Does Darwin's theory of evolution contradict Catholicsm?

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rossum said:
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Techno2000:
Why can’t we find any animals today that are in the process of changing from one species into another species ?
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We can. Dalmatian lizards are a good example. On a slower timescale lions and tigers are also in the process of separating – Google “liger” and “tigon”. Horses and donkeys are even further separated as mules are sterile.

You can also have a look at ring species. The intermediate stages in the ring are separating, but not yet separated while the ends of the ring have separated.

rossum
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rossum
[/quote]As far as I can see lions are still producing lions and tigers are still producing
tigers, same with Horses and donkeys .
 
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IWantGod said:
The thing is, as long as you accept Micro-evolution you cannot discount the possibility that incremental changes in one kind of animal cannot result in the existence of a completely different kind of animal compared to what you started with.
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I can discount that possibility because you
  1. you don’t have enough time
  2. you don’t have that information
  3. you don’t have the technology/process
IWantGod said:
Over millions of years it is not hard to see how macro evolution could account for the differences we seen in creatures today when compared to creatures that have lived before.
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The earth is livable for about 4 billion years.
  1. No explanation how life can evolve from non-life
  2. Not enough time to evolve. Google Haldan’e Dilemma. He was an evolutionist. No wonder this has been kept out of public’s eyes for a long long time. No science guys want to talk about it.
  3. No explanation for DNA/RNA evolving. Basic building blocks of life and science has no decent explanation. How did information to assemble a cell and programmed to reproduce arise through evolution? This chicken-egg head scratcher is super tough to overcome.
  4. No species has been seen to cross family types. Without evidence it is not science. Fruit flies drosophila melanogaster after many many thousands of rounds of mutations are still fruit flies. No frog evolve to be a cow. No explanation how different lifeforms could emerge from simple one-celled microorganism in earth’s early days. See Cambrian explosion. Again not enough time, no information in existing cell to come out with new body parts nor functions, no natural process to make it happen.
After years of exploring the evidence for macroevolution, I am intellectually satisfied that these obstacles preclude a case of macroevolution. There is a Designer.
 
If the food chain is needed to support life…how did life survive without a food chain in place ?
 
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rossum said:
There are many such organisms. Our sense of smell is useless and half-formed compared to a dog’s sense of smell. Our eyes are useless and half-formed compared to an eagle’s eyes.

We can see the development of our organs in other organisms, and each organisms has a functioning and useful version of that organ. A jellyfish has functioning and useful nerves, but no brain. A Lancelet has a functioning and useful simple brain that is sufficient for it to survive.
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The word ‘useful’ implies purpose. The problem with evolution, or at least an undirected form, is that it assumes no purpose behind the changes. So with evolution we can’t really say if something is or is not useful. It just is.
 
I don’t know where to begin. The purpose of evolution isn’t to “do away with God.” The physical mechanics might lack quantifiable (empirically measurable) direction, but that does not mean God’s intent doesn’t permeate creation or that we are accidents. By accepting that the species today evolved from earlier species doesn’t mean you then have to accept an atheistic, material reductionist worldview towards reality or that there is no higher purpose. You don’t have to buy into the empiricist or scientism narrative.
 
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You can’t empirically measure value or purpose without first non-empirically judging what criteria to measure for. The scientist is right when he says that the empirical study of evolution can’t comment on purpose of organs or life (without injecting non-empirical reasoning), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t purpose. The empirical study shines light on what it can, but there are some areas it can’t go. We just need to reject the “scientism” that there isn’t anything beyond what we can measure.
 
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Wesrock said:
You can’t empirically measure value or purpose without first non-empirically judging what criteria to measure for. The scientist is right when he says that the empirical study of evolution can’t comment on purpose or organs or life (without injecting non-empirical reasoning), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t purpose. The empirical study shines light on what it can, but there are some areas it can’t go. We just need to reject the “scientism” that there isn’t anything beyond what we can measure.
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I agree that there is purpose. But lots of people who deny purpose, especially prominent supporters of evolution, litter their explanations of things with grand mythical tales of purpose. Those folks irritate me no end because they tend to be particularly haughty and look down on ‘simple minded’ theists who dare question evolution.
 
That’s. Not. How. It. Works. There aren’t any “half nervous systems.” And at the same time there wouldn’t have been a leap from nothing to exactly what we have today.

Lookong for a “half nervous system” is like saying, “Human technology hasn’t evolved over the years. If it had, where’s the half information age? Where’s the half atomic age? Where’s the half computer?” Those questions are nonsense. You had a continuation of more primitive systems which were “fully functional” for the species they belonged to, from simple chemical transfer causing so-and-so reaction to further cell and reaction specialization over the course of millions of years.
 
The first life in evolutionary theory would probably have “fed” on chemicals. That is, it would have taken in the amino acids in surrounding waters, phosphates, or what-have-you that it used in its chemical self-replication process. Though nobody knows for certain.
 
It has to work one of two ways: either a slow, gradual process, or a series of sudden jumps. Now, let’s use a metaphor like technology. Technology is a series of sudden jumps; guided by direct human action and direct human intention. The steam engine didn’t gradually evolve into an internal combustion engine, nor did the internal combustion engine just pop into being. Experimentation, trial and error, and a whole lot of “half-formed and useless” engines theoretically came before the final product was perfected.

So with technology we had plenty of failed “mutations” that only led to the perfected product because the procreative agent was the human, and not the engine itself. In a “survival of the fittest” scenario where that particular engine had to succeed in competition with steam engines and based on it’s effectiveness either continue mutating or die out forever and thus end the “evolutionary” process, the internal combustion could never have occurred. Because the non-functioning or half-functioning internal combustion cannot compete with a fully formed steam engine.

Technology only “evolves” because the human can scrap the failed engine and start again. With organisms, that doesn’t work. If you trash the progenitor then you trash all of it’s progeny too.

So let’s take mammary glands. They exist now, but at one point in the past, they didn’t exist anywhere. We have an organism that has no mammary glands itself but is the progenitor of all mammary gland possessing organism. It must either:
  1. have given birth to an organism with fully-formed and functioning mammary glands
    Or
  2. given birth to an organism with something that isn’t quite a mammary gland, who then gives birth to another organism with a slightly more-formed proto-gland, which then gave birth… Until you have the finished product.
The first suggests a very long series of ridiculously advantageous, huge mutations that popped into existence literally out of nowhere, and the second suggests a VERY long series of disadvantageous mutations that somehow were able to compete against non-disadvantaged organisms and thrive enough to have the thousands of generations necessary to complete the process.

Both stretch the limits of credibility and neither have any tangible evidence backing them up.

Evolutionists can’t get around this hole in their theory. Intellgient Designers can because they can say God did it, but then we have to enter into the second, more important, theological phase of the discussion.
 
How did animals survive with underdeveloped defence mechanisms (squid escape predation with by way of a ink cloud) at what point did the squid get the ability to do that and how did it survive without it ?
 
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rossum said:
Our sense of smell is useless and half-formed compared to a dog’s sense of smell. Our eyes are useless and half-formed compared to an eagle’s eyes.
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You are twisting what he said… dogs, humans and eagles are perfectly formed creatures.He talking about one animal transitioning into a new animal and how can this new “in-between creature” have a chance for survival .
 
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Consider predators also needed to evolve. The predator-prey relationship is kind of like an arms race. You survive with a rock because your enemy also has a rock until you hit the nuclear age. (No literal analogy meant.)
 
I looked up what squid ink is made of and it is mostly melanin suspended in mucus with trace amounts of other things like amino acids. If I would have to make an educated guess, ink in cephalopods would have evolved in a mutation that caused melanin to be produced in mucus glands. Every cell in an orgnanism’s body has the same genes and DNA, with the exception of gametes, and what differetiates cell types are which genes are being expressed and supressed. So, a mutation could have caused the genes that encode for melanin production to be active in mucus cells, leading to melanin in mucus and individuals with the melanin-infused mucus could have learned to take advantage of it, and thus goes on to produce more offspring.

This is actually how venom is believed to have evolved in snakes: mutations caused proteins normally transcribed in other part’s of the snakes body to become transcribed in salivary glands and it had the effect of weakening the organism’s prey with its bite. More efficient venom-delivery systems came later.

As to how the squid ancestor survived without it, it probably had other defense mechanisms in place, but, when mutations caused some individual to produce it, ink proved to be much more effective or effient and alleles for the other defense mechanisms became less common while the ink allele became more common over time.
 
Also, as a general note, for all those in this discussion saying evolution’s purpose is to deny God’s existence, remember we’re on a Catholic forum. Denying God’s existence isn’t really on our list for we God-believing Catholics that see evolution as logical. We know the who of creation and wonder at the how. Truly, it amazes me and gives me, when I think about it, an even greater appreciation of God’s handiwork.
 
Techno2000 said:
What did the first predator eat ?
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“For the first billion or so years of life on Earth, the only organisms were chemosynthetic bacteria, which grew as mats in shallow seas and by volcanic hydrothermal vents. The very first cells probably metabolised hydrogen sulphide and carbon monoxide. Eventually photosynthetic bacteria evolved and used sunlight to build sugars from carbon dioxide and water. Organisms that eat other organisms didn’t emerge until around 1.2 billion years ago – over two billion years after life first emerged.”
 
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