Creation, wanting answers from Catholics and NonCatholics

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isaacalsop said:
Interesting. So humans were the only immortal things on Earth?
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And more specifically, Adam and Eve were. There could have been other “humans” without souls running around outside the garden, such other “humans” would later become extinct or lost in the flood.
 
isaacalsop said:
Not really but its very interesting and good to think about. As long as we agree God created it.
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We definitely agree that God created it…but given what I have seen and heard in discussions on this subject, I disagree that it is (necessarily) good to think about it.

The Story in Genesis is just that - a story. A good one and generally accurate as far as it goes. But it is not science and should not be treated as though it were.
Consider that in Genesis there are TWO creation stories - in the first, God creates man last - after all the other animals. In the second version God creates man BEFORE He creates the plants and animals…
In the first story God takes 6 days…but in the second one can read it as being all in one day…

As for God saying it is good in the face of extinctions - - Why would God, the creator of all things worry about some extinctions? Why would such things be somehow not good in God’s eyes.
The energy and the matter that made such creatures would still exist - it would merely translate into something else. Such is the cycle of life of all material things.

We must be careful about imposing our view of what is or is not good onto God - - His thinking is so far above ours…

And this is yet another reason to simply say - I don’t care how old the earth is…God has given me enough to do just to love Him and Love my neighbor.

Peace
James
 
isaacalsop said:
Alright. Ill cut to the cheese. How old is the Earth? Im Catholic, and Ive seen people of all denominations say the earth is 6017 years old, or 13 billion. What stance does the Church hold, if any? If the Church has no stance, what do you think, and why?
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It is always as old as NOW. All thoughts and arguments are stories about where we aren’t, and only conceptual constructs. They make a great story, and some stories are more consistent and congruent with the whole of experience. Given what is most consistent with most observations, passing under the scrutiny of critical thinking, the millions-of-years story is more seamless. The other is fun as a fairy tale and good for causing turbulence. But so is the other, in one regard: it is in the same class as religion in accounting for whatever it is that makes us awake.
 
inthespirit said:
Yet almost every civilisation pre-Christianity had a better and accurate idea about the nature of creation through science and mathematics. Take the Maya. When the Church came promising eternal life or damnation, they believed that Catholics had solved the mathematical and intellectually challenging conundrum of immortality, one of their holy grails. They also believed the Church had identified and proven other planes.

At the same time all their books packed with useful equations were destroyed or taken back to Rome. So the conquered natives lost hundreds of years of painstaking research and knowledge.

As for the stolen texts, if someone did solve a formula for, say, calculating the weather months ahead of time, it would never have been made public. That kind of knowledge is power and profit.

So it is no wonder the Church doesn’t have a view on the age of the universe. It could give the game away.
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Interesting, but do you have any sources to back up those statements? We have weather satellites and the people who report the weather get it wrong, at best, 50% of the time.

Peace,
Ed
 
Jon_S said:
And more specifically, Adam and Eve were. There could have been other “humans” without souls running around outside the garden, such other “humans” would later become extinct or lost in the flood.
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There is no scriptural or scientific reason to believe that. It is a fiction that is repeated. Science cannot identify a soul or determine if it exists.

Peace,
Ed
 
It will profit you absolutely nothing to take creationists seriously. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, the universe is 13.772 billion years old. Those who claim there is a lack of “proof” for this owe it to themselves and to people who may listen to them to invest some time and energy in understanding why it is 13.772 +/- 59 million years old. The +/- thing includes a good heap of understanding as to what the proof is and why it works the way it does.

Bear in mind that when dealing with issues such as this you are often contending with people who are not well studied or well practiced in either legal or scientific rules of evidence. Everyone has an opinion, not every opinion is a good one.

It is likely better that you should ask: how good am I at forming coherent, evidence-based opinions? Then attempt to answer the question honestly. Critical thinking may not be a fun skill to develop, but we contend with questions like this because it is so lacking.

Here are a few better things to think about that will profit you much more than worrying about creationists.

Tonight - go outside, use an iPhone app to help you if you have one, and gaze in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. When you do, reflect on the fact that you are gazing at a giant black hole that astronomers call Sagittarius A* (read as: Sagittarius A-star, or Sagittarius A-prime). This is the “super” black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, it is the mass of 2.5-4 billion of our suns.

As you gaze at this place in the sky, bear in mind that our entire solar system orbits this invisible giant - we orbit it as a solar system, the way our planet orbits the sun. We have a relationship with this enormous object, 26,000 light years away.

Then go inside and think about this. No matter how large and massive a black hole is, at its center lies a “singularity”.

A singularity is a point in space which - being a point, can be found in the sense that it is at a “point” in a 3-dimensional grid, i.e.: x, y, z, or length, width, height … there is a point where this singularity is found.

But the singularity, as a point, is a “point” more in the strict sense that they taught you to think about “points” in high school geometry. A geometric point, while we think of it as a dot, actually occupies no space at all. It is in space, but it occupies no space.

The singularity at the center of Sagittarius A*, like all singularities, has no volume. It has infinite mass, yet no volume.

We occupy the same universe with such things.

Finish your meditation by considering this: we understand that the Big Bang was a singularity. Whether it was the same kind of singularity as those found at the center of black holes is a question we cannot yet answer and probably never will be able to.

Nevertheless - when the Big Bang happened the universe “expanded” from the space of a singularity - in other words not really any space at all - to millions of light years in diameter, in the space of billionths of a second. Astronomers have a way of talking about this that uses too much math and causes people to visualize the wrong thing.

It is correct to say that in the beginning there was a singularity - but we don’t really have any idea what that is, other than a point of zero volume but infinite mass. It is also correct to say that the universe “expanded” in under a second to hundreds of millions of light years in diameter … only it is only correct to say this in the sense that a billionth of a second earlier, it essentially occupied no space at all.

Understanding this - it was much less a “bang”, than a “poof”. Count a second, right now. Now, visualize that in that time the universe went from nothing … to hundreds of millions of light years in diameter.

This kind of thinking will profit you. Listening to fundamentalists exploit people’s lack of critical thinking faculties is a waste of your time. You should look at it with the same disdain as a collections agent calling you every night to collect on someone else’s debt. It is an offense against you, or in this case: your time, and your mind.
 
It’s interesting to think that only certain people are allowed to think certain things.

Peace,
Ed
 
Bluedogtalking said:
. . . (lots of awesome astronomical imaginings) . . . This kind of thinking will profit you. . .
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This is pretty much standard stuff; nothing new here.

Nor have I ever been anywhere nearly impressed with anything in science in comparison to when I saw my kids born.

So with regards to your comment, since I did not seem to happen, how should I have profited by that kind of thinking?
 
Aloysium said:
This is pretty much standard stuff; nothing new here.

Nor have I ever been anywhere nearly impressed with anything in science in comparison to when I saw my kids born.

So with regards to your comment, since I did not seem to happen, how should I have profited by that kind of thinking?
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People can think what they want I suppose- whatever works
for them.
The universe is 13 billion years old and the earth is
round or the earth is six thousand years old and flat.
 
marywarfield said:
People can think what they want I suppose- whatever works
for them.
The universe is 13 billion years old and the earth is
round or the earth is six thousand years old and flat.
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A Humanist described scenes from his imagination, informed by what he has learned in school, the media, wherever.
He seemed to feel that I should profit by his presentation of a HUGE!!! clockwork universe.
I am more impressed by a pastoral scene that has God depicted in the corner, in charge of the show.
You evidently aren’t.
As you state clearly -“whatever works”.
A universe devoid of God is meaningless, horrific, evil (if any moral value could apply), and grotesque in its boundless emptiness. Actually, without God it is simply an unreal fantasy.
Think whatever you will of people in the Church who thought the world flat and thousands of years old, but they were definitely closer to the truth than that guy.
 
Aloysium said:
A Humanist described scenes from his imagination, informed by what he has learned in school, the media, wherever.
He seemed to feel that I should profit by his presentation of a HUGE!!! clockwork universe.
I am more impressed by a pastoral scene that has God depicted in the corner, in charge of the show.
You evidently aren’t.
As you state clearly -“whatever works”.
A universe devoid of God is meaningless, horrific, evil (if any moral value could apply), and grotesque in its boundless emptiness. Actually, without God it is simply an unreal fantasy.
Think whatever you will of people in the Church who thought the world flat and thousands of years old, but they were definitely closer to the truth than that guy.
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You miss my point. Ask any creationist if the world is
flat and they will say no it is round. They know it is round
because mathematics and other sciences prove it to be so.
But when mathematics and the same other sciences
say the world is older than six thousand years they
reject it out of hand.

The Catholic Church no longer believes the world
flat and God is not insulted by that.
 
I am not and personally don’t know anyone who is a YE creationist.
The central issue as I see it, is that everything must be centred on God.
This (the Holy Spirit) is the standard of truth.
Whatever we think, whatever we do that does not have Him as our ultimate destiny, leads us astray.
 
edwest2 said:
It’s interesting to think that only certain people are allowed to think certain things.
Peace,
Ed
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What kind of passive-aggressive thing is that to say? I haven’t seem anyone censored on here, unless there is some hidden way that happens. Why don’t you be pain about what you mean? I mean I personally find much of what you post very interesting. And much I way disagree with, but then why are we here? Please point out the police to me…
 
May I strongly recommend that anyone who is interested in this invest in a copy of
Chance or Purpose? Creation, Evolution and a Rational Faith by Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn

BookTV video.

I have it and have actually discussed this very topic with the author by phone through Catholic Answers Live.

Two important points he made with me. (and in his book)
  1. When science tries to speak outside its field, particularly in matter of faith, it errs.
  2. When religion tries to speak outside of its field, particularly in scientific matters, it errs.
The Bible is not a science book, period.
 
marywarfield said:
You miss my point. Ask any creationist if the world is
flat and they will say no it is round. They know it is round
because mathematics and other sciences prove it to be so.
But when mathematics and the same other sciences
say the world is older than six thousand years they
reject it out of hand.

The Catholic Church no longer believes the world
flat and God is not insulted by that.
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The Catholic Church has never ever never believed the world is flat. That myth actually occurred by lifting information from a work of fiction, and putting it in the non-fiction section of the library. It is such an inbreed myth, that it was included in the 20 greatest myths of all time.

Incidentally I have in my possession a burnt piece of wood from a pyroclastic flow that science has told me is 5 million years old, but it still smells of sulphur, much of it is still just wood without decay. Science has KAred rocks from an eruption 50 years ago and declared them to be 3.5 million years old.

I would much rather people kept an open mind on this topic (as the Catholic Church has historically done) because the simple answer is we do not know, I don’t care what science suspects it knows, because the problem is that when evidence comes along that disagrees with all our theories (and it has and will continue to) we make that anomaly fit our preconceived entrenched theory with some magical slight of hand in order to save the pie on the face.
 
Darryl_B said:
The Catholic Church has never ever never believed the world is flat. That myth actually occurred by lifting information from a work of fiction, and putting it in the non-fiction section of the library. It is such an inbreed myth, that it was included in the 20 greatest myths of all time.

Incidentally I have in my possession a burnt piece of wood from a pyroclastic flow that science has told me is 5 million years old, but it still smells of sulphur, much of it is still just wood without decay. Science has KAred rocks from an eruption 50 years ago and declared them to be 3.5 million years old.

I would much rather people kept an open mind on this topic (as the Catholic Church has historically done) because the simple answer is we do not know, I don’t care what science suspects it knows, because the problem is that when evidence comes along that disagrees with all our theories (and it has and will continue to) we make that anomaly fit our preconceived entrenched theory with some magical slight of hand in order to save the pie on the face.
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I think I just need to add, that dating rock from an eruption seems like a futile effort. After all the rock was not created in the eruption, just transformed from mantle to crust. Converted from liquid to solid.

Just an observation.

I would love to see evidence for young earth. Maybe dinosaur bones in the same rock layer as a horse or human.

If it happened it would change science. But it hasn’t, we’ve pulled millions of fossils from the earth and not once have we found such evidence.

It seems that’s millions of reasons to believe science is at least on the right track.
 
Darryl_B said:
The Catholic Church has never ever never believed the world is flat. That myth actually occurred by lifting information from a work of fiction, and putting it in the non-fiction section of the library. It is such an inbreed myth, that it was included in the 20 greatest myths of all time.

Incidentally I have in my possession a burnt piece of wood from a pyroclastic flow that science has told me is 5 million years old, but it still smells of sulphur, much of it is still just wood without decay. Science has KAred rocks from an eruption 50 years ago and declared them to be 3.5 million years old.

I would much rather people kept an open mind on this topic (as the Catholic Church has historically done) because the simple answer is we do not know, I don’t care what science suspects it knows, because the problem is that when evidence comes along that disagrees with all our theories (and it has and will continue to) we make that anomaly fit our preconceived entrenched theory with some magical slight of hand in order to save the pie on the face.
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Slight correction. At one time the entire world thought
the earth flat-Catholic Church was no exception.
 
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