Does logic draw a line in your faith?

[MalachiM]

Do many Catholics, both priests and lay persons, draw a line between what the holy bible teaches and what secular logic dictates?

I believe what I read in the holy bible and what I learned in the church growing up. If anything is proven to exist or discovered to have come into existence by science, then I simply believe that science is discovering the manner in which God chose to create it. I assumed, for the most part, this was the consensus of the church.

This is a question born of curiosity, someone else’s lack of faith will not belittle my own…

God bless

 

[LethalMouse]

In my experience there is sort of 3 types:

1. Denial of sciences (there are some catholic young earth theorist etc…)
2. Support of science (I believe in a God who creates funtionality over false store fronts)
3. Somewhere in between and muddled.

But IMO the more I learned of science the more God made sense. I find no contradictions between science and God. In fact I actually found a deeper learning of science to only make God more credible…

TBH there are a few items of logic that I had feared before accepting the church, but in accepting it I have faith that none will happen. There are concerns of “catholic tendency” becoming doctrine that I had in that those items would disprove divine guidance to me… but in my research even when majority catholic opinion is of something illogical including pope opinion… they never make it a teaching God = smart dude

 

[MalachiM]

Well put. You bring up an interesting point. Young earth, crazy talk? We don’t typically discuss the exact age of the earth in Mass. It’s not an issue that effects my faith in God or his divine mercy. But, I am curious as to what the church says of it.

I agree with your statement about science and religion, I don’t take issue with science or technology. I dismiss claims of man evolving from apes and similar claims that contradict God’s word. Carbon dating is something I look at with great skepticism, not because of my faith but, because it draws conclusions based on certain assumptions. If you can’t accept these assumptions, you can’t accept the results.

All that said, is the “Young Earth” movement fringe? Looney? Or just misguided…

Thoughts?

 

[LethalMouse]

catholic.com/tracts/adam-eve-and-evolution

To me most young earth theories are linked with much crazy talk IMO.

Also, I mentioned this on another thread but if God lives outside of time then a “figurative” Genesis would look much more literal to God’s perspective. To Him the formation of the Earth would be instant even if it took a billion years within our concept of time/space. Nothing I have seen of science has ever served to discredit God…

I like to think of it sort of as follows:

In a movie you have two types of “magic” characters.

1. Sorcerer who “makes” a gun appear and it is essentialy there in magic. You distract or kill the sorcerer and his creations stop.
2. Sorcerer makes a gun and it is there period. It is a literal functioning gun that operates mechanically and no matter what happens to the sorcerer the gun is “real”.

I like to think God is more along the lines of the 2nd more powerful guy.

 

[MalachiM]

Again I find myself agreeing with you here. I don’t think we can assume that God uses our clock or our calendar. We can’t question God for not mentioning dinosaurs in the bible, the word didn’t exist until the 1800’s.

Essentially, I don’t expect the bible to read like a book published yesterday or a thread on the Internet. Although it is obviously applicable to modern life, it doesn’t need to refer to the modern calendar, clock, current slang or popular terminology.

 

[RPRPsych]

Well put. You bring up an interesting point. Young earth, crazy talk? We don’t typically discuss the exact age of the earth in Mass. It’s not an issue that effects my faith in God or his divine mercy. But, I am curious as to what the church says of it.

I agree with your statement about science and religion, I don’t take issue with science or technology. I dismiss claims of man evolving from apes and similar claims that contradict God’s word. Carbon dating is something I look at with great skepticism, not because of my faith but, because it draws conclusions based on certain assumptions. If you can’t accept these assumptions, you can’t accept the results.

All that said, is the “Young Earth” movement fringe? Looney? Or just misguided…

Thoughts?

The Church does not oblige us to take dogmatic positions on issues of science, except where they come in contact with the eternal truths of the Catholic faith.

For example, we must accept the creation account in Genesis 1-2 either literally (which is what our ancestors largely did) or as being true in a “condensed” or “summarized” fashion (i.e., though the account is simplified, it still contains scientific truth.) We cannot consider it “simply a myth” or “a primitive story made up by savages”.

Similarly, while we are allowed to accept Theistic Evolution (or Creationism, or Intelligent Design), we cannot accept either atheistic evolution or polygenism; the origin of the human race from a common pair of ancestors is part of the doctrine of Original Sin and the Fall, and we cannot toss it aside.

As for the age of the Earth, while my own views tend towards an older figure, I don’t think the movement is “looney” as long as it accepts its limitations and tries to work with genuine loopholes / ambiguities in current science. My own background in physical science ends at high school, though, so I’ll leave comments on that to those who know better.

 

[MalachiM]

I understand your point and I tend to agree. I accept the bible as a whole and on each individual claim made therein. After listening to some radio programs, I began to worry I may be one of the few Catholics that hold this belief.

I believe in God the father, the holy trinity and every aspect of the bible. Including the really scary, demonic, hellfire and brimstone accounts. I don’t draw a line in the sand and say “the story is nice but, it’s just a story”. That’s the reason for my post, the reason I joined this forum.

 

[LaetenturCaeli]

I dismiss claims of man evolving from apes and similar claims that contradict God’s word.

The issue, of course, is whether or not they actually contradict Holy Scripture.

I think the Church tended to interpret certain passages in the Bible literally, with the understanding that, if sufficient evidence was found that would make the literal interpretation impossible, exegetes would be free to interpret those passages in a different manner.

A great example of this is geocentrism. Some verses in the Bible seemed to imply that the earth stood still, and that the heavens revolved around it. But scientific discoveries, so often made by Catholic priests and scholars, seemed to point in a different direction. We now look at those verses as being phenomenological: they describe the way things look to us on earth, not how they actually are scientifically speaking.

The key, of course, is understanding what the sacred authors intended by what they wrote. That is by no means a fixed discussion, but there are certainly modern parameters one can work with that might not have been the same parameters as those used 500 years ago.

 

[LaetenturCaeli]

I believe in God the father, the holy trinity and every aspect of the bible. Including the really scary, demonic, hellfire and brimstone accounts.

Of course, all of that is revealed doctrine.

But it is not revealed to us by God how one is to interpret Genesis 1-11 or whether Joshua contains literal history or what the literary genre of Judith or Tobit happens to be.

 

[JurisPrudens]

Do many Catholics, both priests and lay persons, draw a line between what the holy bible teaches and what secular logic dictates?

I believe what I read in the holy bible and what I learned in the church growing up. If anything is proven to exist or discovered to have come into existence by science, then I simply believe that science is discovering the manner in which God chose to create it. I assumed, for the most part, this was the consensus of the church.

This is a question born of curiosity, someone else’s lack of faith will not belittle my own…

God bless

There is no “secular logic”. The laws of logic are God’s creation, and we all follow them.

Of course, if we see the facts, we take them as true and evaluate them from the point of the Church doctrine.

However, please mind that it is really hard to “prove” something in science. It is easy to disprove (to “falsify”) an old theory rather than “prove” a new one. In the 18-19th centuries it was considered “proven” that the Earth moves around the Sun, while the Sun remains stationary. But the relativity shows us that both Sun and Earth are relatively moving in respect of each other.

 

[grannymh]

Do many Catholics, both priests and lay persons, draw a line between what the holy bible teaches and what secular logic dictates?

I believe what I read in the holy bible and what I learned in the church growing up. If anything is proven to exist or discovered to have come into existence by science, then I simply believe that science is discovering the manner in which God chose to create it. I assumed, for the most part, this was the consensus of the church.

This is a question born of curiosity, someone else’s lack of faith will not belittle my own…

God bless

While I think I know what is being discussed as secular logic, may I point out that Catholic doctrines amazingly follow logically from basic truths or axioms. Deductive reasoning (top-down) is used. The scientific method is generally based on Inductive reasoning.

 

[MalachiM]

The issue, of course, is whether or not they actually contradict Holy Scripture.

Evolution, as it pertains to man evolving from apes, all life evolving from a single celled organism, most definitely contradicts holy scripture. Your arguments, while intelligent and fairly mainstream, are the exact arguments I’ve found disturbing. I know that non-Christians hold these beliefs, that’s well known. The fact that so many of my brothers and sisters hold this belief, I find alarming.

I, for one, cannot accept that the Holy Bible should be interpreted as a dumbed down version of history, edited for simple men to understand.

Genesis 1:11f Then God said: Let the earth bring forth vegetation: every kind of plant that bears seed and every kind of fruit tree on earth that bears fruit with its seed in it. And so it happened:

And that’s how it happened. I don’t believe that was God’s way of saying he developed all plants from a single celled organism, over billions of years…

 

[MalachiM]

There is no “secular logic”. The laws of logic are God’s creation, and we all follow them.

Perhaps I should rephrase that. By “secular logic”, I mean logic influenced by the secular world around us, or Logic with little spiritual influence/understanding.

 

[LaetenturCaeli]

Evolution, as it pertains to man evolving from apes, all life evolving from a single celled organism, most definitely contradicts holy scripture.

Is this your opinion or the opinion of the Magisterium?

I, for one, am highly skeptical of evolution.

But I also have a massive allergy to those few who insist that the Church definitively holds to a certain interpretation of Holy Scripture which it absolutely does not. Frankly, their arguments require not only private interpretation of Scripture, but private interpretation of Church documents in a manner which binds their opinions on others when the Church has done no such thing.

 

[MalachiM]

Is this your opinion or the opinion of the Magisterium?

I, for one, am highly skeptical of evolution.

But I also have a massive allergy to those few who insist that the Church definitively holds to a certain interpretation of Holy Scripture which it absolutely does not. Frankly, their arguments require not only private interpretation of Scripture, but private interpretation of Church documents in a manner which binds their opinions on others when the Church has done no such thing.

I’m new to this forum, so forgive my ignorance, but when I went to quote your post, as to directly respond to you, I saw more text then I saw in the thread, prior to hitting the “quote” button.

I understand your “allergy” to what you may perceive as ignorance or stubborn resistance to accepted science.

However, what science asks that I accept as fact, requires as much if not more faith than does my Christian beliefs

I haven’t found any indication that The Magisterium, directly or indirectly, supports Evolutions description of how man came to exist.

Catholic.org has some good information on this

 

[LaetenturCaeli]

… cannot accept that the Holy Bible should be interpreted as a dumbed down version of history …

Of course, no faithful Catholic should.

But it is one thing to do what you state. It is another to genuinely wonder, for example, when the book of Daniel was written, and whether its literary genre is truly prophetic when it relates events of certain empires, or whether the inspired author was merely commenting on the past by means of a certain literary form as guided by the Holy Spirit.

To state that everything that Holy Scripture relates must be interpreted as belonging to an utterly modern idea of history is overly-simplistic.

 

[LaetenturCaeli]

I understand your “allergy” to what you may perceive as ignorance or stubborn resistance to accepted science.

No, not ignorance with regard to science!

I’m only speaking of people who go around scandalizing Catholics—and I certainly do not have you in mind here—by insisting that the Church teaches something that it does not. For example, those few who rabidly will tell anyone who listens that to deny geocentrism is to commit formal heresy, and that the modern Church is leading people astray should it say that it is not heresy to deny geocentrism.

Their interpretation is based on usurping for themselves an authority they do not have, and they use this “authority” to sit in judgment of the Church.

By the way, welcome to the forums! :egyptian:

 

[grannymh]

I haven’t found any indication that The Magisterium, directly or indirectly, supports Evolutions description of how man came to exist.

Paragraphs 35-37, Encyclical Humani Generis, Pius XII, 1950

35. It remains for Us now to speak about those questions which, although they pertain to the positive sciences, are nevertheless more or less connected with the truths of the Christian faith. In fact, not a few insistently demand that the Catholic religion take these sciences into account as much as possible. This certainly would be praiseworthy in the case of clearly proved facts; but caution must be used when there is rather question of hypotheses, having some sort of scientific foundation, in which the doctrine contained in Sacred Scripture or in Tradition is involved. If such conjectural opinions are directly or indirectly opposed to the doctrine revealed by God, then the demand that they be recognized can in no way be admitted.

36. For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.[11] Some however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts which have been discovered up to now and by reasoning on those facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.

37. 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. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]

Footnote 11.
Cfr. Allocut Pont. to the members of the Academy of Science, November 30, 1941: A.A.S., vol. XXXIII, p. 506.

Footnote 12.
Cfr. Rom., V, 12-19; Conc. Trid., sess, V, can. 1-4.

 

[LaetenturCaeli]

To state that everything that Holy Scripture relates must be interpreted as belonging to an utterly modern idea of history is overly-simplistic.

As support of this:

CCC 390 The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.

 

[ProdglArchitect]

Do many Catholics, both priests and lay persons, draw a line between what the holy bible teaches and what secular logic dictates?

There is no line between them. The Church teaches Truth. Science is the study of reality. Properly ordered science can only uncover the Truth about things. I reject science when it’s abused and turned against Truth. (Like with things like fetal stem cell research or human cloning.)