Does Darwin's theory of evolution contradict Catholicsm?

[niceatheist]

I’m not trying to argue, but rather providing you with an opinion that has been pretty well thought out, although perhaps not adequately expressed. You missed my point. You ask why someone would “misuse” the Bible. People are concerned about their neighbours’ eternal soul. Turning the question around, why would atheists misuse science to justify their belief that there is no God?

Since science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, I could only speculate as to why other atheists would do so.

 

[Bradskii]

Turning the question around, why would atheists misuse science to justify their belief that there is no God?

I don’t think that anyone really does. What a lot of people do is use science to point out to those such are as posting in this thread that what they consider to be facts about the world are simply not true.

You could point to anything at all and claim that you see God’s hand in it. Look, a rainbow. And a kitten. And morality. But there are scientific explanation for why things are as they are. And this is the important point: none of those explanations can be used to claim that God does not exist.

But so many people are drawn to discussions like this, absolutely determined to deny the science because THEY are the ones that believe that the knowledge we have gained makes their God appear unnecessary.

The only response a Christian should make after someone has explained evolution is: ‘Cool. So that’s how He did it’. Just the same as if they had just been taught about plate tectonics or quantum mechanics or planetary accretion.

To argue against basic science just makes some Christians look either ill-informed or wilfully ignorant. No names, but I’m putting a couple of posters in this thread in the second category.

 

[Glark]

Examine the evidence, all of it,

What? I should spend endless hours studying a scientific theory that CAN NEVER BE TESTED and is UTTERLY USELESS in any applied sense? Goodness gracious, that’s rather poor advice - studying how life supposedly evolved from bacteria rates as one of the most pointless and fruitless activities ever undertaken by human beings.

So no thanks; I think I’ll study real science instead.

 

[Glark]

Glark is my Hero.

I strongly advise you to steer well clear of Glark. I think he might be trying to set up some kinda weird, creation-literalist suicide cult.

 

[Glark]

Genesis 1 says all creatures were vegetarians, so where did a lion’s teeth come from, for example? Such teeth don’t look especially well designed for eating plants and fruit and nuts and seeds. Instead, they look designed for killing other animals.

 

[Glark]

. That the universe is 13.5 billion years old. That the earth is 4.5 billion years old. That life on earth is about 3.8 billion years old. That Homo sapiens evolved from an earlier species of Hominid primate around 200,000 years ago in Africa.

I haven’t actually studied the entire Bible, so the verses that contain this information must be among those I haven’t read yet.

That a woodenly literal interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis will lead you into error.

I doubt if this is what the Word of God says - the Catholic Church declares that a literal interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis will not lead me into error.

 

[IWantGod]

Does Darwin’s theory of evolution contradict Catholicsm?

No. People might hold opinions outside the body of science that contradicts the faith, but the science itself is not an enemy of the Catholic faith.

 

[Glark]

AIUI souls are not inherited, but directly given by God. If all Adam and Eve’s descendants were given souls then God would give them a whole soul, not a part soul. Is there anyone alive today with a part soul? Everyone alive today receives their soul in the same way as Adam and Eve’s descendants did back then: direct action by God. With souls we are not talking about genetics or inheritance, but the direct action of God at each and every conception.

That makes sense.

But here some other thoughts:

• If Cain (who possessed a soul) mated with a untrue woman (who didn’t possess a soul), surely that would amount to some kind of “spiritual bestiality”. I don’t think God would allow it. Did Adam mate with a woman with no soul? We presume not.
• Speaking of which … we read that God “breathed” into Adam and he thereby “became a living soul”. But nowhere to my knowledge do the Scriptures specifically tell us that Eve was also a living soul. Does this mean she may not have had a soul? (After all, flesh and soul are mutually exclusive things - flesh is matter; soul is spirit.) I doubt it - it is presumed Eve had a soul solely on the basis that she was taken from Adam. Adam called her “flesh of my flesh” - he did not call her “soul of my soul”. But the mere fact that she had the same FLESH as Adam did is sufficient to impute that Eve had a SOUL as Adam did. In other words, to be of HUMAN FLESH is to have a SOUL. Or to put it another way, there cannot exist a human without a soul (at least, that’s my reading of it).
• Evo-Catholics claim that Adam was a soul-less human until God injected a soul into him; and that there were many other soul-less humans in existence at the time. But Genesis 2 says Adam was “alone” and that no “mate” could be found for him amongst all the creatures that God had made. This doesn’t add up - if there were female humans in existence with Adam, why didn’t God simply choose one of them and inject her with a soul, just as he had (supposedly) done with Adam? In this way, Adam would have his soul-mate. Too easy.
  But no, that obvious step was taken - instead, God fashioned Eve from the flesh of Adam. Why? My answer is: Because there were no other female humans in existence - soul or no soul. Eve was the first woman.

 

[Glark]

Unenlightened people are reborn again and again and again. When they are near to enlightenment, but have not actually reached it, they are called Bodhisattvas.

I have bright light coming out of my ears. Does this mean I have become enlightened or am at least close to it?

 

[Glark]

That “circle” is a scientific error. A circle (Hebrew: ma’agal) is a flat two-dimensional object. Hebrew had a different word for “ball, sphere” (cadoor)

Splitting hairs. The earth, viewed from space, has a circular appearance.

 

[Glark]

He doesn’t. You just assume that’s what the text implies.

Six “days” of creation, each characterised by “an evening” and “a morning” doesn’t suggest creation was achieved in a very short space of time?

In Exodus 20, God bases the pattern of six literal days of human work and one literal day of rest on the six days of creation and God resting on the seventh. This doesn’t suggest creation took six literal days?

Mark 10:6 says, “But from the beginning of creation, God created them male and female.” In other words, humans were present at the BEGINNING OF CREATION - not billions of years AFTER the beginning of creation.

“Behold behemoth, whom I made with thee, he eaterh grass like an ox” - Job 40:15. This creature was made at the same time as humans - their respective appearances on earth weren’t separated by millions of years.

 

[Glark]

Does that make you want to convert to Hinduism?

No. Hindism gives me the creeps. It reminds me of my lost years in the spiritual wilderness and my brush with the New Age movement.

 

[Glark]

And yet you’ll apparently trust what a lawyer thinks.

Albert Einstein was a patents clerk. What would he know about physics?

 

[Glark]

The molecular data shows a lot more than that. It shows that all organisms alive on the planet that have been analyzed fit into a hierarchy; the tree of life as it were. Even where there is horizontal gene transfer, that hasn’t disproven evolution, it has actually allowed scientists to determine with a good deal more resolution particular branches of the tree.

If God didn’t use evolution, then He made it look like he did.

So the story goes - there is only one possible explanation - evolution. I don’t believe it. (A lot of sceintists would have us believe that man-made pollution is the only possible explantion for global warming. I don’t believe that either.)

 

[Glark]

The reality is that all evolution is, at the very core, is change in the genetic makeup of a population over time; or more technically, change in allele frequency in a population over time.

What is the connection between antibiotic resistance (aka “evolution”) and humans evolving from bugs (aka “evolution”)?

 

[Glark]

Turning the question around, why would atheists misuse science to justify their belief that there is no God?

“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”Richard Dawkins. But this is only a secondary cause. The primary cause is Satan, who wants to blind people to the truth that there is a Creator.

 

[rossum]

He must have flipped the off switch a while back because nothing is evolving right now.

False. As we speak, humans are evolving resistance to Malaria, resistance to AIDS and a few have evolved a better way to deal with the fat-rich Western diet. Insects are evolving resistance to insecticides like DDT and others. Plants are evolving resistance to herbicides like Glyphosate/Roundup.

As the environment changes, evolution will adjust the genomes of organisms living in that environment to be better adapted to the modified environment.

rossum

 

[rossum]

If Cain (who possessed a soul) mated with a untrue woman (who didn’t possess a soul), surely that would amount to some kind of “spiritual bestiality”. I don’t think God would allow it. Did Adam mate with a woman with no soul? We presume not.

As opposed to real (not spiritual) incest? One or the other. Note that mating with an untrue human is ‘open to life’ in the Catholic sense: the two are the same biological species and can easily have children.

AIUI Eve had a soul, and did not mate with any other partner. Hene all their grandchildren would be descended from both Adam and Eve, meeting the requirement of Humani Generis.

Evo-Catholics claim that Adam was a soul-less human until God injected a soul into him; and that there were many other soul-less humans in existence at the time. But Genesis 2 says Adam was “alone” and that no “mate” could be found for him amongst all the creatures that God had made.

Even a literalist agrees with that. God made Adam’s body and after He made the body breathed a soul into Adam’s “nostrils”. There must have been a body for nostrils to exist. There was a pause, that “after”, of maybe a few seconds or more, when Adam’s body existed but did not have a soul. Maybe God was saying that Adam did not have a “soul-mate”?

if there were female humans in existence with Adam, why didn’t God simply choose one of them and inject her with a soul, just as he had (supposedly) done with Adam? In this way, Adam would have his soul-mate.

Why ask me? Go and ask God. Yes, God could have done it that way, but He didn’t. Being omnipotent He has a great many ways to do things. Why a rib, why not a tooth, a hair, a toenail?

rossum

 

[TheHolyTrinity]

Thank you, this is helpful information.

 

[rossum]

I have bright light coming out of my ears. Does this mean I have become enlightened or am at least close to it?

[At Polonnaruwa] I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything – without refutation – without establishing some argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening.

I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock slopping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures. Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more “imperative” than Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward).

The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem and really no “mystery.” All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life is charged with dharmakaya … everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. … I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains, but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. …

It says everything, it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we who need to discover it.

From: The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton

You do not have the be Buddhist to become enlightened. The Buddha wasn’t Buddhist when he became enlightened.

rossum