Any young earth creationists out there?

[edwest211]

"However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.[11] Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.

“37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]”

 

[mVitus]

Yes or no: Is the Catholic Church heretical?

 

[catholic1seeks]

Two points:

1. I think most on here readily recognize the necessity of monogenism, insofar as all of humanity stems from the first human couple.

But this is simply not addressing what some on here are asserting: That Adam and Eve must be specially created by God. Over and over and over again, it is the soul that must be specifically created and infused: The biological development of the body is allowed. It is even compatible to affirm multiple organisms that had the human body but were not human.

1. And also: What is your response by further quoting the encyclical supposed to signify?

 

[edwest211]

I think it’s plain. There were no other Adams. The soul is not a scientific concept so it means nothing as far as science is concerned. The origin of Adam (from the slime/dust of the earth), and Eve being fashioned/created from Adam’s side involves something most posters here seem not to want to touch - miracles. But that’s not scientific either.

The Church teaches God created everything from nothing, but that does not seem to be an issue. Human origins is the issue. So, hominids or the relatively recent ‘God dropped souls into two random almost humans,’ which has no basis.

 

[catholic1seeks]

Plenty of faithful, orthodox Catholics are aware of the very encyclical document you cite, as well Catholic teaching on the matter in general, and also see no problem with the biological polygenism I’ve talked about. I recommend looking over the following articles dedicated to the topic at hand:

• Edward Feser, a renowned Catholic philosopher and Auinas expert. HERE.

• The implications of all of this should be obvious. There is nothing at all contrary to what Pius says in Humani Generis in the view that 10,000 (or for that matter 10,000,000) creatures genetically and physiologically like us arose via purely evolutionary processes. For such creatures – even if there had been only two of them – would not be “human” in the metaphysical sense in the first place. They would be human in the metaphysical sense (and thus in the theologically relevant sense) only if the matter that made up their bodies were informed by a human soul – that is, by a subsistent form imparting intellectual and volitional powers as well as the lower animal powers that a Planet of the Apes-style “human” would have. And only direct divine action can make that happen, just as (for A-T) direct divine action has to make it happen whenever one of us contemporary human beings comes into existence.

• Fr. Robert Spizter, SJ, whose very ministry involves reconciling science and faith. He is often featured on EWTN. HERE.
• Thomastic Evolution, a website dedicated to exploring evoliution through the lens of faith. HERE.

I feel rather comfortable taking their lead.

 

[Carmel]

Yes.

 

[catholic1seeks]

From the above linked Thomstic Evolution site:

Significantly, Pope Pius XII makes no mention of the Genesis text in his encyclical, because for Catholics, the disputed question over the historicity of Adam and Eve does not involve a debate over whether the biblical text should be interpreted literally or not. As we have discussed in earlier essays in this series on evolution and Christian faith, for the Catholic Christian, biblical interpretation is a work of both faith and reason that seeks to read the sacred text in line with all truth, theological and scientific, both of which have their source in God. It is a task that is guided by the Holy Spirit who continues to work within and through His Catholic Church.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that the International Theological Commission chaired at that time by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, published a theological statement on evolution that is open to polygenism. In its document, Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God, published in 2004, the Commission acknowledges that the scientific evidence points to a polygenic origin for our species: “While the story of human origins is complex and subject to revision, physical anthropology and molecular biology combine to make a convincing case for the origin of the human species in Africa about 150,000 years ago in a humanoid population of common genetic lineage” (no. 63). We will discuss this scientific evidence in the next essay in this series on evolution and Christian faith.

The Commission then makes the following theological claim: “Catholic theology affirms that that the emergence of the first members of the human species (whether as individuals or in populations) represents an event that is not susceptible of a purely natural explanation and which can appropriately be attributed to divine intervention” (no. 70, my emphasis). This suggests that both monogenism and certain types of polygenism remain viable theological opinions for Catholic theologians seeking to be faithful to the doctrinal tradition.

At the very least, it is hard to deny that the teachers of the Catholic Church — the magisterium, or at least those representative bodies that do the “thinking” of the magisterium — are moving forward with the findings of science with regards to evolution.

 

[twf]

Historically they did.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Speaking of the human brain …

I know this was a while back, but I’d like to respond, if I may. Your statistics and numbers are no doubt as accurate as they can be, and you end by saying:

Now, that the human brain, not to mention the rest of the human body, evolved from inanimate rocks together with blind or mindless, inanimate forces and processes of nature on earth is in my opinion beyond belief and unreasonable to say the least.

Sounds perfectly reasonable. However - and here I hope you’ll allow me to use the wikipedia table of neurons - a human has about 86 billion neurons, and a chimpanzee about 26 billion. If the common ancestor of us both had about 20 billion, then it does not seem to me a very unreasonable idea that simply increasing a number of neurons is possible, just by what some would call gradual variation. The mechanism for forming them, and their synaptic connections, was after all, already in place.

A rat has about two hundred thousand neurons, but again, mere multipllication does not seem too improbable, given that the structure was already in place. And the first mammals were small rat-like creatures.

You can see where this is going. An amphioxus is a very primitive chordate, but even an amphioxus has twenty thousand neurons, and a jellyfish has five thousand.

All in all, it does not seem to me absurd that once any number of neurons had evolved, any future expansion of numbers was possible. So if you’ll forgive me guessing, what you really find difficult is not those massive numbers, but that neurons could have evolved art all.

The earliest nerves may have appeared in things like sea-squirts, rather random collections of cells with a tube through the body. They are very similar to other blob-like creatures, with a cavity, but not a tube.

And so on. Creationists usually look at the beginning and the end, and cannot envisage any possible linkage, but a line of pictures of, say, a hundred million generations of my ancestors, maybe 2000 kilometres long, would show no discernible difference between any two adjacent pictures, although I am at one end and a single transparent blob less than 1mm across at the other.

I do not find this either unreasonable or beyond belief.

 

[edwest211]

“moving forward”? I think that’s just simply moving “in the desired direction.” “divine intervention” is not a scientific concept and has no scientific backing. Further, I believe in divine intervention and that is my issue with all this.

From Humani Generis:

"5. If anyone examines the state of affairs outside the Christian fold, he will easily discover the principle trends that not a few learned men are following. Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution, which has not been fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences, explains the origin of all things, and audaciously support the monistic and pantheistic opinion that the world is in continual evolution. Communists gladly subscribe to this opinion so that, when the souls of men have been deprived of every idea of a personal God, they may the more efficaciously defend and propagate their dialectical materialism.

“6. Such fictitious tenets of evolution which repudiate all that is absolute, firm and immutable, have paved the way for the new erroneous philosophy which, rivaling idealism, immanentism and pragmatism, has assumed the name of existentialism, since it concerns itself only with existence of individual things and neglects all consideration of their immutable essences.”

Fast forward to Pope Benedict:.

"In the book, Benedict reflected on a 1996 comment of his predecessor, John Paul II, who said that Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution were sound, as long as they took into account that creation was the work of God, and that Darwin’s theory of evolution was “more than a hypothesis.”

“The pope (John Paul) had his reasons for saying this,” Benedict said. “But it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.”

Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.

“We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory,” he said."

Like any good University professor, he points out that we cannot haul all those generations into the lab and that “It is impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.”

There you have it.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

If Darwinism is true, why is there not presently life forms or simple cell forms evolving or spontaneously appearing out of the inanimate earth, rocks, or water now? Nobody has ever observed such a thing nor does it appear scientists expect too as their not out in the field day and night to see if life will spontaneously appear anywhere but they are in the lab.

I think the conditions for the emergence of life are quite special, but probably not particularly unique, and that assorted ‘varieties’ of self-replicating organic entities are possible. If there ever were, then the one we are familiar with out-competed the others, and, should they form again, continue to do so. That’s why we don’t find them popping up all over the place.

I find it reasonable to assume and I do believe that God himself created life on earth as well as all the various plant and animal species we find.

Yes I know, and I find it reasonable to assume and I do believe that God created the circumstances within which the various plant and animal species we find could evolve as we see them. I have problems with the wastefulness of creation for extinction, rather than continuous descent by normal organic reproduction.

Incidentally, if life could evolve and spontaneously appear out of the earth presently, that would sort of put a blow to the evolutionary idea that all life on earth originated from one single cell life form.

Not at all. It may well have happened. However, as I say, one form out-competed the rest

Also, if life did evolve out of the inanimate rocks, why should this have produced only one single cell life form and not many of them? Why only a single occurance of it? Maybe not all evolutionists are committed to the idea that all life evolved from one single celled life form but that seems to be the prevailing opinion I think.

No. See above. Several different varieties may be possible, ands may have occurred, but they didn’t last, at least as individual varieties. Some may have merged. That’s a quite acceptable evolutionary idea.

 

[Hugh_Farey]

Like any good University professor, he points out that we cannot haul all those generations into the lab and that “It is impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.”

This is just obsessive. We cannot haul stars into the laboratory either. Your categorisation of Science as something that can only be discovered by laboratory experiments is wrong. Very wrong. Totally wrong. You have been told this many times, by scientists who practice and teach science, but persist in obstinately defining it in your own personal way, just so that you can deny it to yourself. Not impressive.

 

[buffalo]

Quite so. My clumsiness. The teaching is indeed that the entire human race arose from a single couple, but I think it does not deny that that single couple could have been born from many ancestors - the “pre-existent and living matter”. It does deny that there were any ‘simultaneous’ humans.

Do we have among us humans walking around without an immortal spiritual soul?

 

[buffalo]

He’s God. His sense of Justice is beyond ours. And Adam and Eve were in a pre-Fall state. And when they chose sin, by definition, they had to know it was wrong. So the real question is why not.

Are there walking among us humans without immortal souls?

 

[mVitus]

Are there walking among us humans without immortal souls?

Of the trolling I could do with that idea if I were a lesser man…

But in short,evidence points against that.

 

[Techno2000]

You linked to a thread that expresses a wide range of views. Is it your view that dark skin is a curse that was gradually placed upon all Africans for the sins of their ancestors?

It’s interesting that the Acts records the supernatural evangelization of an Ethiopian and his baptism… many “blacks” were saintly Catholics at a time when Northern Europeans were barbaric pagan savages.

I believe everyone is equal in God’s eyes. Do you believe that dark skin people were somehow less evolved than white people?This is private revelations. and it might be just one scenario or alternative to the evolution reasonings that dark skin people came from apes.

 

[buffalo]

Of the trolling I could do with that idea if I were a lesser man…

But in short,evidence points against that.

How do we know? If Adam and Eve came about by evolution and God ensouled them, what did He do with the other thousands? Did we interbreed? Are there among us those without immortal soul? Original sin? Concupiscence? Many problems…

I

 

[buffalo]

reasonings that dark skin people came from apes.

Dark skin as well as yellow and red is an adaptation.

 

[edwest211]

Correct. 10 characters.

 

[edwest211]

This type of emotional response ignores the obvious. No, we cannot haul stars into the lab but we can certainly do that with human beings, including discovering that some human beings have Neanderthal DNA.

And you do not have the ability to read my mind