Does Darwin's theory of evolution contradict Catholicsm?

[Gorgias]

Certainly. Here is Augustine referencing scripture on the non-existence of Australia:

Hmm… is Australia on the “opposite side of the earth” from Africa?

there is no reason for believing it. Those who affirm it do not claim to possess any actual information; they merely conjecture

So… Augustine is bad because he asks for scientific proof of scientific claims? Oh, what an evil, evil man!

And here is part of the [abjuration Galileo made]

I, Galileo Galilei… having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the centre of the universe and immoveable

Dang. I just knew the Church was wrong in asking Galileo to prove that “the Sun was the centre of the universe and immoveable”! What evil, evil men, asking him to have proof for the scientific claims he made!

 

[Gorgias]

Galileo’s accusers ignored the data from the real world.

Was Galileo lying when he said “I provided arguments, but not proof”?

 

[Cruciferi]

Don’t declines in populations decrease diversity and increase inbreeding? Do endangered species magically adapt and rebound without help or significant changes in their favor? Let’s say 90% of a certain pigeon are annihilated how will the remaining 10% evolve with such small diversity. Magic perhaps? The flying speghetti monster I assume. There’s no coming back from extinction unless you’re assuming God intervenes.

 

[niceatheist]

niceatheist:

Yes, as pretty much every biologist is. But if you want to actually understand where the research is, rather than just shutting your eyes and covering your ears, watch the videos. You don’t have to agree with it, but it could at least inform your criticism.

Theories that can’t be tested are just worthless talk.

So I take it you haven’t watched the videos and know nothing about modern abiogenesis research. Does that about sum up where you coming from on this?

 

[niceatheist]

Techno2000:

If you don’t believe in the supernatural, the Devil has already got you.

If I didn’t believe in a supernatural Creator, I would probably conclude that humans evolved from grubs too (or was it from bugs?). But I wouldn’t need to understand how such a thing could happen … probably because without God life would seem meaningless, so why care about how life evolved? Add science to meaninglessness and you still have meaninglessness.

Your ignorance of evolution continues to astound me.

 

[rossum]

So… Augustine is bad because he asks for scientific proof of scientific claims? Oh, what an evil, evil man!

No, Augustine was correct there. He was wrong to reference scripture further on:

“For Scripture, which confirms the truth of its historical statements by the accomplishment of its prophecies, teaches not falsehood; and it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man.”

Dang. I just knew the Church was wrong in asking Galileo to prove that “the Sun was the centre of the universe and immoveable”!

You left out the rest of the abjuration:

“… and that the Earth was not the centre of the same and that it moved”

The Church was definitely wrong to teach that.

It is wonderful what you can do if you leave out part of a quote, you know, where the Bible says, “There is no God”.

rossum

 

[Gorgias]

Don’t declines in populations decrease diversity and increase inbreeding?

They can. However, that’s not the claim you were making. You dismissed evolution due to mass extinction events. Once a species is gone, it’s gone.

However, that doesn’t mean that evolution stops for the remaining species.

Let’s say 90% of a certain pigeon are annihilated how will the remaining 10% evolve with such small diversity.

OK. Different question, then.

I’m not sure that you’re embracing what evolution is suggesting, however. When a new species evolves, how many members of that species do you presume exist? And, given the low number of that species and the extremely small diversity (umm… “one” is about as non-diverse as it gets, wouldn’t you say? ), evolution still manages to take place! After all, diversity isn’t the (name removed by moderator)ut to evolution, it’s the output of its processes. So, even if 90% of a given population is killed off, we would expect that the remainder of the population to continue to exhibit the processes we call by the umbrella term “evolution.”

Magic perhaps? The flying speghetti monster I assume.

Perhaps. I betcha the FSM is involved in some way or another. Glad you’re dealing with this rationally and without facetious close-mindedness.

There’s no coming back from extinction unless you’re assuming God intervenes.

Why would we presume it would “come back”? If species A evolves to species A’, and then A’ dies off, we wouldn’t expect A’ to magically reappear. (Conversely, if certain environmental conditions were what gave rise to A’ in the first place, and those environmental conditions continued to exist after ‘mass decimation event’, then wouldn’t we expect that similar features would re-appear in the extant population?)

 

[Glark]

Here is Augustine referencing scripture on the non-existence of Australia:

Well, I live in Australia and I can reliably inform you that it doesn’t exist.

 

[Glark]

Your ignorance of evolution continues to astound me.

What do you mean?

 

[Glark]

So I take it you haven’t watched the videos and know nothing about modern abiogenesis research. Does that about sum up where you coming from

Let me know when abiogenesis scientists can produce life in a test tube - life that can also reproduce. Anything short of that is just paper science and empty talk.

 

[niceatheist]

When you say we evolved from a “grub”, it indicates you have little or no knowledge of vertebrate evolution. “Grub” isn’t even a meaningful taxonomical description, since it could probably refer to any number of species from many different branches of Animalia.

If you want to criticize evolutionary biology, shouldn’t you at least be somewhat familiar with it, and its specific claims. It would be like some of more ignorant fellow atheists going around accusing Christians of worshiping “Zombie Jesus” or whatever other insulting term they bring to mind, with no appreciation of the Church’s long history, its actual beliefs on Jesus’ death and resurrection, or the meaning of his sacrifice. You would rightfully feel that anyone saying something like that had willfully missed the point, and was really just trying to be provocative for no other reason than to create a strawman of Christianity for the purposes of mockery.

So that’s what I feel about someone taking an intricate and well-supported theory like evolution by invoking fallacious strawmen of its claims for little more purpose than polemics and mockery.

 

[niceatheist]

niceatheist:

So I take it you haven’t watched the videos and know nothing about modern abiogenesis research. Does that about sum up where you coming from

Let me know when abiogenesis scientists can produce life in a test tube - life that can also reproduce. Anything short of that is just paper science and empty talk.

We can’t produce a black hole or continental drift in a test tube, so why suddenly do the goal posts have to be moved for abiogenesis research? And have you familiarized yourself with the theory at all?

 

[Glark]

I can also quote Dr. Patterson:

“In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil ‘missing links’, such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . .”

– “Evolution” Colin Patterson (1978)

Regarding the fossil record of horses:

Niles Eldredge, biologist and paleontologist, co-author of Punctuated Equilibrium:
“I admit that a lot of that has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true. For instance, the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs (in the American Museum) is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly because the people who propose these kinds of stories themselves may be aware of the speculative nature of some the stuff. But by the time it filters down to the textbooks, we’ve got science as truth and we’ve got a problem.”

George G. Simpson: “The uniform, continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the hearts of generations of textbook writers, never happened in nature.”

Bruce McFadden, FL Museum of Natural History and U. of FL: “… over the years the fossil horses have been cited as prime example of orthogenesis [“straight-line evolution”] … it can no longer be considered a valid theory … we find that once a notion becomes part of accepted scientific knowledge, it is very difficult to modify or reject it.”

 

[Glark]

People receptive to the evidence for evolution are likely to be receptive to the Big Bang theory or similar models for the history of the universe. Perhaps the Big Bang is the manifest sign of the initial work of creation? And the evidence is that the conditions of the universe at the time of creation, and for a considerable length of time thereafter, were not suitable for any form of life. Life appeared much later.

There are separate and distinct stages of “creation”. As the Catholic Encyclopaedia points out:-
the “First Creation” is described in Genesis 1:1-2 … “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth …”;
the “Second Creation” is described in Genesis 1:3-31 … the “six days” of creation.

Obviously, in Mark 10:6, the writer is referring to the Second Creation.

 

[niceatheist]

rossum:

I can also quote Dr. Patterson:

“In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil ‘missing links’, such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . .”

– “Evolution” Colin Patterson (1978)

Regarding the fossil record of horses:

Niles Eldredge, biologist and paleontologist, co-author of Punctuated Equilibrium:
“I admit that a lot of that has gotten into the textbooks as though it were true. For instance, the most famous example still on exhibit downstairs (in the American Museum) is the exhibit on horse evolution prepared perhaps 50 years ago. That has been presented as literal truth in textbook after textbook. Now I think that that is lamentable, particularly because the people who propose these kinds of stories themselves may be aware of the speculative nature of some the stuff. But by the time it filters down to the textbooks, we’ve got science as truth and we’ve got a problem.”

George G. Simpson: “The uniform, continuous transformation of Hyracotherium into Equus, so dear to the hearts of generations of textbook writers, never happened in nature.”

Bruce McFadden, FL Museum of Natural History and U. of FL: “… over the years the fossil horses have been cited as prime example of orthogenesis [“straight-line evolution”] … it can no longer be considered a valid theory … we find that once a notion becomes part of accepted scientific knowledge, it is very difficult to modify or reject it.”

Boy you’re just pulling the quote mines of the Creationist sites. Asked and answered below:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/part3.html

 

[Glark]

you basically declare that evolution is not even in the domain of science because you can’t do it in a test tube and a labcoat (well, you can, actually, but the results will never satisfy the requirements of a creationist because speciation cannot occur that quickly).

Speciation. What does Green Warblers speciating into more Green Warblers, for example, have to do with humans evolving from bacteria?

And this is in spite of:
“Evolution by natural selection is one of the best substantiated theories in the history of science, supported by evidence from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including paleontology, geology, genetics and developmental biology.” --livescience.com

“Evolution by natural selection” is more than “one of the best substantiated theories in the history of science” - it’s a fact. Sausage dogs being bred from wolves is “evolution” by artificial selection, so “evolution by natural selection” isn’t hard to accept as reality. The biggest, toughest lion get all the girls, so he gets to pass his genes on - it’s a scientific fact.

The evidence from “paleontology, geology” could probably be explained by my so-called Gap Theory of creation - which allows for the possibility that (non-human) life existed on earth before the “six days” of creation of Genesis 1; life that may have been extinguished by a global flood similar to Noah’s flood (notice the similarities between the lifeless, watery states of the earth in Gen 1:2 and during Noah’s Flood, and notice Psalms 104:24,30 says God’s creation “renew(ed) the face of the earth.”)

The evidence form “genetics”, generally speaking, can be explained by a Creator using the same molecular “building blocks” to create very different forms of life (the use of “Cytochrome c” in cellular respiration is a good example).

Not sure what you mean by “developmental biology”, but maybe this includes Dobzhansky’s belief that human embryos have “gills” like fish. Yep, sounds like solid science to me.

 

[Glark]

And I cannot see how Mark 10:6 reconciles with Genesis 1 which clearly says that humans were not present at the “BEGINNING” but only came on the scene days later. And you also have to reconcile your Mark quote with 2 Peter 3:8 where a day is a thousand years. That puts thousands of years between the beginning and the origin of man.

Your argument is weak and doesn’t help your cause. It is clearly impossible to reconcile humans being present at “the beginning of creation” with humans not being present at the beginning of creation, but billions of years after the beginning of creation.

The writer of Mark 10:6 obviously regarded the whole six days of creation as the “beginning of creation” and he didn’t mean his words to be to be taken super-literally as you have done.

---

You need to somehow reconcile your “one day is one thousand years” theory with each day in Genesis 1 being characterised by “an evening” and “a morning” and also with the direct comparison of six literal days to the six days of creation in Exodus 29:11.

The word, “day(s)” appears more than 2000 times in the Bible, but you think “one day is a thousand years” might apply to only about six of them. An interesting approach.

I don’t think the “one day is a thousand years” quote is meant to be taken literally. It simply means God exists outside of time, so what feels like a long period of time to us humans is nothing to God.

New animals evolved before man. New animals evolved at the same time as man. New animals have evolved since man. Tell me what exact species “Behemoth” is, and I will look up the date it originated. You also need to nail down your “at the same time”.

“New animals evolved at the same time as man”? Does it mean that the same day a ape-woman gave birth to a human baby, a non-Bebemoth gave birth to Behemoth?

 

[niceatheist]

The evidence form “genetics”, generally speaking, can be explained by a Creator using the same molecular “building blocks” to create very different forms of life (the use of “Cytochrome c” in cellular respiration is a good example).

Can you think of any possible observation that would falsify your view that God did it?

 

[Glark]

Very. A Lipid bilayer bag with some chemicals inside splits into two smaller lipid bilayer bags with the same mix of chemicals inside. Both bags then absorb more chemicals from the surrounding water and grow bigger, making more chemicals in the process. Then they split again. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Disneyland. Apparently, life and reproduction are so simple that little kids with blind-folds on can do it in laboratory.

Numerically you are closer to an atheist than I am. My scriptures have tens of thousands of gods in them.

I think it’s wiser to believe the one, true God, instead of thousands of little imposters.

 

[niceatheist]

“New animals evolved at the same time as man”? Does it mean that the same day a ape-woman gave birth to a human baby, a non-Bebemoth gave birth to Behemoth?

You really know absolutely nothing about biology or evolution.