Creation, Thomistic Philosophy, and the Natural Sciences

  • Thread starter Thread starter Richca
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

“Do you give the horse his might?
Do you clothe his neck with strength?
Do you make him leap like the locust?
His majestic snorting is terrible.
He paws in the valley, and exults in his strength;
he goes out to meet the weapons.
He laughs at fear, and is not dismayed;
he does not turn back from the sword" (Job 39: 19-22).
 
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
(Nasa image 12/8/2017 of Messier 5 globular cluster of hundreds of thousands stars in Milky Way galaxy 24,500 light years away)

To whom then will you compare me,
that I should be like him? says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes on high and see:
who created these?
He who brings out their host by number,
calling them all by name;
by the greatness of his might,
and because he is strong in power
not one is missing (Isaiah 40: 25-26).

He determines the number of the stars,
he gives to all of them their names (Psalm 147:4).
 
Last edited:
Embed from Getty Images

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
(A Hippo wadding in water, Chobe National Park, Chobe, Botswana)

“Behold, Be′hemoth, [a]
which I made as I made you;
he eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength in his loins,
and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like bars of iron (Job 40: 15-18).

[a] rsv-ce bible - Or the hippopotamus
 
Last edited:
I used to believe in a literal “six days” creation, but this interpretation doesn’t stack up against the discoveries of science - that the earth is possibly billions of yeas old and the first life-forms appeared millions of years ago.

However, I reject biological evolution - I believe in what’s known as progressive creation, in which God began created life with relatively simple organisms, and over millions of years introduced more complex creatures, culminating in the creation of Adam, with Eve created from Adam’s rib (about 6000-10000 years ago

I believe this view is supported by the fossil record, which is characterised by sudden appearance of fully-formed creatures, stasis and a distinct lack of transitionals. The lack of transitionals is testament to separate and distinct creations. The only “evolution” that occurred or occurs is within “kinds”.

Atheists misread the fossil record as evolution because they have taken God and creation out the picture.
 
Last edited:
But dinosaurs died out millions of years before Adam was created. Behemoth existed, I believe, but it has no modern-day equivalent which we can relate to.

The book of Job also describes a Leviathan, which is a sea monster that breathed fire and smoke. I believe such a creature existed, although now extinct. A traditional Chinese dragon may well be based on this creature.
 
bobperk said:
The modernists often skip over the words “by no means enjoy such liberty” and “cannot embrace” in this passage and latch onto the phrase “now it is in now way apparent” in efforts to claim that Pius XII left open the idea of polygenism.
Click to expand...
They have to do that to accommodate the false paradigm of evolution … which in turn is necessary in order to have any chance of being accepted by the reigning cult of atheistic intellectualism.
 
Edgar said:
But dinosaurs died out millions of years before Adam was created. Behemoth existed, I believe, but it has no modern-day equivalent which we can relate to.

The book of Job also describes a Leviathan, which is a sea monster that breathed fire and smoke. I believe such a creature existed, although now extinct. A traditional Chinese dragon may well be based on this creature.
Click to expand...
Dinosaur is a recently coined word. They were called dragons.

If you missed it, earlier in the thread it was shown soft tissue was found in dino bones as well as carbon dating tests returning dates around 28000bp.
 
Last edited:
buffalo said:
Dinosaur is a recently coined word. They were called dragons.
Click to expand...
But is a dragon a dinosaur?
If you missed it, earlier in the thread it was shown soft tissue was found in dino bones as well as carbon dating tests returning dates around 28000bp.
Click to expand...
I’ve heard of that case, but there seems to some controversy as to how “soft” the tissue was.

Forgive my ignorance, but what does “bp” mean?

There are also many interesting depictions of what appear to be dinosaurs on ancient artifacts. These are hard to explain if dinosaurs became extinct million of years before humans were created.
 
That appears to be the problem. While science is bound by its own rules, it has also adopted a worldview that biological robots somehow self-upgrade, eventually resulting in man. All we think is based on a kind of programming, making the true nature of man irrelevant, partly to fit the ongoing idea that our ancestors came from the sea, we were once lemur-like creatures, then ape-like animals, and then we somehow split off from the apes to continue on as some other kind of animal.

The theory cannot be verified.
 
Word origin of ‘dinosaur’

C19: from New Latin dinosaurus, from Greek deinos fearful + sauros lizard

There are recently discovered depictions of dinosaurs in various artifacts. There is also the puzzle of polystrate fossil trees going through many strata.
 
Edgar said:
A hippo has a tail like a “cedar”?
Click to expand...
Not all scholars agree that Job is describing a hippopotamus in 40: 15-24 but that is the probable view of at least some of them. I haven’t studied or researched it much myself. God made all the animals so if we don’t know exactly the animal Job is describing here, I don’t think the hippopotamus would be in contradiction to the text. Behemoth or the Leviathan which is mentioned next may also have a spiritual, metaphorical, or allegorical meaning as referring to Satan or the devil. I believe at least some of the fathers of the Church understood the text this way as well as St Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on Job.
 
Last edited:
Edgar said:
I used to believe in a literal “six days” creation, but this interpretation doesn’t stack up against the discoveries of science - that the earth is possibly billions of yeas old and the first life-forms appeared millions of years ago.

However, I reject biological evolution - I believe in what’s known as progressive creation, in which God began created life with relatively simple organisms, and over millions of years introduced more complex creatures, culminating in the creation of Adam, with Eve created from Adam’s rib (about 6000-10000 years ago

I believe this view is supported by the fossil record, which is characterised by sudden appearance of fully-formed creatures, stasis and a distinct lack of transitionals. The lack of transitionals is testament to separate and distinct creations. The only “evolution” that occurred or occurs is within “kinds”.

Atheists misread the fossil record as evolution because they have taken God and creation out the picture.
Click to expand...
I am also a believer in ‘progressive creationism’ which I mentioned in my opening post to this thread and I agree with what you say in this post except that I don’t necessarily hold to the creation of Adam and Eve some 6000 - 10000 years ago. I mean, I think it could have possibly been earlier than that.
 
Fr. Michael Chaberek, O.P., author of several books on Catholicism, Aquinas, and evolution has an interesting new website aquinas.design he created titled ‘Aquinas on Evolution and Intelligent Design.’ Link below:

https://aquinas.design/
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top