Abortion

I was watching some news when I caught  snippet of the Kermit Gosnell abortion trail (Click here for details) some discretion is advised when reading.  Abortion is defined as murder by the Catholic Church. At conception, each baby has a soul, just as an older brother has a soul, a fetus does as well. The fetus is growing, so it is alive. John Paul II declared that the teaching on abortion is not going to change.

Leadership in the Catholic and Protestant Church

Leadership is an important aspect of all unified groups of people. In the case of the Church, leadership prevents schism and heresies from destroying the Church. The magisterium guided by the Holy Spirit prevents incorrect teaching from being spread. This means that heresies are corrected, and questions are answered. In the Protestant Church, there is no hierarchical structure similar the the Catholic Church. The clergy in the Protestant Church is ordained by the denomination, this means that there is not a unifying, ultimate person solving the problem. A person can go and split off from his or her denomination over a simple teaching and still be called Protestant.  This is partly the reason why there are 30,000 different Protestant churches, but only one Catholic Church.

The Problem of Evil

One of the most common objections to the existence of an omnibenevolent God is the so-called "problem of evil". Its proponents claim that if God loves everyone, how can He let bad things, like murder or tsunamis happen in the world? The logical conclusion of their argument is that an omni-benevolent God must not exist.
Now let's refute it. First, there are two types of evil: man-made, and natural. Murder is an example of man-made evil, because people kill each other. A tsunami, on the other hand, is an example of a natural evil, because people don't cause tsunamis.

Man-made evil is easy to explain in the context of an all-loving God. It is clear in Genesis that God endowed humans with free will, so that we can make our own decisions and take responsibility for them. Along with freedom comes those people who choose to abuse it. God does not interfere with free will, even if the action take were evil, but lets final judgment mete out punishment for the wrongs committed. God therefore doesn't cause evil, and permits it because He respects human free will.

However, natural evils are much more difficult reconcile with an all-loving God. The answer must be that, as odd as it sounds, natural disasters aren't intrinsically evil. In order for an action to be morally evil, the person performing the action has to intend the evil. Morality is premised on a system of praise and blame, where good deeds are praised and evil deeds are punished.This presupposes that there is someone to praise or blame for the action; someone has to take culpability for it. However, tsunamis and hurricanes can't intend evil because they aren't living beings. Agents of natural disasters can't be blamed for their destruction, and therefore the disaster isn't an intrinsic evil. To be sure, the deaths and sorrow that follow natural disasters are great tragedies, but it would be incorrect to assign the blame to God. God created the natural world, but doesn't micro-manage everything that happens.

The First Cause

One of the most simple and intuitively appealing arguments for God's existence is St. Thomas Aquinas's argument from causality. In the physical world, every material object has a cause. For example, a chair was built by a carpenter; the carpenter caused the chair to come into being. This chain of causality can stretch almost infinitely far back in time, because every action has to have been caused by a previous action. However, nihil fit ex nihilo; from nothing, nothing comes. There must have been a uncaused cause at the beginning of time to set the universe and its chains of causality in motion. Without a first cause, nothing would exist. 

Now we'll cover and refute some objections to the First Cause argument. The first objection replies that if everything in the universe has a cause, then God too, must also have a cause. This objection stems from a misunderstanding of the cosmological argument. The argument posits that everything in the temporal world has a temporal cause. A chair, a computer, and even a human have causes because they exist within a temporal framework. However, God, as the first cause,  definitionally exists independent of time and space, and is therefore not constrained by the limitations of temporal beings. Only temporal objects have causes, and seeing as God is not a temporal being, He has no cause.

The second objection stems from a remark made by famous physicist Stephen Hawking that God cannot exist because time came into existence at the Big Bang. It goes like this :a cause must necessarily temporally precede the object it causes; a carpenter has to exist before he can make a chair. If time didn't exist before the Big Bang, this objection argues,  then neither could a cause for the universe. The problem with this objection is that it assumes temporal causality is the only type of causality. In other words, it assumes that a cause must always precede the object it causes in time. However, the true essence of causality is logical causality. For example, when you place a bowling ball on a cushion, a dent in the cushion appears because the bowling ball is placed on it. Causality only appears temporal because we live in a world constrained by space and time. Again, because God exists independent of the spatio-temporal world, He is a logical cause for the world as opposed to a temporal cause. As a summary, it doesn't matter if time didn't exist before the Big Bang because God's existence and creation is not dependent on time. 

No such thing as a bad pope, just bad people.

Many people try to disprove the accuracy of the Church's teachings by calling out sinful popes. Nobody is perfect, neither are the popes. This argument of bad popes does distinguish infallibility and impeccability. There were pope who were not celibate, or they used their power for the wrong reasons, but none of them declared incorrect doctrine. The go to example of a "bad" pope is Pope Honorius, people said he taught Monothelitism which describes as only divine. When he was settling the controversy, he thought to not do anything at all. This shows the infallibility of the Pope because even when Honorius was teaching Monothelitism, he did not define it as doctrine so there would be peace in the Church. By not defining Monothelitism as truth, Honorius showed that the office of the papacy is infallible when defining doctine.