Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Catechism In A Year podcast,

where we encounter God's plan of pure goodness for us, revealed in scripture and passed down

through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in Ere is brought to you by Ascension.

In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity in God's family as we journey together to our heavenly home. This is day 41. We're reading paragraphs 285 to 289. As always, I'm using the Ascension edition of the catechism, which includes the foundations of faith approach, but you can follow along with any recent version. Also, you can download your catechism in your reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com

slash CIY.

And lastly, you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily updates and daily notifications. It, as I said, is day 41. We're reading paragraphs 285 to 289. This is continued catechesis on creation. We're going to be sticking with creation for quite a little bit. tomorrow we'll talk about like we'll crack into the importance and what's revealed to us in Genesis

chapter 1. be sticking with creation for quite a little bit. Tomorrow we'll talk about, like, we'll crack

into the importance and what's revealed to us in Genesis chapters 1 through 3, which is

amazing and incredible. But today, we're all going to continue what we talked about yesterday,

which is the fact that people have always asked the questions. Who are we? Where are we going?

Where did we come from? What's our origin? What's

our end? That kind of situation. We're also going to talk about the fact that paragraph 285

will highlight this. That since the beginning of Christian faith, or since the beginning of everything,

the Christian faith has been challenged by responses to the questions of origins that differ from

our own. So we have a very specific response of how the world,

how everything started. And so paragraph 285 will go into a number of different theories for the

creation and origin of the universe. Some people will talk about pantheism like God is everything

essentially or everything is God essentially as well. Also dualism where there's good and evil battling it out. We'll talk about deism, which is the idea of like they call it the clockmaker god. So yes, there's a god who made all things, but he just kind of like wound up a clock or made the clock wound it up and let it go. So he's not really involved anymore. There's also materialism, which I mentioned yesterday where this is just stuff. All there is stuff.

All it is is the material world, and there's nothing beyond the material world.

Now, we'll go from there to talk about how important the reality is that God has revealed

himself to us in creation and also in revelation, because we recognize that recognize that God's existence can be perceived

from human reason. Romans chapter one emphasizes this or makes this claim that here, if we're

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