Does Darwin's theory of evolution contradict Catholicsm?

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All I wanted to knows is there any animal today that has some kind of appendage (fin, feather, scale,etc ) visible growing out of its body that we can say is changing into something new.
That’s… that’s not how it works.
I know it happens so slooow that you can’t see how it works.
This isn’t even an appeal to time. I’m not saying “you correctly understand how it works but you’re not accounting for time.” I’m just flat out stating your description is not how evolution works, whether in an instant or over five trillion years.
What would a animal look like at the midway point of its transitioning into different species… example we know what tadpole looks like halfway into becoming a frog. Are you saying evolution doesn’t work in a similar way?
 
Do you have a link you could share? I’m curious if there’s more I could read in regards to this.
 
I am not sure if this would help, but pythons, boas, and worm snakes do have residual pelvises and toes.
 
I read that before. It is possible that different features of an organism that at one point existed for one job could be co-opted for another job have it no longer can or needed to serve its original purpose. Fossils of theropods have been discovered with the vestiges of features. These dinosaurs could not have been able to fly due to their arms being too short, so it is believed that early feathers may have been used for identifying other members of one’s own species, and, as feathers became more elaborate and numerous, they could have been used to incubate eggs and later to gain traction while running up hill, which is hypothesized to be the origin of flight.
 
I don’t get this constant referral to all of creation being created at once, past present and future simultaneously from Gods perspective as significantly different from Gods creating linearly from past to present. Neither makes any more sense as to being able to answer difficulties that may arise in Gods creating act. Take two identical lines. Can one tell the difference between the one being created instantaneously and the other spatially from point A to point B through a span of time? What significant difference could there be in their function? From our perspective there would be none since even if the future already exists, sustained by God we only experience temporally in either case. We couldn’t know if the line is complete or only half finished given our view, that is as one dimensional travelers along the line. From Gods perspective only the act would be different not the resulting creation. God would be as restricted by self contradiction in drawing the future parts of the line as much as the past and the present parts and since God would be the sustainer of the evolving future from his perspective it wouldn’t matter either. The lines are functionally identical. While the one line may be only a theoretical construct given our conception of God and his attributes it would still be a valid model from our perspective that God could not violate. God would know the future if it didn’t exist as much as he would if it did since he sustains all and simultaneity becomes meaningless. One could say God created the past then the future or the present then the past then the future or all at the same time. Outside of a temporal frame of reference all are valid statements. Only the belief that God can only act once in creating makes past, present, and future necessarily exist simultaneously from Gods perspective and our speculative conjecture but it would still be irrelevant. God would have to honor our model of a temporally created line since even in our perspective of the incomplete line the evolving portions of this line are of the exact same line. The future, past, and present would have to be consistent with each other to define the same simultaneous creation. Any God working outside of time would be subject to the same limitations as a God working within time as well.
 
You are adding words to the Bible. Your merely human assumptions about the meaning of the text are just that, human assumptions. The Bible does not say that the United States is not dedicated to Lucifer and Mamon. Does that make my statement true?
I am not adding anything. For one, I am only repeating the Catholic traditional interpetation, which is Divinely Inspired and therefore the opposite of 'human interpetations". Cain married his sister, and Adam and Eve had many, many children.
Besides the genetic evidence is against you. Biologists can detect past genetic bottlenecks, as in cheetahs about 10,000 years ago. There was no genetic bottleneck of two (or eight for that matter) in humans. If there were then transplant rejection would be a much smaller problem, as it is in cheetahs.

rossum
Catholics are bound by infallible teaching to believe in Adam and Eve as the only two parents of the entire human race. I don’t particularly care what a biologist has to say about it, or anyone elae for that matter. They can bring up their doubts and heresies with God when they meet him for their judgement.
 
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So, you have no problem with humans, chimps and gorillas sharing a common ancestor because they all belong to the hominidae/mammal taxonomy. What about the “life on earth” taxonomy which includes all bacteria, arche, eukaryotes and viruses?

Any two organisms will be related at some level of the hierarchy, that is the effect of common descent and if part of the evidence we have for common descent.
On that basis we can say humans are “descended” from fruit flies or bananas if we go back far enough. Unfortunately 4 billion years isn’t far enough for mutation to do its work Haldane’s Dilemma again. The human genome has over 3 billion base pairs and most organisms spent their time in stasis rather than mutating.

I have no problem that they share similar lego chemical blocks of DNA. However, it is another matter to say one descended from another merely because they share similar building blocks of material. That is simply a fallacious argument. I can theorize that an intelligent being creating various species would find it more efficient to use the same lego blocks and vary it slightly for each family/kingdom/genus. It is an equally valid theory. At the top the differentiation being the most distinct and varying less and less as we get down into the sub groups, inter group, intragroups.

To claim x organism mutated to y organism, one needs evidence, not fossils. Fossils only tell you such and such an organism lived approx X years ago. That’s all you can deduce. Mutation is not the same as survival of the fittest as my example of DNA resistant insect shows. There may be several variants of hominids and only the strongest/fortunate survive without need to call on the mutation card.

Common descent is only theory. Not proven by any means. The so call tree of life is no tree as latest research reveals. More like a bush I was told. Not sure of the implications though.
The information (name removed by moderator)ut comes from the environment.
That is a most ridiculous extrapolation when the environment itself does not contain the information. Look around you. Where/who/how does the environment tells the chemical soup to make a living self replicating bacteria? You have stop pulling the Nature “joker” card to explain things. Just imagine the immense difficulty of designing a) a cell b) a living cell c) a living replicating cell purely from natural means with the clock ticking away. Without a plausible testable explanation, it is just not science.
There is a classic piece from a creationist poster on this very subject:
I am not really a 6-day creationist guy myself. So I only read the more logical sciency stuff off them. There are some good stuff and a lot more convenient for me rather than to run all over the place to consolidate various sources of information. I sanity check their writings. I just want to point out that the evidence does not point to dumb nature. Origin of Lifers must look elsewhere. Trying to get our children to subscribe to a non-feasible solution is immoral and divert their energies down the wrong path. If atheists want to avoid having God in their equations, call it by some other name, X factor or something like that. At least you can maintain your dignity and integrity. It is ok to have unknowns. Cosmologists already named dark matter/energy/stuff which they can’t verify nor experiment with.
 
Trying to get our children to subscribe to a non-feasible solution is immoral and divert their energies down the wrong path. If atheists want to avoid having God in their equations, call it by some other name, X factor or something like that.
It seems you fear is that certain theories imply (or require) no God. Perhaps that is to impart limited human imagination on God? I think you worry too much. Serious and honest scientists are quite willing to admit that they don’t “know” how life emerged from non-live, and they don’t know what gave rise to a Big-Bang. But to cease a line of scientific enquiry and declare “God did it” doesn’t work for me. Such an approach would likely leave us without many of the medical cures we enjoy today.
 
Catholics are bound by infallible teaching to believe in Adam and Eve as the only two parents of the entire human race. I don’t particularly care what a biologist has to say about it, or anyone elae for that matter. They can bring up their doubts and heresies with God when they meet him for their judgement.
And I’m not sure there is compelling evidence to the contrary - rather there is just the inescapable observation that - given what we understand of evolution - Adam + Eve is highly unlikely. That leaves ample opportunity to believe in Adam + Eve.
 
The point being that the clockmaker analogy, the idea that God is sitting back and leaving things up to chance and just waiting to “see what happens” is an inappropriate anthropomorphic picture. To be a Christian and believe that evolution occurs does not mean imagining God as acting like a deist clockmaker-god.
 
Catholics are bound by infallible teaching to believe in Adam and Eve as the only two parents of the entire human race. I don’t particularly care what a biologist has to say about it, or anyone elae for that matter. They can bring up their doubts and heresies with God when they meet him for their judgement.
Catholics are bound to believe that all true men and women that have ever existed have been descendants of Adam and Eve. Furthermore, they’re bound to believe that Adam and Eve had a special relationship with God, sinned, and transmitted that sin to their descendants. That is not precisely the same as saying that our genetic heritage comes only from Adam and Eve.
 
And your proof of this “fact” is where. Someone’s opinion? (In answer to your statement that Cain’s wife was one of his sisters. Don’t recall that from Scripture
 
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On that basis we can say humans are “descended” from fruit flies or bananas if we go back far enough. Unfortunately 4 billion years isn’t far enough for mutation to do its work Haldane’s Dilemma again. The human genome has over 3 billion base pairs and most organisms spent their time in stasis rather than mutating.
Haldane never believed he had a dilemma, he thought it accorded with the literature, stated his work was preliminary and his mathematical models would need revision, he revised his calculations in 1961, and literature since the 60s and 70s and beyond have addressed it. Haldane’s underlying simplifying assumptions were incorrect. Please stop using Haldane’s work as a punching bag.
 
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I am not adding anything. For one, I am only repeating the Catholic traditional interpetation, which is Divinely Inspired and therefore the opposite of 'human interpetations". Cain married his sister, and Adam and Eve had many, many children.

Catholic traditional interpretation from where? I’ve never heard that. Or is that simply the “interpretation” of those who want it to be true so that everything is wrapped up neatly in a little theological bow? Canon law, chapter and verse, Papal Bull, Encyclical, Dogma, Doctrine by a Pope from the Chair of Peter? Some enlightenment please.
 
Gen 5:4 says that Eve had other sons and daughters.

Catholic Tradition infallibly teaches that all human beings are the progeny of Adam and Eve. Cain’s wife would necessarily have to be either his sister or his daughter by Eve. Tradition holds that it was his sister.

Take up your concerns with the Moses and the Catholic Church if you don’t like it. I’m just repeating the Truths that were handed to me by them.
 
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I am not adding anything. For one, I am only repeating the Catholic traditional interpetation, which is Divinely Inspired and therefore the opposite of 'human interpetations". Cain married his sister, and Adam and Eve had many, many children.
Back in 1000 CE the “Catholic traditional interpretation” was that the earth was static at the centre of the universe and the sun went round the earth. The “Catholic traditional interpretation” is not reliable in matters of science. If God made the universe, then the universe is direct evidence of the work of God.
Catholics are bound by infallible teaching to believe in Adam and Eve as the only two parents of the entire human race.
Here is Humani Generis:
  1. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. (emphasis added)
We can easily read this as “true men” meaning humans with both human bodies and human souls. Evolution only deals with human bodies, not souls. Adam and Eve were true humans with human bodies and human souls. They lived among a larger population of almost-true humans with human bodies but no human souls. All true humans alive today are descended from that initial pair. That satisfies both the scientific evidence, and the official teaching of the Catholic Church.
I don’t particularly care what a biologist has to say about it, or anyone elae for that matter. They can bring up their doubts and heresies with God when they meet him for their judgement.
The Argumentum ad Baculum is a well established logical error. You do not help yourself by posting it here.

rossum
 
On that basis we can say humans are “descended” from fruit flies or bananas if we go back far enough.
No. You are not descended from your cousins (I assume!) We share a common ancestor with fruit flies, but that ancestor was neither a fruit fly nor a human, it was some bilaterally symmetric worm with a head and a tail. Similarly we share a common ancestor with a banana, but that ancestor was neither a banana nor a human, it was some single-celled eukaryote.
However, it is another matter to say one descended from another merely because they share similar building blocks of material. That is simply a fallacious argument.
Yockey (1992) calculated that there were 2.3 x 10^93 different ways to make a working Cytochrome C. Our Cytochrome C is identical to a chimp’s Cytochrome C. A Rhesus monkey has one difference from ourselves. The odds are 2.3 x 10^93 to 1 that we are closely related to chimps and we both inherited our Cytochrome Cs from a relatively recent common ancestor.
Common descent is only theory. Not proven by any means.
Gravity is “only a theory” and is also not proven. No scientific theory is ever proven because all scientific theories are always open to replacement by a better theory. Newton’s theory of gravity was replaced by Einstein’s theory. Einstein’s theory will in turn be replaced by the theory of Quantum Gravity once scientists have done more work on it. You need to learn more about the meaning of “theory” within science; it is a specialist term, and does not have the usual common meaning.
That is a most ridiculous extrapolation when the environment itself does not contain the information.
Yes it does. Again we are butting up against the problem with your subjective definition of information. Unless you have experimental data and calculations supporting your statement here, then I will not accept your personal opinion. Sunlight is part of the environment and sunlight contains information about the temperature and composition of the sun as well as the reactions happening inside the sun. Scientists can extract a great deal of information from sunlight. You are wrong here.
Origin of Lifers must look elsewhere.
If your God is a living God, then you have to look elsewhere as well. You cannot use a living God to explain the origin of life. Your God can only create the second living thing, not the first.

rossum
 
Gravity is “only a theory” and is also not proven. No scientific theory is ever proven because all scientific theories are always open to replacement by a better theory. Newton’s theory of gravity was replaced by Einstein’s theory.
Quite right. And even when it’s claimed that some scientific conjecture has been “proven”, the meaning of proven is not what ordinary language might suggest.
 
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