A Question for Catholic Creationist

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vsedriver said:
I never claimed it wasn’t ex nihilo.
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Yes, this is why is said in parentheses “Granting that, at first, He created ex nihilo of course”
As in, He would have made the prime materials and then formed them over time (assumedly over billions and billions of years)

I am genuinely asking how this method is more God-like then creating with the Creative Power of His Word, speaking and making it so. It isn’t (at least not fully) rhetorical.
 
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I never made such a claim about people losing faith. It appears you have confused me with someone else. Rejecting it on scientific grounds is perfectly reasonable. Man is no accident. The document Communion and Stewardship, and other statements, make it clear God works infallibly in Creation. The Church can link together what science cannot. And the Church is not half blind like science is about this subject.
 
Finding Design In Nature

By Christoph Schönborn
Code: 
July 7, 2005
Vienna - EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was “more than just a hypothesis,” defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance – or at least acquiescence – of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection – is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.
 
Once again “if evolution is true, then your interpretation of the Bible is wrong.“
 
vsedriver said:
You are making claims that it causes people to lose faith and so far most have said it doesn’t.
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If your statement is correct about most of the posters here being pro evolution of man, it doesn’t mean that most Catholics/Christians are. There are any number of explanations for that ratio.
Eg.
*Obviously, most of the Catholics here on CAF aren’t interested enough in evolution to participate in this discussion of it.
*Catholics who lost their faith, as a result of how they were taught evolution, are probably not interested in spending time on a religious/Catholic forum - anymore than I’m interested in spending my time on an atheist forum.
 
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Exactly. Especially when we are told that with the Lord, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. How anyone can believe in a strict literal sense of creationism is mind boggling.
 
I’m surprised anyone here is still trying to defend creationism. Is that really the case? I haven’t had time to really dig through all these posts.
 
Christians do not need to sacrifice their minds and evolution does NOT disprove that Jesus is the Son of God , was crucified on the cross, rose from the dead, and lived the most miraculous life in History.

Evolution has no bearing whatsoever–as far as I can tell–on anything relating to Jesus Christ. To me, the account of creation in Genesis is a way of explaining something that was completely beyond the understanding of ancient man. God is creator, but His method is rather irrelevant.

“There are no difficulties in explaining the origin of man in regard to the body by means of the theory of evolution. According to the hypothesis mentioned it is possible that the human body, following the order impressed by the Creator on the energies of life, could have gradually been prepared in the form of antecedent living beings [i.e. living beings that existed prior to humanity].”

John Paul II, “Humans are Spiritual and Corporeal Beings”, April 16, 1986.

St. Augustine in the A.D. 300s wrote a commentary on Genesis and pointed out that the days do not need to be taken literally nor need the creation be a few thousand years ago. Indeed he suggested that God made the world with certain special potencies that would gradually unfold over time and develop. This interpretation came 1,500 years before Darwin!

Biological evolution is simply irrelevant to the truth of Christian Theism.
Any doubts I would have about the theory of biological evolution would be scientific and not biblical. Barrow and Tipler two physicists who wrote the Anthropic Cosmological principle lists 10 steps in the course of Human Evolution and each of which is so improbable that before it would occur the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and incinerated the Earth. They calculate the probability of the development of the human genome to be somewhere between 4 to the negative 180th power to the 110,000 power and 4 to the negative 360th power to the 110,000 power! So, if evolution did occur on this planet it was literally a miracle and therefore evidence for the existence of God!" :sunglasses:BOOM! CROWD GOES CRAZY 😎

"So, I don’t think this is an argument for Atheism.Quite the contrary it provides good grounds for thinking that God super intended the process of biological development. So, the Christian can be open to the evidence and follow it to where it leads. You have to feel sorry for the atheist because their presuppositions determine the outcome no matter how improbable or fantastical because they cannot follow the evidence to where it leads. However, if there is a fine tuner and creator of the universe then already in the initial conditions of the big bang you have an elaborately designed universe that permits the evolution and existence of intelligent life."
 
Textbook Biology is the problem here. It presents a deficient understanding of the human being. It is 100% relevant to point out that those who do not have the full, complete answer from the Church can become satisfied atheists. Content that nothing made them and content that after they die - nothing. No judgment here or after they die. That is, and will remain the problem.

The Church teaches that God must have a direct, causal role in the development of life in the universe. For those who don’t know that, the Biology textbook is no help. It DOES NOT point to the existence of God.

You, and all animals, are biological robots. You live, you reproduce (maybe) and die. End of story.
 
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