On the contrary, I think you may have eloquently made exactly the case that I would make. You seem to have elegantly argued that believing that there would be no observable difference between a human and its non-human mother is no obstacle to being a good Catholic. I’ll go with that.
Your comment are “eloquently made” in a Rodney Dangerfield kinda way
Had to google that one.
Very true. And the first human souls had to be created immediately. They could not have developed gradually. The Catechism states, “1711 Endowed with a spiritual soul, with intellect and with free will, the human person is from his very conception ordered to God and destined for eternal beatitude.” So all should be in agreement here that the soul is an immediate, miraculous, direct creation of God.
This could be a possibility theologically, as an exercise in thought, but still seems problematic. I have read Dr. Feser’s approach. But it seems to separate God from His Creation of man. Man is God’s ultimate achievement of the visible world. No other material creature contemplates God but man. Scripture, the Fathers, many saints, and centuries of Church teaching affirmed the direct miraculous creation of Adam and Eve. We believe in many other miracles performed by the prophets, apostles, our Lord, and the saints. And while perhaps the soul itself and the mechanism of evolution may be considered miraculous by many, to a non-believer that just sounds like a cop-out, since miracles imply an action not bound by natural or scientific explanations. So if our first parents can come about through evolution which can be explained scientifically, then their creation by God was not miraculous. And the various passages of Scripture which refer to God’s creation of Adam are just talking about his infusion of a soul, apparently.
You will come around.
See?
As in the real world we witness devolution rather than evolution, the “evolution” of science has ben marked by the gradual breakdown of the truth. Those faithful to the truth will yet bring it to the forefront.
And I would take the “immediate creation of the soul”, which we as Catholics posit of God, as a reasonable way to interpret Adam having been “directly made in the image of God.” After all, it’s not Adam’s body that’s in the “image and likeness”, is it? So, then, it must be the soul.
Does your birth, having taken place billions of years (or, at, least, 6000 years) after the creation of the universe, mean that God is “separated” from your creation? If not, then why would it be so for Adam?
My take is that our first parents’ bodies can be explained by evolution scientifically… but their souls can only be explained by God’s action – which was, in your words, “miraculous”!
The fact that some belief a variety of things about evolution doesn’t mean that the theory itself is to blame. Like I said earlier: the existence of the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t prove that Christianity is faulty.
This doesn’t make sense to me.
Jesus is God. Humans are made in the image and likeness of Jesus, who is God. Therefore humans are made in the physical image of Jesus.
Yes, that is now understood.
idvolution.blogspot.com
No. That is not the theology of the Church. We are made in the image and likeness of God, not in the image and likeness of the Incarnated Second Person of the Trinity.
They are on in the same.
So… if we are in the image and likeness of the Incarnated Logos, are we all Middle Eastern? Are we all men?
Catechism
Oh, goodness me! Guess what I’m going to say next! …
His understanding of the science converted him. He invented the gen gun has many published papers and patents.