Any young earth creationists out there?

[Dan123]

Carbon14 is produced in the atmosphere constantly.

RA-226 is formed as part of a chain of decay starting with Uranium-238 that also includes Thorium 230, Uranium-234, Radium 226, and lead. Uranium-238 has a half life of around 4.5 billion years which is around the age of the earth about a third the age of the universe.

Uranium-235 has a half life of 700 million years.

It was fun looking those up, I hadn’t actually looked through the whole uranium series so I didn’t realize how many steps there were in the series, pretty cool.

So I dunno that’s most of them perhaps you could just point me to the ones you want me to read up on because I’m not seeing the issue here.

As for the rest, I leave it to the cosmologists. I have no trouble with the idea that the math involves inferences and therefore will always mean a margin of error exists, but saying the Earth is 4.5 billion years old when it may be 4 or 5 does not mean someone saying the universe sprang into existence last Tuesday just after lunch is equally rational in their thinking.

 

[catholic1seeks]

They only see what they want to see.

Oh well.

Most Catholics know better.

 

[catholic1seeks]

@buffalo and @edwest211 and @chunkmonk still haven’t answered:

Can a Catholic be FAITHFUL to the MAGISTERIUM and also accept that biological organisms evolved over millions of years, and that the human body also evolved?

THAT. Just that. Don’t add the extra straw men of denying Original Sin or monogenism or atheistic materialism or evolutionism as a worldview. No, can a Catholic be faithful and accept that evoltion was the means God used to create the diversify of life on Earth?

Let me put it this way: WHAT BISHOP could I write to who will respond in the negative? What bishop — a member of the magisterium, the teacher of the faith — would you recommend I ask? Do you have any bishop in mind that teaches NO CATHOLIC can hold any form of macro-evolution?

Clearly not Pope Francis. Clearly not Pope Emeritus Benedict. I can’t write to them—-since they would let me accept (macro) evolution. So do tell, even in theory, what bishop would you recommend?

What teacher of the faith alive today should I ask? Since any source I give, no matter how learned or credible (like the Vice President of Theology at EWTN), is simply cast aside as heretical by you all, who would you recommend I ask? Who in the church alive TODAY should I ask?

 

[Glark]

No… it talks about scientific studies. ‘Darwinism’ (for whatever definition you give that term – since there are many out there!) is not a scientific study

One hundred and fifty years of scientific research into Darwin’s theory of evolution doesn’t qualify as “scientific studies”? Evolutionary scientists devote their whole working lives to investigating the theory of evolution and this doesn’t qualify as “scientific studies”? Sorry, but your argument is lame.

The Church isn’t discussing theories, as you claim – rather, she’s discussing the scientific studies which do, in fact, “increase our knowledge

At least you’ve got one thing right - the theory that life evolved from microbes doesn’t provide any knowledge.

Wait – a sentence that discusses the “Creator” is really talking about Darwinian evolution?!? Seriously?!?

Er, have you ever heard of theistic evolution?

No… in CCC #284, no answers are provided – instead, only questions are asked! There’s no claim of “knowledge” or of any particular scientific theory being claimed as fact!

You appear to have read this paragraph out of context. The words,
“It is not only a question of knowing when and how the universe arose physically, or when man appeared”
are obviously referring to the previous paragraph -
the “many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man”,
which are then described as “discoveries” (283).

So “when man appeared” (284) is not in question, but it is considered by the CCC to be a discovery (a fact) of evolution science.

Furthermore, “discovering the meaning of such an origin” of man pertains to the implications for Catholicism of such a scientific discovery (for what would be the point of discussing the implications of a mere theory?). Evidently, the CCC considers the claims of evolution science regarding the origins of man to be factual.

 

[Glark]

So, what is it that uses “figurative language” according to the Catechism? The account of the fall in Genesis 3 … Not the creation account.

Sorry, but you are mistaken. In at least two places, the CCC does in fact claim that the Genesis creation account in written figurative language.

Firstly, consider 337 - “God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator SYMBOLICALLY as a succession of six days of divine ‘work’ …”

Since the birth of the Church, the vast majority of Catholics interpreted the Genesis creation account LITERALLY, but the Catechism seems to be teaching that the account is not to be interpreted literally, but EXCLUSIVELY SYMBOLICALLY. The Church had always taught that the faithful may believe in a LITERAL six-days interpretation of Genesis, but the Catechism seems to be teaching that the six days are EXCLUSIVELY SYMBOLIC. Can “symbolic” also mean “literal”? Of course not - they’re polar opposites!
Where does the Catechism say the creation account can also be interpreted literally? It doesn’t - in fact, it PRECLUDES it by employing the word “symbolically”.

I don’t object to a symbolic interpretation of Genesis 1 per se, but I do object to the Catechism teaching that it is to be interpreted only symbolically, to the exclusion of the literal option.

Secondly, consider 362 - "The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once both corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE when it affirms that “then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.”

I discussed this paragraph in a previous post. Where does the Catechism point out to the reader that this verse can be interpreted literally? It doesn’t. On the contrary, it claims that only a symbolic interpretation is possible.

 

[Glark]

It also uses …

#337 - “God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator SYMBOLICALLY as a succession of six days of divine ‘work’ …” (emphasis mine).

#362 - "The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once both corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE when it affirms that “then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (emphasis mine).

By describing these accounts as symbolic, the Catechism excludes a literal interpretation.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

By describing these accounts as symbolic, the Catechism excludes a literal interpretation.

So it’s rubbish, eh?

 

[Glark]

Who is more trustworthy? The Church founded by Christ with centuries of tradition and deciding the canon if the Bible in addition to interpreting it or you, a guy with a Bible?

The former. As the Scripture says, the Church is “the pillar and foundation of the truth.”

 

[Hugh_Farey]

As the Scripture says, the Church is “the pillar and foundation of the truth.”

And yet you deny the truth of the Church’s catechism.

 

[Glark]

Sorry, I recant my “delusional” comment.

How do know “the majority of Catholics” believe microbe-man evolution is a fact?

Which Popes have declared microbe-man evolution to be a fact? Even if a Pope believes such a thing, then I believe he is in error, since it is impossible to prove it. Furthermore, as a Catholic, I’m not obliged to conform to his opinion.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Furthermore, as a Catholic, I’m not obliged to conform to his opinion.

Am I, and the Pope, obliged to conform to yours?

 

[Richca]

You know those ‘spin art’ toys that spin the paper around and kids throw paint at them and when the wheel stops the spinning motion plus the paint has combined into a kind of tie-dye pattern typically? So imagine someone who could spin up the paper and squirt paint on the paper and when it stopped spinning you saw the Mona Lisa. That would be darn impressive I think, in a certain way that may be one of the most talented artists in the world at least when examining technical skill. The ability to forsee what the paper would become while it’s spinning faster than you can process is amazing.

So you’d said we were either created as humanity, or a mutation of previous lifeforms. In short what I’m asking is, what word would best describe a creator who could create a proverbial ripple in a primordial pond that would spread throughout the eons across billions of years and trillions of generations until finally that artists true vision of man was fully realized? I think a lot of people, even nonbelievers, might say the most appropriate word to describe a being who could paint with the eternity of time itself, would be ‘god’.

I understand what you are saying and in a certain sense I agree with it. But for me, the primordial pond is the creation by God of the heavens, the earth, the seas, and all that is in them as described in Genesis 1-2. The proverbial ripple is the governance or administration of the creation at its first institution till the end of time by divine providence.

For me, it is not a matter of imagining what God can do or can’t do, but what he did do and this he has revealed to us through divine revelation through the Holy Scriptures. And the picture that God has revealed to us through the sacred writers concerning creation is not that of evolution.

The fact of the matter is that a lot of people claim to believe in evolution but it appears to not impress them, probably a majority, much about God. Besides creationists, believers in evolution can be found among all possible ranges of some sort of belief or unbelief. There are some christians, probably most atheists are evolutionists, there are agnostics, people who profess no religion, unbelievers, satanists, etc. Evolution did not impress the man most famously associated with the theory, Charles Darwin himself. He was a self proclaimed agnostic tending to atheism, an unbeliever in christianity and Christ who is the Truth. A number of his most immediate followers were atheists.

 

[Richca]

(continued)

Evolution is the predominant view among the scientific community, it’s in our schools, everywhere. But, I don’t see people flocking to our churches or mass conversions. I seriously doubt that belief in evolutionism contributed to a single christian or catholic conversion to the faith since I don’t believe it is even true although it was probably a significant factor to the loss of faith to many and disbelief in the Bible, God’s word. It’s plainly apparent that evolution does not necessitate conversion to Christ and it definitely has the opposite effect on who knows how many people. Such being the case, why would God use evolution to ‘create’ the world? In my observation, it wouldn’t be in this created order anyhow. Creation is designed by God to lead us to him and recognize him as our Creator, not away from him. On the other hand, one can’t be a creationist and be an atheist at the same time.

‘Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, 3 and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already. 4 Little children, you are of God, and have overcome them; for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. 5 They are of the world, therefore what they say is of the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are of God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and he who is not of God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error’ (1 John 4:1-6)

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Perhaps the earth is at the center of the balloon. Everything would still be moving away from us if the balloon skin is expanding. I think then all the galaxies could still be in concentric rings around us on a plane. I need to think this through…

No, the earth is not at the centre of the balloon; it, and all matter, is on the surface. But the balloon is only an analogy or metaphor. Understanding the arrangement of the many spatial dimensions is counter-intuitive, but not as difficult as it sounds.

Duh, I know the claim quite well.

I dare say. But you haven’t thought it through…

 

[Richca]

Completely false. This is a very strange assumption. The universe is expanding into what? Nothing? I don’t buy that. Even a balloon has a center point. Not rational.

I agree that the notion that the universe has no center is irrational. Anything finite has a center. According to the Big Bang theory, it appears to me the singularity is the center of the universe from which the universe exploded into smitherines in all directions. It seems to me that at least a few problems with the Big Bang Theory is that we shouldn’t be looking out in all directions and be seeing billions of galaxies and stars in all directions as far as we can see. The direction towards the singularity explosion should have few if any galaxies beyond which should be complete blackness. We shouldn’t even be seeing the CMBR. That radiation that blew out with our galaxy from the Bang should have long passed us by. The other direction we shouldn’t see any CMBR as that radiation blew out in the opposite direction. One doesn’t see light that’s moving in the opposite direction of you or has long since past you by. The CMBR is not from a singularity Big Bang. It probably has something to do with the primordial light God created when He said “Let there be light and there was light.”

 

[Nelka]

What is behind your rejection of modern science? Certainly not your Catholic faith…certainly not the teaching of the popes and magisterium. This is obviously some personal beef… your positions seem more fundamentalist Protestant than anything.

Where did Neanderthal skeletons and DNA come from? Created by Satan to deceive us?

Skeletons and dna make you believe something? So you don’t believe Moses existed because his skeleton and dna are nowhere to be seen?

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Well, no. The surface of a balloon is often chosen as an analogy for an n-dimensional object bending through another dimension, such that it is “finite but unbounded”, in that it has an area, but no edges to the area. A simple circle is another - a circle is a line of definable length, but no width or height, making it one dimensional, but bent through another dimension, so that the line has no beginning or end.

Of course, we can express the notion of the ‘centre’ of the circle or the balloon, but the centre is not part of the object, and cannot be found in the object.

The universe, as far as we can determine, is a largely three-dimensional object, but it is bent through another dimension, such that it has no centre that can be found within the universe itself. Just as a beetle crawling around a circle may have no conception of any area to its left or right, or a beetle crawling over a sphere may have no conception of any space above it or below it, so we, adventuring in any direction from earth into space, can have no conception of the dimension within which it is distorted.

Furthermore, if the circle, sphere or three-dimensional space is big enough, its curvature through the other dimension may be undetectable - literally immeasurable (although such is our precision of mensuration that we can, in fact, detect that our universe has this property).

Science fiction writers, and serious scientists, have considered what can be known about the ‘extra dimension’, the sheet of paper, the ballon, or the ‘hyperspace’ within which the universe is bent. From the point of view of the original object, extra dimensions do not exist, either in space or time, such that a beetle transferred from one side of the circle (or sphere) to another would have no appreciation that it had travelled at all, switching from one place to the other instantaneously. The same applies to our space. A successful departure from it (via the celebrated “warp-drive”) would result in arrival elsewhere instantly, without any sense of travel through space or time.

Edwest’s and Richca’s belief that “the notion that the universe has no center is irrational”, and that the universe cannot expand into nothing must be seen in the light of our own understanding of space. The universe really isn’t expending into any ‘space’, nor is there anywhere in ‘space’ that is its centre. In that sense, it really is expanding into nothing, and it really has no centre. However, in the light of ‘hyperspace’ then the nature of ‘nothing’ is not, wholly, ‘nothingness’!

This touches on the ‘nothing’ within which the Big Bang is supposed to have originated. We have already demonstrated that real nothing is inadequate to originate anything, and filled the metaphysical space with God, or the “laws of physics” or some other plausible mathematical machinery.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Skeletons and dna make you believe something? So you don’t believe Moses existed because his skeleton and dna are nowhere to be seen?

Nelka, you demonstrate here the common Creationist tactic that I was teasing Glark about a few posts ago. Begin with one observation, and reinterpret it into something clearly absurd. Please avoid it. If you are not sure of the relevance of what someone is saying, ask for clarification, do not leap to non-sensical corollaries. Skeletons that closely resemble those of people, but with some significant differences, clearly exist and can be seen in numerous universities. From these skeletons, and the circumstances in which some of them were found, and the similarity of their DNA to ours, twf and I, among millions, think that the organisms which originally possessed them were very similar to modern people. So similar, in fact, that they were able to, and did, interbreed with modern people. That is our belief. To extrapolate that into a claim that we only believe in people whose skeletons can be found is absurd.

 

[Nelka]

But God created Adam and Eve like us so why would he create Neanderthals too? It makes no sense.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

I seriously doubt that belief in evolutionism contributed to a single christian or catholic conversion to the faith since I don’t believe it is even true although it was probably a significant factor to the loss of faith to many and disbelief in the Bible, God’s word.

The rest of your post is as grammatically obscure as the sentence above, but I think I understand. I think that most young Christians nowadays are brought up in an educational culture within which evolution is accepted as the current best explanation for biological history. If they are taught evolution at school, and creationism at home or in church, in such a way that the two are seen as mutually incompatible, then these young people are forced to decide for themselves which to follow. Overwhelmingly they choose evolution. Nothing wrong with that, in my opinion. However, in rejecting Creationism, they may well also reject all the religion which goes with it, and become atheists, which is a pity. Fortunately, there are plenty of places, perhaps the majority, in which Christianity is not taught in such a way that Evolution is seen as incompatible with it, so that students do not reject one if favour of the other. I suspect that the Catholics commenting on this site are more conservative than revolutionary, but the recent poll set up by Catholic1seeks suggests that even they overwhelmingly accept Evolution.

If anybody on this site wants to prevent a slide to atheism, then repudiation of evolution is unlikely to be the answer. Religious education that allows for both a Christian God and scientific understanding would be much better, and Religious education that demonstrates how scientific understanding contributes to an understanding of God would be better still.