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.

Evolution and Genesis

Bible interpretations shape how people believe. Many take parts of the Bible as literal, some take it as metaphorical. The story of Genesis is one of the best examples of misinterpretation. Many atheists refute Christianity solely because the Earth cannot be made in six days. Humans did not show up in a day when there is evidence that the human race took thousands of years to develop into a homo sapien. Days in Genesis are not recognized as days. God does not have day and night since he created the concept of time. So the metaphorical day in Genesis can be the length of time for humans to evolve. Also, the human race is one of the youngest species on the earth. In Genesis, God created humans last.

The Features of Love

Love is a subjective concept because it doesn't mean the same thing to different people. We obviously love different people, and we love people for different reasons. It's impossible to objectify love because it must apply to a specific people or objects.  For example, we don't just say "I feel love", but rather "I love" someone, because love is not a concept that we feel objectively, but a subjective feeling towards something. This isn't to say that there aren't similar components between the way people love others, but just means that each subject, or each person, must engage in the act of loving; no one can do it for another person. 

The Church's understanding of love is two-fold. One part comes from the Christ's New Commandment: love your neighbor as yourself.  This basically implies the Golden Rule, treat others in the way you want to be treated. Love of self is instinctively ingrained into every person; we intuitively value ourselves and our goals. Christ says that love means that we not only have to respect and love ourselves, but extend that same love to others, because we must recognize that they value themselves just as much as we value ourselves. This is manifested in the obligation all people have to help the poor and vulnerable, because they lack the means to help themselves. The second part of love is love of God Himself. We say that the virtue of charity is supernatural when it is infused by the Holy Spirit, as true love of God must be. Love requires near full knowledge of a being, and with humanity's finite limitations, full knowledge of an infinite being such as God is impossible. The full Catholic understanding of love as love of one's neighbor and love of God is manifested in the act of marriage. The Church recognizes three, not two, members in each marriage: the husband, the wife, and God. Both facets of Catholic love are present in a marriage: the man loves the woman, vice versa, and they both love God. 

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03592a.htm

Papal Infallibility

One of the most hotly contested and divisive topics between Catholicism and other sects of Christianity is the authority of the papacy, specifically papal infallibility. Protestant and Orthodox denominations are loath to accept the authority of the Pope, seeing as they deny that Christ created the post at all. We can get to Christ's establishment of the papacy in a later post, but this one just assumes that the pope does have authority as the Vicar of Christ. Even so, there are still some objections to infallibility, most of which result from a misunderstanding of the teaching. For example, some people point out that in Paul's letter to the Galatians, Paul corrects Peter: "But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned" (Gal 2:11). This, they argue, must mean that Peter, as the Pope, was incorrect and therefore his words are fallible. Others argue that popes disagree about theological teachings, and because two contradictory teachings cannot simultaneously be infallible, the doctrine of infallibility is untrue. However, both of these arguments stem from a misunderstanding of papal infallibility as extending to every word or thought that popes say or think. The Catholic Church defines papal infallibility as:

"The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when carrying out the duty of the pastor and teacher of all Christians by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, through the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, operates with that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer wished that His church be instructed in defining doctrine on faith and morals; and so such definitions of the Roman Pontiff from himself, but not from the consensus of the Church, are unalterable."

In neither situation in the objections listed above were the popes acting infallibly, or ex cathedra. In context, Paul was correcting Peter and chastising him on his imprudence. Imprudence is definitely not a teaching, much less one given ex cathedra. As for popes having different opinions, infallibility only applies when the pope speaks in union with his bishops or from the Seat of Peter, not when describing his own personal beliefs. So it's very obvious that objections to the doctrine of infallibility can be refuted by correctly understanding the doctrine. 

https://sites.google.com/site/apostolicapologetics/Bishop-of-rome/papal-infallibility#TOC-Objections