Help, Daughter does not believe

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It can be very gut-wrenching when a son or daughter makes such an admission to a parent, but as others have said above, it’s actually a good thing that she opened up to you about it. That allows you by example to explain your own love of God and profound faith in Him. I think it’s probably also good that she sees how sad her admission has made you. Maybe that will help spur her on to learn more about why you have such faith so that she can as well. There’s a lot of good advice from others in this thread. I would also suggest that you pray for St. Monica’s intercession to Our Lord for your daughter. She had been in your shoes for many, many years and knows the anguish first-hand! Through her diligent prayers and faith in God, her unbelieving son, Augustine, eventually became a believer and a Saint! It doesn’t get any better than that in the long run! Try to keep peace in your soul and have faith in God’s unending mercy. He will be by your side every day, no matter what. Our Lord’s blessings and peace always to you.
 
Since she is so busy, I would recommend watching Fr. Robert Barron’s YouTube videos so she can watch them on the bus or something. They were how I started learning about the faith. He is really good in that he is both understandable and does not dumb down Catholicism. His website is Word on Fire. Also, there are really good audiobook versions of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man and C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I was a an all honors and AP class student, so I mainly learned through audiobooks which I listened to on the bus since I never had time to read.

Also, I agree with the others who said that she needs a knowledgable Catholic in real life to talk to. I am a 20 year-old woman currently studying biology and also a self-taught Catholic. If I were not so busy with school, I’d offer to talk with her about the reasons why I believe and the resources I found useful. Maybe during a break. Still, someone in real life would be better.

One thing that stuck out to me was that she is working until 2-3 AM. That is really unhealthy and it is easy to start seeing life as a meaningless hamster wheel when a kid or anyone is that overworked. I often wished my parents put their foot down and told me to limit my classes so that I could at least sleep normally.
 
I would suggest a different tact.

Read up on “Stages of Faith” , I like what Scott Peck has written on the topic. You can google reading material.

Your daughter is at a stage many work through. I felt that reading the material helped open the door for me to again embrace my faith.
 
Please dont blame yourself youre a wonderful dad who cares. I wasnt raised religious but i do know that a parents faith can only carry a person for so long before they have to find the will and reason to form their own. At 17 she is nearly out of the house. I think that there will be many oppurtunities for u to speak of how God has helped u in your life as the conversations arise from the problems she will encounter in her own as she grows older. Whatever she decides will be her choice in the end.

Keep praying for her conversion.

God bless
 
Take her to the Latin mass, perhaps that will spark something in her.
I’m young as well and I can tell you for sure that the Latin mass can do something for people struggling with the faith. The ancient tradition of the Latin mass makes someone realize that all these things are done for a reason, that there is something that runs deeper.
Show her the Eucharistic miracles, how they tested the blood anonymously and it turned out to be AB positive blood, and tissue from the heart of someone tortured, as results showed.
Show her the miracles of Our Lady of Guadeloupe. How the image is impossible, not even painted on.
Show her the story of Our Lady of Fatima, how the sun danced and turned atheists into Catholics.
Tell her of the impossibility of evolution. Look up any article on how evolution is so extremely unlikely. Show her the probability of her being born. I think its something like one out of a trillion.
Show her the lives of the saints.
 
Some apologetics books that may help:
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
The abolition of man by CS Lewis
Miracles by CS Lewis
Anything by William Lane Craig or Peter Kreeft
(hopefully these books won’t be too advanced for her but for me they really helped with my doubts)

Also a demon could be causing this unbelief in her so you might want to try a binding prayer (you have the authority to do so since you are her mother)

Just simply name the demon ( Spirit of Unbelief) and say the following prayer:

http://www.sensustraditionis.org/Binding.pdf
 
Went to hear Dr Scott Hahn speak about a decade ago. He had just published his book “Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God” and he spoke about how each of us needed to begin studying now the new atheism. That each person there would end up with someone, child, friend, spouse, who was lured away by the emotional siren of the Dawkins crowd.

The days of the old fashioned “rational atheists” are long over.

Doubts and questions about the faith are a normal part of growing up. It is the rare person who never has a doubt. The Church encourages us to question! Tell her that. Encourage her that we have Faith seeking understanding.

The questions that she has lined out show that she has a very secular view of God. That God is just like us with superpowers. She likely thinks that Satan is just like God with superpowers that he uses for bad things.

Time to meet the real God. Theology, real serious theology.

If you can get her to read one book, make it Peter Kreeft’s “Jesus Shock”. If that catches her attention, she may move on to his other work.

I’d highly suggest that you spend some time on his website. I’d also suggest you read “Theology for Beginners” by Frank Sheed. It will help you shore up your theology to give better answers.

I also cannot suggest enough the work of Trent Horn. If you Google Catholic Answers Live podcasts and listen to his “why are you an atheist” programs, learn how he answers the questions. (And know that these are all the same set of questions). Get Mr Horn’s book “Answering Atheism: How to Make the Case for God with Logic and Charity” for yourself.

Watch his YouTube videos, his debates.

Do not treat her as if she is bad or under the influence of Satan for questioning. Let her know that you love her and that together you will find the answer for her questions - because in the Church there IS an answer for every question.
 
Pray to St. Monica. Her son was awful. Terrible person. Very smart.

She prayed and prayed and prayed.

Then one day, her son was just sitting and made a complete U-turn.

He became a priest and a bishop and helped translate and collect the books of the Bible.

St. Augustine.

Their feast days are next to one another.

Pray to St. Monica.
 
If you are a Catholic, surely the probability of her being born is 100%, and God always knew she would be born. Incidentally, she, and you, share 50% of your genes with plants. Genetic material is passed on only by descent (apart from some extreme cases). Therefore evolution is a fact. No point arguing against it. It’s the same science used in courtroom DNA testing.
 
Uh, no. That does not prove evolution is a fact.

God of course knew she would be born. But the possibility of her being born is actually very small (in terms of natural probability). On the other hand, God could have created a different soul, but He didn’t. He created her.

Evolution is a theory. That’s it. There are so many holes in the fossil record; if evolution were true we would be finding a lot more links between evolved species. When there is no real evidence, evolutionary scientists simply make assumptions. Evolution is still called a theory—a possible explanation or assumption—because it is not testable according to the scientific method, as this would require thousands or millions of years.

Have you ever heard of the dinosaur tissue with the presence of proteins and DNA found in an apparently 130 million year old dinosaur fossil? Evolutionists are actually stumped by this pretty recent discovery. How could dinosaur tissue last this long? It can’t. It’s impossible. Tissue cannot, absolutely cannot last longer than 10,000 years tops. Believing proteins could last for tens of millions of years takes enormous faith. According to a report in the science journal The Biochemist, even if collagen were stored at 0°C, it would not be expected to last even three million years. But such is the power of the evolutionary paradigm that many choose to believe the seemingly impossible rather than accept the obvious implication, that the samples are not as old as they say.
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This is thought to be the oldest caveman painting.
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Carbon dated depiction in Kuwait of humans hunting dinosaurs
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Another reason evolution is false is because of symbiosis. When one living thing needs another different living thing to survive, it’s called a symbiotic relationship.

A good example of this is the relationship between bees and flowers. The bees need the nectar from some types of flowers to feed while these flowers need bees to pollinate them. Both depend on each other to exist and survive. The question for evolutionists is: How did these plants exist without the bees, and how did the bees exist without these plants?
 
So how come you share 50% of your DNA with plants if you don’t have a common ancestor?
 
DNA similarity could just as easily be explained as the result of a common Creator.

Human designers frequently reuse the same elements and features, albeit with modifications. Since all living things share the same world, it should be expected that there would be similarities in DNA as the organisms would have similar needs. It would be pretty surprising if every living thing had completely different sequences for each protein—especially ones that carried out the same function. Organisms that have highly similar functionality and physiological needs would be expected to have a degree of DNA similarity.
 
If God did create in this way he did so to exactly mimic what would be expected had evolution occurred, right down to planting fossils in all the right places. It is also possible that there is a God and he created the world exactly as it is now, a minute ago, with all our memories implanted. Each of these hypotheses is equally likely and unable to be tested. Science provides far more likely answers.
 
Yeah but…creationism is a theory just like evolution. You would be right that it is not testable which is why evolution needs to stop getting all the credit when there are in fact many holes in the theory and is not at all more likely than God creating the world.

It is all about probability. It is extremely unlikely that we were created a minute ago with implanted memories. It is also unlikely that evolution could be true because the design needs a designer, plus all the fallacies I mentioned previously.
 
misstherese said:
evolution needs to stop getting all the credit when there are in fact many holes in the theory and is not at all more likely than God creating the world.
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There is no conflict in those ideas unless you wish to limit or short-change God.
 
Evolution is a theory designed to explain a world without God. That doesn’t mean life can’t evolve and adapt; I’m talking about the theory that all life evolved from one organism.

St. Thomas of Aquinas even believed in a young earth. There is an interesting article hear about the Church and Genesis on how old the earth is: https://www.sign.org/articles/adam-the-pope-and-me
 
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misstherese said:
Evolution is a theory designed to explain a world without God.
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That is a over-simplified idea that makes a good bumpersticker.

There are many, many faithful Catholics who see the stunning beauty of a universe that was created by God to evolve into the diversity of life we see today.
 
misstherese said:
Evolution is a theory designed to explain a world without God. That doesn’t mean life can’t evolve and adapt; I’m talking about the theory that all life evolved from one organism.
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You are simply pigeon-holing God’s creative power. Why do you need to limit him?
 
It says in Genesis that life did not evolve from one organism, though…that’s not making God into anything less. I think it would pigeon-hole God’s creative power by saying He couldn’t create all at once. Again, that doesn’t mean life doesn’t evolve necessarily.
 
misstherese said:
I think it would pigeon-hole God’s creative power by saying He couldn’t create all at once.
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Sure God could do that. No one has said he cannot, though one person has said that all life on earth plus the sun (I think) were all put in place 5778 years ago over a 6 day window. It is just that our human enquiries have produced evidence suggesting something far different.
 
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