Does Darwin's theory of evolution contradict Catholicsm?

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Glark said:
But if you’re a Darwinist, it doesn’t matter what Genesis says - because an untestable scientific theory trumps the Bible.
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If you’re a scientist, what the Bible says has no bearing on the findings or conclusions of good science. That’s true for good catholic scientists too.
 
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niceatheist said:
If God can create any kind of universe and still have life capable of asking the question, then the fine tuning argument is meaningless. If God isn’t free to make any kind of universe capable of supporting such life, then that certainly raises some questions about the nature of omnipotence.
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This is why some people (hi Glark…) cling to the idea that everything was made as-is. I think that they feel that it makes no sense for something that is omnipotent to go through the incredibly complex processes that eventually resulted in the universe we see now.

If you were omnipotent and decided to make a car for example, do you start by looking for iron ore, digging it up and smelting it to get the necessary metals? Or do you snap your fingers and make the Ferrari appear instantly?

The ‘finger-snap’ process of creation makes no scientific sense and you really need to be a hard core fundamentalist to even contemplate it (hi again, Glark). And the process that we know occurred could include God. But I mean…omnipotent? And this is the best He could do? Which was obviously a problem for Catholics from day One. So they all get around for a brainstorming session and someone has a brilliant idea: ‘Listen guys. This is the answer we’ve been looking for! Everything is a mess and we can’t blame God for that, so I’ve come up with something I call The Fall’.

Just another variation on ‘It wasn’t me. It was like this when I got here’.
 
Rau said:
So, if evolution of species actually happens, you conclude there is no God? Such fragility of faith.
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I believe we’ve been through this before. I fail to see what Green Warblers speciating into more Green warblers has to do with humans evolving from a unicellular organism.

Perhaps if I swallow lots of LSD, the will see it (after all, I believe it was after Charles Darwin consumed a vast amount of the hallucinogen, peyote, in South America, that he came up with his wacko microbe-to-man theory).
 
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Bradskii said:
The ‘finger-snap’ process of creation makes no scientific sense
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If mIracles made scientific sense they wouldn’t be called miracles.

Life arising from mud doesn’t make any scientific sense either. So these are your only choices - believe in God or believe in magic (aka superstition).
 
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Glark said:
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Bradskii:
The ‘finger-snap’ process of creation makes no scientific sense
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If mIracles made scientific sense they wouldn’t be called miracles.

Life arising from mud doesn’t make any scientific sense either. So these are your only choices - believe in God or believe in magic (aka superstition).
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So what process do you use to differentiate something that is a miracle (something that doesn’t result from natural process, like, I dunno…magic) and something that is entirely natural?

Something tells me it’s whether you understand it or not, but maybe you’ll have another method.
 
Glark said:
humans evolving from a unicellular organism.
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Glark said:
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niceatheist:
I’m sorry, I’m going to take the findings of generations of researchers over the words of random posters on the Internet.
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In that case, you won’t have any trouble citing one evolutionary scientist who says the theory that all life on earth has evolved from unicelllar organisms has been tested and confirmed.
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This will explain everything.
 
You said God would be limited by fine tuning. How could he be limited by something he created?

God of the gaps argument is in the form of saying when we don’t know what the explanation of x is therefore we say God did it. However to say there is a transcendent cause of reality is a philosophical deduction. If the physical universe can not cause itself to exist then it needs a transcendent first cause that is not contingent or not material. This is not god of the gaps. It is a philosophical deduction.
 
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Glark said:
How do reconcile the following Scripture with billions of years of evolution:

“But from the beginning of creation, God created them male and female” - Mark 10:6

This is worth arguing about, I think.
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I think you are reading too much into this passage. Jesus is quoting Genesis to rescind Moses’ allowance of a divorce law, which was only a temporary law because of their hard hearts. He is not describing the method humans came into existence. What would you expect Jesus to say to the Pharisees? Jesus is quoting Scripture to some Pharisees who were trying to trick Jesus into going against the law of Moses which allowed for divorce. Jesus quotes them a Scripture passage from Genesis to say that God’s original law, that of one male and one female be joined by God for life goes back to the beginning of human creation and therefore supersedes Moses’ temporary law. But using this passage to try to disprove Evolution is a bit of a stretch since that is not the scope of the passage.

In addition, it must be talking about the beginning of human creation. Since under a literal interpretation of the beginning of all creation on day 1 there were no humans.
 
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fisherman_carl said:
You said God would be limited by fine tuning. How could he be limited by something he created?
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If you argue that there is only one specific way that we could exist (the fine tuning argument), then you are restricting God to setting the universe up in only that one specific way. That He had to fulfil specific conditions. Which, for an omnipotent being, is nonsensical.

And if you argue that it there is no specific way and He just chose these particular lever and dial settings at random because He could have made anything to work (practically the very definition of omnipotent), then there is no fine tuning argument available.

Which option do you prefer?
 
But if you are an omnipotent being creating a physical universe that runs by physical laws then at some point you are allowing secondary causes to come into effect that will control the movements of the universe. For instance I could string a whole lot of secondary causes between the first cause of existence and the most immediate cause of a person’s existence. Or I could string a lot fewer secondary causes between them. But, it would be arbitrary to for us to say it would be better if there were fewer secondary causes vs more secondary causes. Since the universe if it going to be physical material governed by natural physical laws it must be at some point allowed to act naturally through secondary causes. When a person is born they naturally evolve in the womb. And after birth they naturally evolve into an adult. So a kind of natural processes of evolution we already accept. No one is shocked that God does not create us all supernaturally and instantly but uses natural processes to create each individual. The question is how far back do these natural processes go? And isn’t it arbitrary to say that it would be better if they didn’t go back too far?
 
Act of divine timing or mere coincidence? Ha ha. (referring to previous 2 posts)
 
fisherman_carl said:
But if you are an omnipotent being creating a physical universe that runs by physical laws then at some point you are allowing secondary causes to come into effect that will control the movements of the universe.
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The first causes are the very physical laws of nature. The ones that are ‘fine tuned’. The ones that cannot be anything other than what they are. The ones that you say must apply. The ones, by the very fine tuning argument that you wish to make, constrain an omnipotent God.

So again, are these first order laws fixed that God must follow, in which case He is not omnipotent, or are they arbitrary, in which there is no fine tuning argument?
 
Bradskii said:
f you argue that there is only one specific way that we could exist (the fine tuning argument), then you are restricting God to setting the universe up in only that one specific way. That He had to fulfil specific conditions. Which, for an omnipotent being, is nonsensical.

And if you argue that it there is no specific way and He just chose these particular lever and dial settings at random because He could have made anything to work (practically the very definition of omnipotent), then there is no fine tuning argument available.

Which option do you prefer?
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Sounds like a false dilemma to me. The fine tuning argument is not saying that the constants of nature could not be anything else. It is asking the question why are they the way they are when they could have been something else. If you say they are that way because of coincidence then the odds are against you. If you say they are that way because of an intelligent designer then there is no longer a problem explaining the odds. The odds of our fined tuned universe for life is why the multiverse theory exists in the first place. And to say that God could have gotten any namby pamby universe to work is besides the point. Since we are only talking about trying to explain this one.
 
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