Does Darwin's theory of evolution contradict Catholicsm?

[Gorgias]

Dunno - but you are having trouble quoting me. Seems you quoted someone else and claimed I said it!! That’s very naughty.

Actually, @Glark quoted himself and attributed it to you!

 

[Rau]

Actually, @Glark quoted himself and attributed it to you!

Yeah, I did notice that. Wanted to raise the matter with him gently…

 

[fisherman_carl]

I think the definitive answer to the question posted in the thread title of “Does Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Contradict Catholicism?” is:

If you want it to, then yes.

If you don’t want it to, then no.

Fair enough?

Ha ha. That gave me a chuckle. I think it is telling though that while the Church does not say whether Evolution is true it does permit Catholics to believe in a kind of theistic evolution. If there was a problem with it contradicting the faith then the Church would have said so and warned its flock from ever considering the possibility. So regardless of what anyone says here I think that if you are looking for a more official Catholic response it would be to look and see what the Church has said on the issue rather than what some people think.

Another thing is that whether you believe in Evolution or not, this should not be something that divides Catholics or other Christians. We still believe in the same doctrines of the faith, God created the world and our first parents sinned, for instance. We may differ on how we think he may have done it. But, that is not something that we should be divided over or resort to name calling or getting angry with others over. As Christians we are called to love our brother even if we disagree with him.

 

[Glark]

I know you want to be right, but resorting to name calling (evo-catholics) and unsupported assertions (like Evo-catholics will resort to anything…) only serve to undermine your credibility.

“evo-Catholic” is not “name-calling” - it simply refers to Catholics who accept billions of years of evolution as a scientific fact.

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It is not an 'unsupported assertion" that evo-Catholics resort to all manner of Scripture twisting and denial. Spent some time on the BioLogos forum and you will notice how prevalent it is.

Your interpretation must be right, right, because…?

I can’t recall where I wrote that. Remind me.

I imagine there were people like you around the time of Galileo who insisted that the sun must go around the earth because that is what a literal reading of the Scripture implies.

Comparing evolution to this aspect of astronomy is a fallacy - one is an untestable theory and the other is a demonstrable scientific fact.

I imagine 99% of the Church Fathers believed the sun went around the earth too.

This is a straw man. The point I made was that Jimmy’s Akin theory that the “original audience” viewed Genesis 1 as “symbolic” is revealed as a nonsense by the facts of history. If Jimmy’s pro-evo argument is correct, then the early Church Fathers would have considered Gen 1 as symbolic - but they didn’t.

Even St. Augustine in the 4th centuries taught that one should not insist on a literal interpretation of everything in genesis so as to appear ignorant of the science of his day.

Here we go again - the vacuous “Augustine argument” that Darwinists love to trot out.

Firstly, It would have been impossible for St. Augustine to preach against a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 - because the Church has always taught that the faithful are free to believe in said literal interpretation.

Secondly, Augustine was referring to stupid interpretations of the Bible (“nonsense … mischievous false opinions … utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements”) that clearly contradicted demonstrable scientific facts (“knowledge he hold as to being certain from reason and experience”).
Augustine would never have described a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 as “nonsense … mischievous false opinions … utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements”;
and the theory that all life on earth has evolved from bugs over billions of years hardly qualifies as “knowledge he hold as to being CERTAIN from reason and experience”.

Darwinists twist St. Augustine’s words and imply that he opposed a Church teaching - how lame and pathetic is that?

 

[Glark]

A big part of the timing problem, etc. comes from literal interpretation of Genesis; something that doesn’t work with the language of the text. For example… Cain and Able. Cain is afraid that wherever he goes, people would kill him on sight. Problem… we have Adam + Eve + Cain as the only people in the world at the time Cain is afraid. Cain would know where Adam and Eve are, so unless he is afraid of them killing him, why does he fear being killed on sight? Later, Cain takes a wife and produces offspring… where did the wife come from since Eve was the only woman in the world at the time? Remove the literal interpretation and many of the issues fall away. Just my 2 cents.

How can you reconcile your non-literal interpretation of Genesis with Pope Pius XII’s Humani Generis teaching that prohibits Catholics from accepting polygenism?

 

[Glark]

Regarding the “Adam and Eve” discussion, it’s important to note that A.) Genesis is mythological in form; Adam and Eve are placeholder names for humankind’s first parents, and B.) the scientific jury is still very much out on whether humans arose in many places simultaneously or in one place and then spread. Unlike the physical evidence for evolution (fossils, etc.), the physical evidence for the exact start of humankind is difficult to find and what we do have gives us a several thousand-year range in which we just have to do our best guesswork.

It’s important to note that
A) According to you, the genealogies in Genesis 5 (Adam to Noah’s sons) and Luke 3 (Jesus to Adam) are not merely FICTITIOUS, they are FABRICATED LIES. I wonder what sort of idiot would take any notice of a so-called Holy Book that contains nonsense and lies.

B) “When, however, there is a 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” SIGNIFIES A NUMBER OF FIRST PARENTS.” - Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, 1950.

My advice is not to get too worked up over it, since there’s no way we can really know for sure.

We can really know it for sure - the Good Lord recorded it all in His Good Book.

 

[Glark]

Bear in mind that we are created. Who we are, perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting as one person in ourselves, a unity of body, mind and spirit didn’t just happen. And, we were made male and female at the beginning, not because it has any survival value but because it allows for deeper and fuller expressions of love.

If you take the evolution route, how could “we (be) male and female at the beginning”? In the beginning - according to evolution - there were no “we” because there were no human beings.

Besides, the Scripture is question refers specifically to human beings, who Jesus says were present at beginning of creation. Bear in mind that in the passage this verse comes from, Jesus is talking about love, marriage and divorce - so he is talking about humans in their fullest sense - not the (frankly, bizarre) “pre-soul” humans" that evo-Catholics imagine existed.

So I imagine evo-Catholics would get around this verse (if they’re even aware of it - Scripture is not high on their list of priorities) by resorting to their usual tactics - invent some lame interpretation to explain it away, or simply ignore it. In other words: Who cares what Jesus said? Scientists know better.
Apparently, this is what passes for sound Catholicism - the Church says so, since “evolution is compatible with Scripture”.

“For the time is coming when people will NOT ENDURE SOUND TEACHING, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into MYTHS” - 2Tim 4:4.

 

[Glark]

Is there an ex cathedra statement declaring what a Catholic must believe (which is the usual context for church teaching) that requires a literal 6x24hour understanding of creation, and that first life on earth occurred 5778 years ago?

Not yet. But I believe that one day, it will. Even evo-Catholic Jimmy Akin concedes that “the magisterium could in the future decide that the authentic meaning of Scripture precludes the possibility of human evolution.” All the Church needs to do is declare that the six days in Gen 1 are literal days.

 

[Glark]

None of the books I’ve recommended have anything to do with belief in God, they have to do with the evidence for evolution and forming a basic understanding of how it works

So it’s a mere coincidence that between 99.999-100% of evolutionary biologists are atheists? And you see no link between ToE and atheism? If that is so, why did William Provine describe evolution as “the greatest engine of atheism ever invented”?

Has it ever occurred to you that, atheists, having rejected Divine Creation as an option for explaining where life on earth came from, have virtually no other choice but to believe that life as we know it evolved from little bugs over billions of years. That is their STARTING POINT; their a priori position (an idea that has been around since at least 650 BC and is otherwise known as the general theory of evolution). This starting point has NOTHING to do with “evidence” (except that life exists). Darwinism is an attempt to explain the mechanism of that process of evolution. They then go about looking for evidence that supports Darwinism.

“Assuming that the Darwinian hypothesis … [paleontologists then] interpret fossil data according to it … The error in their method is obvious.” - Pierre-P. Grasse.

Edit: Also, what makes you think a scientist with a religious perspective will be more objective than one with no particular sacred worldview to uphold? It seems the scientists not confined to fitting the evidence to a particular creation story will be capable of the most objectivity and not the other way around.

I’m on record as wondering if any scientist can be completely objective.

 

[Glark]

Would God mean us to take literal details from Genesis as central to its message while handing us a world that, on inspection, tells us something entirely different?

I’m pretty sure God is not responsible for mendacious, junk science.

There are millions of Christians who don’t believe the world is telling us something entirely different.

 

[Glark]

Interesting question. One can demonstrate evolution in the laboratory with some E. coli; some plasmids/bacteriophages/etc. and some petri dishes with varying concentrations of antibiotics. Infect the E. coli with the bacteriophages containing a gene conferring antibiotic resistance and place them on a petri dish with a low-level concentration of the antibiotic in question. Select the colonies that survive and spread them onto a higher concentration petri dish. Repeat a few times, and you’ll find that you have a bunch of bacteria that are highly resistant to the antibiotic due to the competitive advantage of having high resistance (might also find some that transferred the DNA between bacterial cells). Works the same way for antibiotic resistance in the “real-world.”

What relevance does this “evolution” have to do with humans evolving from bugs?

 

[Glark]

Science has shown polygenism.

I would expect Darwinist scientists to claim exactly that. I’ve learnt not to trust anything the cult of Darwinism says. Satan is the father of lies.

 

[Glark]

Birds are dinosaurs

That’s so funny! Here’s another evo joke - whales evloved from some land-lubbing, vegetarian rodent!

 

[Glark]

Don’t forget Crocs - hardly changed in millions of years!

Come back in a billions years and they will still be unchanged - because God made creatures “according to thier kinds” - meaning, creatures don’t evolve beyond their “kinds”.

 

[Glark]

Dunno - but you are having trouble quoting me. Seems you quoted someone else and claimed I said it!! That’s very naughty.

If that is so, my apologies.

 

[Glark]

I went a-digging one day and I dug up the skeleton of a dog. I dug deeper and discovered the skeleton of a cat. I concluded that the dog must have evolved from the cat.

 

[Glark]

Glark, you’ve clearly memorized your cherry picked defences and immunized yourself against the evidence. I cannot communicate with the likes of you. All the best.

You have given up already! We barely got started! Sorry to have offended your religion.

 

[Glark]

So this one little chicken size fossil proves birds were once dinosaurs ?

I think you’re approaching it from the wrong end. The idea is to first of all assume evolution is a fact, then you look for the “evidence”. Try this approach and the fossil record will reveal the truth (which you already know is evolution) to you and one little chicken size fossil becomes a missing link.

 

[Glark]

Got any actual citations from peer reviewed journals?

Not at this time, but a cult tends to tolerate only literature that meets the cult’s standards.

(the Evolution News article I referred to was written by a certain Casey Luskin.)

 

[rossum]

So this one little chicken size fossil proves birds were once dinosaurs ?

Your use of the word “proves” shows that you need to learn more about how science works. No scientific theory is ever “proved”. At most it is the best explanation we currently have. All theories are open to being replaced by a better theory, as Newton’s theory was replaced by Einstein’s theory. Mathematical theorems (note the different spelling) are proved. Scientific theories have supporting evidence, often a great deal of supporting evidence, but they are not “proved”.

So, Jinfengopteryx is evidence that birds are placed within the Dinosaur clade, i.e. that the ancestors of birds were non-flying dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx is more evidence. Collagen sequences are more evidence. Scientists have a lot of evidence to support the theory that birds are dinosaurs.

To get back to the topic of this thread, I am unaware of any statement from the Magisterium of the Catholic Church regarding the placement of the Aves within the Dinosauria clade.

rossum