A Letter to Pope Benedict About Evolution

[Gottle_of_Geer]

oat soda:

i have serious reservations about creationists. their whole foundation is a literal interpretation of the creation account and not on reason. as they say, genisis wasn’t written as a science book. modern science as we know it didn’t come around to at least the middle ages. even augustine said that if we found contradictions in the bible we are either interpeting it wrong or have a bad translation.

I think the appeal of creationism has one great strength: it is conservative. IOW, it is not “liberal”. That is the essential thing - to oppose liberalism, in all its forms; for liberal = evil, and conservative = good.​

Within a “conservative” POV, everything is perfectly self-consistent - however odd it may seem to outsiders. But the perception of oddness doesn’t trouble conservatives: it shows only that their critics are not conservative enough; or, that those critics may even be closet liberals. If they are liberals, then they can be ignored, because liberals never have anything worth saying; they can’t have, because they are all enemies of “true Christianity” - which is the Christianity of those who are not liberals, for the simple reason that to be liberal is to be not a Christian. Fundamentalism is a highly self-enclosing ideology.

Fundamentalism works well enough in a Protestant setting: if the pastor is guilty of liberalism, by saying that the Pope might conceivably not be an enemy of God, or that evolutionism might not be the source of Communism, he can be ejected, or the church can go and join like-minded Christians.

Fundamentalism is anti-clerical, democratic by instinct, and not fond of experts: not in the Bible, nor in liturgical matters.

It is difficult to sustain in the CC, because the hierarchy and the Popes have ceased to be Fundamentalist. As many laity are Fundamentalist, it is unsurprising that many find Vatican II and its results very hard to take - it is a form of modernity which is particularly difficult to deal with, because it is officially sanctioned by those “who must be obeyed”. Which may be why Vatican II has been so hard to absorb: it may have been easier for those with religious expertise to adjust, than for the faithful in general, who lacked that expertise & knew of it only in bits and pieces, by its results upon their every day experience as Catholics; for they lacked knowledge of the principles of this expertise, which was expertise in the various theological sciences. Maybe this could have been avoided, if the CC had been inclined to have a well-educated laity, as some Churches do.

Fundamentalism thrives on being anti-ecumenical - the CC is now committed to ecumenism. Catholics can be anti-clerical in some ways - but not anti-hierarchical; and can’t fire tiresome clergy either. What they are inclined to do, is criticise the clergy, and to take over various traditionally clerical tasks such as RE - which is oddly similar to the clericalisation of the laity in “liberal” parts of the CC. The conservative equivalent to the much-deplored EME, is the “true Catholic” who treats bishops as heretics even when they are not heretics by Rome’s standards. ##

dei verbum clearly states that scripture faithfully describes that truth which God intended us to know for the sake of our salvation. the genisis account has a much greater ontological and universal truths about the human experience then any science book could ever have.

why would God make the universe appear to be older then it is? why would he be trying to trick us? this is similar to a heresy called nominalism. continental drift is a fact, we can measure the spreading by GPS. at the current spreading rate it will take hundreds of millions of years to bring the continents back together.

science has it’s place, religion has it’s place. both should not contradict but should work together in revealing truth about God.

 

[abcdefg]

Gottle of Geer:

1. Who are “we” ? I think that should be changed, so that it will be clear to the recipient who are the senders of the letter; and, say at this point why you are writing.

of all languages I’ve tried to learn(6 so far) only Vietnamese distinguish 2 different meanings of “we”: Chúng ta = we including the listener. chúng tôi = we exclude the listener.

a joke I read somewhere:
Gorbachev made a speech, “…Soon we’ll live even better!” one audience said “then how about us?” this joke can be readily translated in various languages except Vietnamese

 

[abcdefg]

Gottle of Geer:

Fundamentalism…

Các bạn xem thấy không? trước khi thảo luận bắt dầu, chúng ta bị gọi là “Fundamentalist” (Hán-Việt: Nguyên Giáo Chỉ Chủ Nghĩa)

because it is officially sanctioned by those “who must be obeyed”.

VaticanII never mandates Catholic must believe in ET or ID. the choice is given to every Catholic. You can’t accuse me of “Fundamentalism” for my believing in ID and I can’t accuse you of heresy either.

scientists support ET are scientists and scientists support ID are dismissed as maniacs? what’s your viewpoint of the article in the first post?

 

[abcdefg]

If humans come from primates why one should be monogamous? all non-human primates are polygamous.

 

[Agricola]

Uhm… just curious… is this another evolution thread?

Personally I can’t ascribe to either “side” of the argument, because the truth does not, in this case, reside in either extreme.

Why do people argue Creationism vs. Evolution? The discussion always ends up being muddled by the injured pride of the participants.

Could God have created the world in 6 days? Yes, of course. Did he? That’s not something we can know.

Science is concerned with things that we can observe. We can’t observe the creation of the world, only make educated guesses as to how it happened (in my mind the creation of something out of nothing is not something that people would be capable of understanding) based on how things work now. We will never know for sure how old the earth is until we have an answer from our Creator Himself. The things that we can be sure of are those things which the Church in Her wisdom has declared as matters of faith.

So, when you argue with each other about the age of our lonely little planet, third from the sun, just remember that the entire discussion will probably loose all meaning when you die. It really isn’t worth getting upset over. In fact, it may only serve to tempt you into less than charitable behaviour.

God bless, Merry Christmas,

Agricola

 

[abcdefg]

Agricola:

Could God have created the world in 6 days? Yes, of course. Did he? That’s not something we can know.

If God hadn’t created the world in 6 days why he told us so in the Bible? There’s no translation of Bible implying God probably used 7 or more days to do it and we know God can’t tell lie or deceive

So, when you argue with each other about the age of our lonely little planet, third from the sun, just remember that the entire discussion will probably loose all meaning when you die.

if human are directly created by God, guess what God will think if you tell Him, humans are just children of some big monkeys. if human hadn’t been directly created by God and you said to Him humans are directly created by Him, He at least wouldn’t be offended. This kinda like “If God exists and you don’t believe in Him, you’ll lose everything. If God didn’t exist and you believe in Him you would lose nothing” somewhat selfish arguments but theologically it does simplify things.

if ET was true then the majority of humans have immaculous conception (no original sin). According to ET, multiple primates become humans yet Bible clearly said only Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit thus getting original sin. those who have never been in Eden doesn’t have original sin.

 

[abcdefg]

Catholic Encyclopedia on this matter

newadvent.org/cathen/05654a.htm

 

[MarkR]

The Catholic Encyclopedia is a tremendous resource and should be updated! It was (I think) written at the beginning of the last century and there have been many scientific developments since then that reinforce the Church’s point of view on things like Creation and Evolution (the “Big Bang” theory for example and the chaos within “Evolutionary” theoretical circles).

A lot of the posts on this thread kind of reinforce what I posted earlier-that Creationism and ID are presented as one and the same. They’re not! A huge preponderance of hard scientific evidence points to ID. Creationism as espoused gives secularists an advantage that they wouldn’t otherwise have. It allows them to stifle debate on “Church/State” grounds. They’re the one’s in a scientific/ logical box but Creationism is helping to lift the lid.

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

abcdefg:

Các bạn xem thấy không? trước khi thảo luận bắt dầu, chúng ta bị gọi là “Fundamentalist” (Hán-Việt: Nguyên Giáo Chỉ Chủ Nghĩa)

VaticanII never mandates Catholic must believe in ET or ID. the choice is given to every Catholic. You can’t accuse me of “Fundamentalism” for my believing in ID and I can’t accuse you of heresy either.

scientists support ET are scientists and scientists support ID are dismissed as maniacs? what’s your viewpoint of the article in the first post?

• ET = what ? Extra-Terrestrial ? ​

• Who is dismissing any scientists as maniacs ?
• I wish I understood Vietnamese - but I don’t
• As for the letter: I have no scientific abilities whatever. I don’t think the authors quite understood why the Church no longer finds the Fathers fully adequate as guides to the intepretation of the Bible:

**“Needless to say the church and its advisors, the PAS, should always give the benefit of the doubt to our Lord’s Word as suggested by the church fathers and the Magisterium. Science changes but God’s Word does not.” **

The problem here is one of different understandings of how words convey meaning in their contexts. Those exegetes who use modern critical approaches of various kinds (such as those in the Letter of 1993) take the words of the Bible with great seriousness - “taking the Bible seriously” is not what distinguishes the Fathers (for instance) from the moderns: doing so is common ground.

The authors are seriously mistaken if they think the Church today (and exegetes today) does not “take the Bible seriously” (as some state the matter). The question is not whether the Word of Our Lord is or is not to be “give[n] the benefit of the doubt”, but how the texts are to be understood. Which includes the question of whether it is appropriate to use it as a source of scientific information: it is perfectly possible to affirm all that the Church teaches about the Bible, while believing the Bible has nothing to say nothing about matters of science.

The writers of the letter seem also not to realise that the Biblical text is by no means uniform throughout the Church. The Septuagint Jeremiah is very different from that in the Vulgate, in which the book’s text follows the order of the Hebrew Bible. ##

 

[abcdefg]

1. ET = evolution theory
2. fundamentalist calling
3. Good, so you can’t pointing out mistakes in that sentence if there’s any. I guess there isn’t any. Vietnamese grammar is almost identical to Chinese
4. How did St. Peter understands this? and why are we still saying we’re poor children of Eve in the Rosary

 

[Benedictus]

buffalo:

It has come to our attention that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS) will be reviewing the theory of biological evolution of life from non-life beginning November 13, 2005.

This sentence alone proves that the author is mentally retarded. Evolution is not about how life may have sprung from non-living things. Evolution is about how populations pass traits to subsequent generations and the origin of new species.