Any young earth creationists out there?

  • Thread starter Thread starter semper_catholicus
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Very far.

Nowdays, anyone can be blessed as long as they are part of the Body of Christ.

The curse that exists today is on the enemies of the people of God, as St. John the Apostle teaches us.
 
mVitus said:
Show me in the Catechism where it was a Catholic may take a geocentric or flat earth view. Or is it just common knowledge that they can?
Click to expand...
This is all getting a bit odd. The Catholic Church nowhere tells us which way up a boiled egg should be placed in an egg-cup, or whether a gentleman should ever be allowed to wear his top button done-up without a tie. I’m assuming that the Catholic Church doesn’t much care about these things. The things it does care about are either forbidden or insisted upon. Everything else is optional. Occasionally, for the clarification of doubt, the Catholic Church specifically states that something is optional, but that does not mean that unmentioned things aren’t. You may believe that the moon is made of green cheese, or that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Martin Luther King, without endangering your status as a Catholic.

So I may believe in evolution (an option that the Church does specifically state).
And you may believe in six-day Creationism (an option that the Church does not specifically state).

As it happens, I’m right, and you’re wrong, but that’s irrelevant just here.

Edit: by “you” I mean a theoretical antagonist, not mVitus personally, whom I think is an evolutionist. Just clarifying!
 
Last edited:
Glark said:
40.png
Gorgias:
Actually, that’s not what it says. The statement it makes is much more precise than that. You might want to go back and re-read it and learn what it really says.
Click to expand...
That’s not what I meant. By “only” I meant the Catechism mentions that the Genesis creation account is written in figurative language
Click to expand...
Actually, that’s not what it says, either! Again, the statement is much less broad than you make it out to be! (Please re-read it!)
, but it fails to mention that it can ALSO be interpreted literally. Therefore the CCC presents a misleading half-truth about how Genesis can be read.
Click to expand...
No. Since it doesn’t say what you’re claiming it says, therefore it isn’t doing what you claim it’s doing. 🤷‍♂️
Are you telling me you haven’t noticed anything amiss in paragraphs 283, 284? What about the parts that implies the theory of evolution is “knowledge” and a scientific “discover(y)”, for example?
Click to expand...
It doesn’t mention “evolution,” per se. It does, on the other hand, simply mention that science investigates “the origins of the world and of man”… which, of course, it does!
I mean, since when does a hypothesis qualify as knowledge and a discovery?
Click to expand...
Again, it’s not mentioning evolution, but the myriad of discoveries which science, in fact, has made!
And please don’t don’t insult my intelligence by saying #283 doesn’t mention ToE - the wording makes it perfectly clear that the science of Darwinism is included.
Click to expand...
I guess I’m insulting your intelligence, then, by pointing out that it doesn’t, in fact, speak to any conclusions or theories, but rather, merely of discoveries and knowledge gained from them.

You’re reading into the passage, friend, through a lens of your own predetermined conclusion. 🤷‍♂️
 
Last edited:
Last edited:
More helpful than your book suggestions or your random mentioning of Earth Day. Have either of these anything to do with our discussion about Young Earth Creationism?
 
Hugh_Farey said:
Since Humani Generis, successive discoveries, both of fossil remains and of course genetics, have made it less and less credible that all humans are descended from a single, exclusive couple. Although Humani Generis has not yet been formally contradicted, successive popes have modified its emphasis, and I do not believe that the majority of the members of the church still believe the “single, exclusive couple” origin of humanity. Adam and Eve are mythological.
Click to expand...
Exactly opposite. What we know now about the complexity and extensive programming makes it less plausible to believe in evolution.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
However the reason this has not (yet) been formally acknowledged has nothing to do with fossils and genes. It has do to with a dilemma which is an inevitable corollary to such an admission, namely what, if anything, is a soul. This, I believe, is still being considered, but I think that already it is less and less thought of as an object planted in a zygote. Some people are horrified at this, and think that the loss of Adam and Eve will inevitably mean the loss of the Soul, and the collapse of all Redemptive Theology. I myself don’t believe that. I think that theology will continue to enhance and find meaning in science, just as it always has, and that a clearer picture of the ‘soul’ will be more beautiful than ever before. I have no doubt that when a new theological consensus is achieved, probably in the next few years, then a new Humani Generis will be promulgated to explain it.
Click to expand...
Unlikely. Christianity rests on the fall of man and his redemption. Remove original sin and no reason for Jesus. Won’t happen…
 
It only contradicts what the “Church has taught in the past” if you absolutize, without context, various church fathers and theologians who are simply commenting on the same truth (as currently held, and as expressed in the Catechism) while ALSO assuming the details of the Genesis creation account. Don’t confuse the substance with the literary details. The Church teaches certain truths about creation and the human person, but NOT necessarily because they reflect a “literal” (literalistic) or “historical” approach to the Genesis account. Monogenism, Adam, Original Sin, Human dignity, God’s creation out of nothing, the goodness of creation, the existence of the human soul, etc., are not dependent on the Genesis account but are reflected there, in their own literary details.
 
Last edited:
For one thing, an irrational animal in a human body does not make sense. Only humans with a rational soul can be in human bodies. Accordingly, I think Pope Pius XII doesn’t use the term ‘body’ but ‘pre-existent and living matter.’
Click to expand...
It only doesn’t make sense if you assume creationism, that each individual species is distinct in the sense that it has always been distinct. But the spiritual soul is not owed to the human body. You are incorrect: There is nothing about the human body that DEMANDS an uplifting to the spiritual powers of intellect and will that we have. Catholicism, of whatever theological flavor (Thomism or not), holds a real distinction between the body and spiritual soul.
The pope here may have in mind that God could have possibly taken a single cell off some ancient primate creature, the skin for example, reworked the DNA and from that cell immediately formed the whole body of Adam from it.
Click to expand...
If that were the case, we should have no problem with evolution. What’s the ultimate difference? In your case, God is being God by directly intervening in a rather mythological way. What, I suppose in your case God is physically coming to Earth and molding man out of the mud with his own “hands”? In the case of evolution, God is still ultimately in control, but letting the secondary causes accomplish His will. So the creationist who holds the view you suggest should have no real problem with evolution of the body, unless they think God cannot work through secondary causes.
 
Exactly opposite. What we know now about the complexity and extensive programming makes it less plausible to believe in evolution.
Click to expand...
Buffalo, are you a scientist? Just curious.
 
The Genesis account is foundational to our understanding of man and further commentary from Pope Benedict and Thomas Aquinas illustrate some things a few apparently do not believe at all or consider false. Not myth but totally false. Not symbolic but totally false.
  1. God cannot perform ANY miracles. None. Not in the Old Testament and not in the New. Regarding the creation of life - God is out of the question. A) Not scientific.
  2. The Biology textbook is a secular Bible that does not align with Divine Revelation which NEVER happened. Jesus tells us Moses wrote concerning Him. The prophets write that the words of God were on their lips or in their mouth. Impossible. A) Not scientific
  3. Adam and Eve were given gifts from God that are called preternatural.

    impassibility (freedom from pain)
    immortality (freedom from death)
    integrity (freedom from concupiscence, or disordered
    desires)
    infused knowledge (freedom from ignorance in matters
    essential for happiness)
Impossible.
  1. Pope Pius XII and Humani Generis. He wrote about errors of his time. He wrote that competent persons can look into evolution and provide evidence for and against, “… 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]”
As far as others, the Pope writes:

"22. To return, however, to the new opinions mentioned above, a number of things are proposed or suggested by some even against the divine authorship of Sacred Scripture. For some go so far as to pervert the sense of the Vatican Council’s definition that God is the author of Holy Scripture, and they put forward again the opinion, already often condemned, which asserts that immunity from error extends only to those parts of the Bible that treat of God or of moral and religious matters. They even wrongly speak of a human sense of the Scriptures, beneath which a divine sense, which they say is the only infallible meaning, lies hidden. In interpreting Scripture, they will take no account of the analogy of faith and the Tradition of the Church. Thus they judge the doctrine of the Fathers and of the Teaching Church by the norm of Holy Scripture, interpreted by the purely human reason of exegetes, instead of explaining Holy Scripture according to the mind of the Church which Christ Our Lord has appointed guardian and interpreter of the whole deposit of divinely revealed truth.

“23. Further, according to their fictitious opinions, the literal sense of Holy Scripture and its explanation, carefully worked out under the Church’s vigilance by so many great exegetes, should yield now to a new exegesis, which they are pleased to call symbolic or spiritual. By means of this new exegesis of the Old Testament, which today in the Church is a sealed book, would finally be thrown open to all the faithful. By this method, they say, all difficulties vanish, difficulties which hinder only those who adhere to the literal meaning of the Scriptures.”
 
"24. Everyone sees how foreign all this is to the principles and norms of interpretation rightly fixed by our predecessors of happy memory, Leo XIII in his Encyclical “Providentissimus Deus,” and Benedict XV in the Encyclical “Spiritus Paraclitus,” as also by Ourselves in the Encyclical “Divino Afflante Spiritu.”

The constant, ongoing repetition here to ignore anything literal and call it symbolic is addressed in Part 23, above. So forget about it. Don’t keep bringing it up. Nothing’s going to change – aside from the constant repetition here that literal is bad and symbolic is good.
 
If, from all of this, your point is that Catholics cannot accept evolution, you are wrong.

And it has been shown again and again and again that Catholics can. I cannot think of ONE modern and prominent Catholic theologian, churchman, or speaker or apologist who does not at least RECOGNIZE that Catholics can accept evolution. Can you point me to one?

Take Catholic Answers, for instance: From my experience with Catholic Answers over the years (listening to radio and reading their articles), it is clear that Trent Horn, Tim Staples, Jimmy Akin, Karlo Broussard, and practically all of their speakers, guests, and writers accept evolution — or at least that Catholics can accept evolution.

I think of the great modern evangelist Bishop Robert Barron. I think of the great scientist Fr. Robert Spitzer. Again and again, I cannot think of any prominent Catholic who rejects evolution.

I think of Ed Feser and Christopher T. Baglow.

I think of Scott Hahn.

I think of John Paul II who called evolution “more than a hypothesis.”

I’m going with the International Theological Commission, led by then Cardinal Ratzinger, which acknowledged that “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.”

Again, I’m going with their lead.

Unless you’d like to call them out as heretical.
 
Last edited:
You’re allowed to go against the scientific consensus and community. You can critique it.

But my point is that Catholics can accept evolution and be faithful – to both church teaching and Scripture.
 
From Catholic Answers:

“While the Church permits belief in either special creation or developmental creation on certain questions, it in no circumstances permits belief in atheistic evolution.”
 
Aulef said:
Very far.

Nowdays, anyone can be blessed as long as they are part of the Body of Christ.

The curse that exists today is on the enemies of the people of God, as St. John the Apostle teaches us.
Click to expand...
You are misinterpreting what I wrote, the idea of evolution in society has caused people to look through that lens and surmise that black people are less evolved than white people, since I don’t believe in evolution I think it’s ridiculous. Jesus Christ has broken all curses.
 
“While the Church permits belief in either special creation or developmental creation on certain questions, it in no circumstances permits belief in atheistic evolution.”
Click to expand...
Yeah, I agree. Catholics shouldn’t adhere to atheistic evolution. Because Catholicism professes a believe in GOD…

As for evolution in general:

www.catholic.com

The Church's Stance on Evolution

The Church has never condemned the theory of evolution and has actually been fairly receptive to it: Pope Pius XII’s Humani Generis: The Teaching Authorit...
www.catholic.com www.catholic.com



www.catholic.com

The Great Creation/Evolution Debate

Catholics are free to hold basically any position on those questions so long as they acknowledge that God directly created man’s immortal soul.
www.catholic.com www.catholic.com
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top