where Darwin rules, in the land of antibiotic resistance and single tiny steps…There is no evidence the Darwinian process can take the multiple, coherent steps needed to build new molecular machinery, the kind of machinery that fills the cell. (Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, Free Press, 2007, p. 162)
In Behe’s view, these are examples of nothing more than a kind of “trench warfare” in which the two species have progressively disabled or broken parts of themselves in order to survive. Nothing genuinely new, novel, or complex has resulted from this struggle, and we shouldn’t expect otherwise. The reason, according to Behe, is that the sorts of changes we see in this well-studied interaction represent the limit, the “edge” of what evolution can accomplish. They can go this far and no further. A line in the sand is drawn, and the other side of that line is intelligent design. How does Behe know where to draw that line? (Kenneth Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for the American Soul,p. 67)
They [Pinker and Bloom] particularly emphasized that language is incredibly complex, as Chomsky had been saying for decades. Indeed, it was the enormous complexity of language that made is hard to imagine not merely how it had evolved but that it had evolved at all…..But, continued Pinker and Bloom, complexity is not a problem for evolution. Consider the eye. The little organ is composed of many specialized parts, each delicately calibrated to perform its role in conjunction with the others. It includes the cornea,…Even Darwin said that it was hard to imagine how the eye could have evolved…….And yet, he explained, it did evolve, and the only possible way is through natural selection—the inestimable back-and-forth of random genetic mutation with small effects…Over the eons, those small changes accreted and eventually resulted in the eye as we know it. (Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, pp. 59–60)
Considered thermodynamically, the problem of neo-Darwinism is the production of order by random events. (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “Chance or Law,” in Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences, The Macmillan Company, 1969, page 76)
Via della Conciliazione 5
00120 Vatican City State
Your Excellency,
The Magis Center is located in California and has on its board three cardinals and three bishops. On July 22, 2015, I filed a complaint against the Magis Center for using arguments for God’s existence based on science (the Big Bang, fine-tuning) rather than metaphysics (a finite being needs a cause) with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
After writing that letter, I had an insight into why a Catholic theologian would think the Big Bang is evidence of God’s existence. Richard Dawkins refutes this argument incisively and correctly by saying: What caused God?
I sent emails and faxes and made telephone calls to the theology faculty at Fordham University, St. John’s University, and Georgetown University suggesting that I give a seminar to explain my insight. I also called and sent an email to the Rev. Msgr. Joseph R. Reilly S.T.L, Ph.D., who is the rector/dean of the Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology at Seton Hall University. I argued that theologians have a duty to assist the magisterium of the Catholic Church and should listen to what I had to say.
Since no one expressed an interest, I wrote up my ideas and submitted an article to Science, Religion and Culture. The editor is Gregg D. Caruso, who is a professor at Corning Community College in New York. I listed Msgr. Reilly and the chairmen of the theology departments of St. John’s and Fordham as my reviewers of choice.
If you want, I will email or fax the article (“Why People Believe God Caused the Big Bang”) to you. I would prefer to explain it in person where there would be give and take. Communicating with written documents requires intelligent and knowledgeable writing and reading.
Very truly yours,
David Roemer
347-417-4703
david@dkroemer.com
http://www.newevangelization.info
http://www.dkroemer.com
http://www.pseudoscience123.com
faxed to +39 0669869521
Letter to President of St. John's University on September 29, 2015
Dear Mr. Gempesaw,
On July 22, 2015, I sent a letter to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith criticizing a Catholic organization run by a Jesuit for helping the American Journal of Physics disseminate anti-religion propaganda about evolutionary biology, misrepresenting our salvation history by touting the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and for disseminating irrational arguments for God’s existence. I have not received a response yet. I am interpreting this to mean the Catholic Church wants me to educate its theologians in the United States about these matters. My correspondence with the Catholic Church is at these websites:
www.pseudoscience123.com
www.dkroemer.com
www.newevangelization.info
In addition, I recently submitted articles (“An Analogy Between Nazi Germany and the United States,” “Science, Metaphysics, Philosophy, History, and Theology of the Shroud of Turin,” and “Why People Believe God Caused the Big Bang”) to Perspectives on History (Shatha Almutawa), The Historian (Kees Boterbloem), and Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Amir Hussain), respectively.
I have contacted through emails, telephone calls, and letters mailed with a certificate of mailing 27 theologians at St. John’s University with an offer to give a seminar about these matters. My offer has been refused. I think you will be doing the Catholic Church a service if you make sure this decision is not the result of improper considerations and fear of unlawful reprisals from individuals in a position of authority.
Very truly yours, David Roemer
sent by restricted registered mail (RE134236414US)