All Christians , science and evolution

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rossum said:
Indeed. Here is a little something I prepared earlier:

Why the Bible is not a science textbook

SCENE: Inside a tent in the desert. There is a small table and chair in the middle of the tent. Some baggage is stacked at the back.

Characters: GOD invisible and omnipresent. MOSES offstage.

MOSES enters the tent.

MOSES: “What a day! If I ever see another piece of sand I swear that I am goi…”

GOD: “Moses!”

MOSES: (surprised) “Yes Lord!”

GOD: “Get pen, ink and papyrus.”

MOSES goes to the baggage and fetches a pen, ink and papyrus. He takes them to the table and sits down.

GOD: “Begin writing.”

MOSES: “Yes Lord.”

GOD: “In the beginning I created a quantum fluctuation at the hyper-sub-quark level …”

MOSES: (interrupting) “Sorry Lord. Was that spelled K-W-A-H-K?”

GOD: “Hmmm. I see a problem. Humans will not discover hyper-sub-quarks for another 8,726 years three months and sixteen days. Perhaps something less cosmological might work better. Moses, begin a new sheet of papyrus.”

MOSES picks up a new piece of papyrus and prepares to write.

GOD: “In the beginning I created deoxyribonucleic acid …”

MOSES: (interrupting) “Sorry Lord, but could you spell that please?”

GOD: “Oy vey! Why did I make these people so stupid!”

GOD touches a finger to Moses’ forehead.

MOSES: “Ah, now I understand. Thank you for giving me all that knowledge Lord. Unfortunately I see a problem. If I write ‘deoxyribonucleic acid’ then none of the other Israelites will know what the he… heck I have written about unless you touch all their foreheads as well.”

GOD: “Hmmm. A good point Moses. Let me think about it for a few thousand years.”

MOSES: “But what do I do while I am waiting?”

GOD: “Never mind, I have finished thinking.”

MOSES: “That was never thousands of years.”

GOD: “Do you doubt Me! Time is Mine to command. It is subject to Me, not Me to it.”

MOSES: (humbly) “Sorry Lord.”

GOD: "Start a new piece of papyrus.

MOSES picks up a new piece of papyrus and prepares to write.

GOD: “In the beginning I created the heavens and the earth …”

CUT: Fade to black.

🙂

rossum
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I think that is wonderful!!! you might also be interested in these quotes by St. Augustine:

“In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received.” - St. Augustine, in his analysis of Genesis.

“…be on guard against giving interpretations of Scripture that are far fetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the Word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.”
-St. Augustine
 
Adamski said:
I really wanted to get all Christians perspective. I used to be a strong believer in evolution and I am currently believing in it a lot less I know the options of belief in the catholic faith what are people’s options and why
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I was a secularist until my late 30’s and I’m in my early 50’s now, and I’ve gone from being “of course there was evolution” to “if evolution really happened, it was one of the biggest miracles ever.”

I still don’t think evolution is a deal-breaker as far as our faith is concerned. Meaning, God could have brought everything into being with the popularly understood evolution model.

But after my conversion I started looking into evolution, mostly because it was such a popular debate amongst Christians. The more you look at it, the harder it is to see evolution really accounting for everything. For example, wouldn’t it have to be a major miracle for each new species to have evolved randomly, AND have a male and a female evolve randomly, at the same time, and be able to mate/reproduce?

I’m not a scientist and again it is not a deal-breaker. But I think the more you look at it the more dubious evolution really looks. There are other dubious aspects that I won’t get into and I don’t really have the scientific background to fully understand it even. But I understand enough to know that there are some questions there worthy of discusson. And it seems the evolutionists are “protesting too much” and on the defensive - probably because for them evolution HAS to be true to support their belief system, whereas for us it doesn’t have to be.

The last point is, irrelevant of whether or not it’s true, evolution I feel is a very ugly and destructive idea to plant in people’s minds, that they are only animals responding to instinct. If you teach people that they are nothing but animals, they will tend to act that way as well, and we already have too many people doing that, acting inhumanely. We are better than that.
 
One of my latest hurtles in my faith journey is the “fall”. People have tended to imagine this in two different ways:
  1. There was Eden (the perfect universe) until Adam and the fall, regardless if it was days or billions of years. Then both Human and Animal death entered the world.
  2. With more acceptance of evolution the idea that Eden was a special place under the protection of God within a world full of animal survival-of-the-fittest and then the fall and Adam and Eve were thrust out of the protection of God that was the Garden of Eden.
These were never satisfying to me because of the problem that the nature of matter is full of decay. The basic physical pieces of matter and the cells of our body & DNA were not made to last forever. I think the problem with 1 and 2 is that they try to maintain a single timeline, because that is how we usually see things. The past doesn’t change with what we do today.

I don’t limit God to this. I think the fall caused a complete recreation from the beginning the once permanent foundation of matter and peaceable animals were rewritten in history from the start and our evolutionary beginnings as humans made plausible. All this so that man may have his wish to be on his own apart from God as Adam’s actions pronounced louder than words.

God does not reveal Himself in a demonstrable (scientific) fashion. A huge discontinuity in the history of the earth would be discovered by man by this stage in our scientific development. That is not His intent he wants us to come to him through love not a scientific theory. Some say this would be deceiving us, but I say the history is true and Adam’s choice is true regardless that it may have occurred in a different timeline.
 
wmw said:
One of my latest hurtles in my faith journey is the “fall”. People have tended to imagine this in two different ways:
  1. There was Eden (the perfect universe) until Adam and the fall, regardless if it was days or billions of years. Then both Human and Animal death entered the world.
  2. With more acceptance of evolution the idea that Eden was a special place under the protection of God within a world full of animal survival-of-the-fittest and then the fall and Adam and Eve were thrust out of the protection of God that was the Garden of Eden.
These were never satisfying to me because of the problem that the nature of matter is full of decay. The basic physical pieces of matter and the cells of our body & DNA were not made to last forever. I think the problem with 1 and 2 is that they try to maintain a single timeline, because that is how we usually see things. The past doesn’t change with what we do today.

I don’t limit God to this. I think the fall caused a complete recreation from the beginning the once permanent foundation of matter and peaceable animals were rewritten in history from the start and our evolutionary beginnings as humans made plausible. All this so that man may have his wish to be on his own apart from God as Adam’s actions pronounced louder than words.

God does not reveal Himself in a demonstrable (scientific) fashion. A huge discontinuity in the history of the earth would be discovered by man by this stage in our scientific development. That is not His intent he wants us to come to him through love not a scientific theory. Some say this would be deceiving us, but I say the history is true and Adam’s choice is true regardless that it may have occurred in a different timeline.
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I totally agree with this and it reminds me of the joke that Rossum posted earlier in this thread. God communicated to us in ways that we could understand. Also, he told us what we needed to know, not necessarily every little detail of quantum mechanics or whatever. So yes I also believe that the fall caused changes we probably cannot even comprehend, possibly including changes to the “space-time continuum” to borrow a phrase from Star Trek. 🙂
 
One of the items that was responsible for my period as an atheist was the theory of evolution. I had some Presbyterian Sunday School as a youngster, but did not have a family with a religious background. Since we were taught the theory of evolution at school, and it seemed to make some sense, ergo the Bible was not true.

So when I did become Christian (basically as a result of the tail end of the worst period of my life, plus a spiritual push), I became a bit of a Creation Science fanatic for a while. At the time Creation Science was just getting a real go-on around Brisbane where I lived. Ken Ham, the Creation Museum founder, is a native of Brisbane, and he was still based here at that time circa early to mid 1980’s.

And their arguments seemed to hold water, and in many cases still do.

But I’m not so interested now, and where I do part ways with the Creationists is their assumption that the theory of evolution is responsible for the lack of faith in the church. I’m also cynical about claims Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and I haven’t got much time for the seven days creation bit. I couldn’t give a stuff about that part of it because it’s unprovable to say the least. And I’m not a fundamentalist.

I suppose I’m sitting on the fence at the moment. I’d dearly like to know the whole story, but I suppose God’s given us the job of working that out.

Personally I think He created a lot of the universe ‘in situ’, giving it a bit of a shove if you like some time after the big bang.

And I don’t think it’s anywhere near as old as we might think.

But proving it is another matter.

Becoming Catholic hasn’t made any difference to my perception of origins. The question had no bearing on my decision to change camp. If anything, I went through a bit of a repeat of my earlier Christian conversion, only this time it was a sense of disillusionment with the protestant churches plus a repeat of the “spiritual push”.

As for God not being the author of “death”, “death” is an absolute necessity if you’re going to have any number of creatures and allow them to breed. I think I remember reading years ago that if a single pair of flies were allowed to breed, and all their progeny survived, and bred in turn and so on, in a single year, there would be a ball of flies with the sun at the centre and the earth at the edge. Each female fly can lay 9000 eggs in its lifespan of about a month. If half of these are surviving females, then just on month later there would be 40 million more eggs. A mere month after that the total would be 180 trillion etc.

Death is a necessity if the biological world was to survive.

If God’s interested in a lot of people in heaven and the Scripture seems to indicate He is …

Revelation 7:9 Good News
After this I looked, and there was an enormous crowd—no one could count all the people!
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… then if He is going to use the limited resources of earth to cater for all these humans, the only way He can do it is to use recycling, so to speak.

As it is, the number of people who is estimated to have ever lived is alleged to be already over 100 billion. Hence “… no-one could count all the people…”.

The “death” the curse brought was spiritual death, not physical death. That’s built in, and always has been.

I know this much though - there’s no way that biological life, with all its complication, came about by sheer chance, any more than the physical constants which govern our universe and make it possible for life to exist, came into existence by chance. They were designed, and they’re set in place with indestructible legality.

The moral laws are the same - we seem to be able to break them with ease, but at the judgement we’ll find they break us, to quote Thomas Merton who likened the fate of unrepentant sinners to burning nessus shirts which they cannot remove.
 
Yes.

Science and evolution and Christianity and the Bible. All together, with no conflicts.
 
In the Catholic Church, Genesis 1: 26-27 is key to human nature.

Unfortunately, the evolution model, which is o.k. regarding plants, ants, and porcupines, is now applied to the spiriutal soul aspect. Realistically, the original concept of evolution is now split into two sections, one of which is popularly known as the Science of Human Evolution.

In addition, the Catholic Church opposes the theory that the original humanizing population was in the hundreds to thousands. Catholicism holds to an original population of two. Unfortunately, apparently, many, not all, people have not looked at evolution since the days of the Piltdown Man.
 
wmw said:
One of my latest hurtles in my faith journey is the “fall”. People have tended to imagine this in two different ways:
  1. There was Eden (the perfect universe) until Adam and the fall, regardless if it was days or billions of years. Then both Human and Animal death entered the world.
  2. With more acceptance of evolution the idea that Eden was a special place under the protection of God within a world full of animal survival-of-the-fittest and then the fall and Adam and Eve were thrust out of the protection of God that was the Garden of Eden.
These were never satisfying to me because of the problem that the nature of matter is full of decay. The basic physical pieces of matter and the cells of our body & DNA were not made to last forever. I think the problem with 1 and 2 is that they try to maintain a single timeline, because that is how we usually see things. The past doesn’t change with what we do today.

I don’t limit God to this. I think the fall caused a complete recreation from the beginning the once permanent foundation of matter and peaceable animals were rewritten in history from the start and our evolutionary beginnings as humans made plausible. All this so that man may have his wish to be on his own apart from God as Adam’s actions pronounced louder than words.

God does not reveal Himself in a demonstrable (scientific) fashion. A huge discontinuity in the history of the earth would be discovered by man by this stage in our scientific development. That is not His intent he wants us to come to him through love not a scientific theory. Some say this would be deceiving us, but I say the history is true and Adam’s choice is true regardless that it may have occurred in a different timeline.
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I am more from the allegorical camp, so I see the story differently. I am not sure how much is literal and how much is not. I am that way with many stories from the bible and I’m okay with that. I enjoy reading opinions from Catholic scholars on the subject and the many ways to view the story of Adam and Eve. It seems that there are many more lessons to learn than I first thought. All I can gather is that at some point, there were the first parents. The first two humans with the gift of intellect that made it possible for them to know and love God. The first with non-animal type souls. It’s isn’t something you can dig up. I have never heard of an animal, even our closest, most clever ape friends, who could knowingly pray and worship God. Animals praise Him by just being animals, but to actually consciously love God is a whole different matter. We are different. We can study cadavers all day long but that doesn’t give us the answer (brings to mind some very creepy experiments where early scientists tried to find the weight of a soul). Why are we so aware of God? Why can we alone know Him? Why can we alone sin? The only answer to that is God Himself making us in His image and giving us not only His gifts, but responsibility for the earth and its creatures. No other animal has the power to effect the earth as we do or even worry about its future. The way we have cared for the earth shows that we haven’t been worthy of even the hard land that we were given when we lost the Garden.
 
I am of the “camp” that believes the Bible tells a literal creation story. I just believe that God is an all-powerful deity and to “explain away” the 7 literal 24 hour days puts limits on what He can do.

Sorry if this isn’t written clearly enough…I’ve been having some brain malfunctions the last few days due to an illness I have. There have been several times I have wanted to post and I didn’t because I couldn’t find the “appropriate” words.

Thanks all,

I enjoyed reading others’ perspective

Rita
 
Catholic_farmer said:
I am more from the allegorical camp, so I see the story differently. I am not sure how much is literal and how much is not. I am that way with many stories from the bible and I’m okay with that.
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This pretty much sums up the way I feel. How much of the story is literal and how much is allegorical is of little importance to me. Either way, it doesn’t change the faith or the truth of what has been written. IMHO, it is when we try to make the bible into something it is not that we get into trouble.
 
Evolution is a complex subject. Often times abiogenesis gets mixed into the discussion. Regarding that I don’t think life can come from non-life. There is also the distinction of what some call micro and macro evolution. I certainly do agree that some change can occur within a species. What I do not believe is that new and more advanced species can come from less advanced species. I would say I don’t believe in evolution in any meaningful sense.

I don’t have the opinion that creation was a literal six days. I don’t have the opinion the universe is young, maybe just thousands of years. I also don’t have the opinion the universe is something like 14 billion years old. I just don’t have opinions about the issue. I do find some of the counter claims against what is typically held up as the scientific age of the universe to be interesting.

My faith doesn’t rest on a certain age of the universe or some form of evolution taking place or not taking place. I consider it difficult to have certainty about knowledge of past historical events. This includes historical events within the lifetime of mankind. I’m certainly not an utter skeptic regarding historical events. I just find that often much more is made from evidence or a lack of evidence than is justified. Very often widely accepted facts of history are later repudiated.
 
From the Traditional Christian view of the initial chapters of Genesis, these links give a current Catholic position.

The new expanded third edition of the book Origin of the Human Species by Catholic author Dr. Dennis Bonnette includes the article “The Myth of the “Myth” of Adam and Eve” as Appendix One. Appendix Two is “The Philosophical Impossibility of Darwinian Naturalistic Evolution”

amazon.com/Origin-Human-Species-Third-Edition/dp/1932589686/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1412467670&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Origin+of+the+human+species++Bonnette

Links to two articles.

Current Catholic article published in Crisis Magazine online: crisismagazine.com/2014/d…e-really-exist

Additional Catholic article
hprweb.com/2014/07/time-to-abandon-the-genesis-story/

Informative Catholic Website

drbonnette.com/
 
grannymh said:
From the Traditional Christian view of the initial chapters of Genesis, these links give a current Catholic position.

The new expanded third edition of the book Origin of the Human Species by Catholic author Dr. Dennis Bonnette includes the article “The Myth of the “Myth” of Adam and Eve” as Appendix One. Appendix Two is “The Philosophical Impossibility of Darwinian Naturalistic Evolution”

amazon.com/Origin-Human-Species-Third-Edition/dp/1932589686/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1412467670&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Origin+of+the+human+species++Bonnette

Links to two articles.

Current Catholic article published in Crisis Magazine online: crisismagazine.com/2014/d…e-really-exist

Additional Catholic article
hprweb.com/2014/07/time-to-abandon-the-genesis-story/

Informative Catholic Website

drbonnette.com/
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Thanks for the links. Excellent.
 
Adamski said:
I really wanted to get all Christians perspective. I used to be a strong believer in evolution and I am currently believing in it a lot less I know the options of belief in the catholic faith what are people’s options and why
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I am not Christian but that issue concern in faith(ignore diffrences between Islamic and Catholic faiths because alls believe in God) so I can tell something.

The Bible tell that God create everything so there are not such randoms actions in universe. The evolution is assumed to be conclusions of random chances. But there is not a random action even there is no a random action of an electron around nucleus. There are determined energy levels for electrons.

There is no any valid proof for evolution. Evolution is an imaginary thought of chains of permutations which have never occured. There are many conflicts of evolution and I want to tell some:

Why did evolution stop(the evolution from a species to others)? Do not disconcert that: If some practice then he can have stronger muscles.

İs there any intermediate fossile forms of species? There is no but some try to show that as if there have been intermediate forms with faked fossiles.

According to evolution all species evoluted from a primary species! If that is so then why did not emerge many different primary species with very different systems? Remember that every alives have got similar origins( blood, cells, wings, eyes etc)!

Can any one show that a cell to be consisted by random chances? Can human create a cell from nothing? İs not cells consisted from an other cell? İs there a cell which consisted by random chances? Could any one show that?

The structures(bodies) of alives are very complex systems. For example if there is no mind then the all other systems cannot run. And if there is no blood(energy in it) then the brain cannot run. İf there is no stomach there is no raw materials for blood. So so so… Such complex systems cannot occur with random chances.

The science is the finding and discovering laws of God in the universe. And there is no place for random chances in science. But some hold and give more importance for random chances more than observation! So where’s scienctific knowledge must be conclusion of exact observations? To accept an evolution which assumed to be occured by random chances is the contrary and opposite of science. As a scientific knowledge and observation there is no random actions in the universe. If there had been such random actions theuniverse would not go on anymore. There is absolute arrengements and orders in ueverywhere which are manifestations of God’s laws.
 
I have read recently that neandrathals might have actually been so close to humans they interbred (Richard Dawkins own words) so does that through out the possibility of them being a transitional species between us and apes
 
Adamski said:
I have read recently that neandrathals might have actually been so close to humans they interbred (Richard Dawkins own words) so does that through out the possibility of them being a transitional species between us and apes
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There are not enough transitional form of fossiles. There are a little which cannot support such a claim especially for such a scientific issue. And also some patterns of fossiles might be faked or may belong to species which became extinct. Many species have became extinct.

If there had been transitional forms of alives some specific species might stay until today but there are not.

Which of species is incomplete and imperfect? Non. All species are perfect and they were always perfect as much we can learn from fossiles. I mean God do not make flawed job. If the structures and bodies of alives were consisted by random chances then there would be many monstrous alives but there is not. Every body of alives has a perfect art, beauty, order and life etc.

If the evolution was effectual it must be always effectual. But we cannot see any ape for thousand years which is being evoluted to human! What stop evolution?

The evolution theory is not recognised and generally accepted by all scientists and biologists. So the evolution is not a valid law of science.

The evolution cannot explain how genders (male and female) can be occured.

The evolution cannot explain the instinct. The instinct is a kind of inspiration from God.

Some struggle very much to prove evolution with fantastic illustrations and that is all not much more.
 
Adamski said:
I have read recently that neandrathals might have actually been so close to humans they interbred (Richard Dawkins own words) so does that through out the possibility of them being a transitional species between us and apes
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I think the current accepted scientific theory is that Neanderthals and modern Humans both evolved separately from a common ancestor.
There is genetic evidence for interbreeding, most people of European and Asian origin have some genetic material that is linked to Neanderthals, while those modern humans of African origin have little to no genetic similarities to Neanderthals.

This is because Neanderthals evolved in Eurasia around the same time that modern Humans were evolving in Africa.
It was only when modern Humans left Africa and met the Neanderthals in Europe that they interbred, so those with African heritage do not have ancestors who left Africa, and would have never met a Neanderthal.
 
To be Catholic there is quite a bit of freedom of Belief in many things. Evolution is not completely eliminated, but it must confine itself into the established doctrines of the Catholic Church or you are beginning to stray from the faith. We only have faith because we can count on the guidance of the Holy Spirit of the Church in that her doctrines guide us to Jesus’ teaching.

What the Church has established are at least these 23 points on the initial 3 chapters of Genesis. These supplied by our Forum Elder, username “buffalo”. I reprint this list often when the discussions get too much about opinion and folks loose track of what the church says we must believe from these passages of Genesis.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=11960539&postcount=12


  1. *]The first man was created by God. (De fide.)
    *]The whole human race stems from one single human pair. (Sent. certa.)
    *]Man consists of two essential parts–a material body and a spiritual soul. (De fide.)
    *]The rational soul is per se the essential form of the body. (De fide.)
    *]Every human being possesses an individual soul. (De fide.)
    *]Every individual soul was immediately created out of nothing by God. (Sent. Certa.)
    *]A creature has the capacity to receive supernatural gifts. (Sent. communis.)
    *]The Supernatural presupposes Nature. (Sent communis.)
    *]God has conferred on man a supernatural Destiny. (De fide.)
    *]Our first parents, before the Fall, were endowed with sanctifying grace. (De fide.)
    *]The donum rectitudinis or integritatis in the narrower sense, i.e., the freedom from irregular desire. (Sent. fidei proxima.)
    *]The donum immortalitatis, i.e.,bodily immortality. (De fide.)
    *]The donum impassibilitatis, i.e., the freedom from suffering. (Sent. communis.)
    *]The donum scientiae, i.e., a knowledge of natural and supernatural truths infused by God. (Sent. communis.)
    *]Adam received sanctifying grace not merely for himself, but for all his posterity. (Sent. certa.)
    *]Our first parents in paradise sinned grievously through transgression of the Divine probationary commandment. (De fide.)
    *]Through the sin our first parents lost sanctifying grace and provoked the anger and the indignation of God. (De fide.)
    *]Our first parents became subject to death and to the dominion of the Devil. (De fide.) D788.
    *]Adam’s sin is transmitted to his posterity, not by imitation, but by descent. (De fide.)
    *]Original Sin consists in the deprivation of grace caused by the free act of sin committed by the head of the race. (Sent. communis.)
    *]Original sin is transmitted by natural generation. (De fide.)
    *]In the state of original sin man is deprived of sanctifying grace and all that this implies, as well as of the preternatural gifts of integrity. (De fide in regard to Sanctifying Grace and the Donum Immortalitatus. D788 et seq.)
    *]Souls who depart this life in the state of original sin are excluded from the Beatific Vision of God. (De fide.)
 
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