Dragons and Dinosaurs

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You talk as if you’re big into science. Which is very possible! But then you say something like “evolution is just a theory” and I am given pause. In science, a theory isn’t just a guess. One doesn’t have “a theory where I left my car keys” or “a theory why Uncle Steve is so crazy” or “a theory why the lamp is broken.”

EVERYTHING in science is a theory. A theory is a system of models and explanations that explains something. Relativity is a theory. Germ theory of communicable diseases is a theory. The heliocentric model of the solar system is a theory.
 
twf said:
No the OP is saying that stories of dragons are based upon oral accounts of dinosaurs… it’s part of the “Young Earth Creationism” model in which the earth is a mere few thousand years old and thus every species that ever lived, lived with man…
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There are a great many accounts of man living with dinosaurs, Genesis 8:8 for example: “He sent forth also a dove after him, to see if the waters had now ceased upon the face of the earth.”

A dove is a dinosaur, as is any bird. Trying to shoot down evolution that way is to misunderstand evolution and what it says. Unfortunately far too common in YEC circles.

rossum
 
In 1996 Pope John Paul II addressed the issue before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He sanctioned the acceptance of evolution but reminded his listeners that spiritual questions like the nature of the soul and its relationship to God are beyond the realm of science.

Two years later John Paul issued his encyclical Fides et Ratio (On Faith and Reason), reminding the church that while faith is superior to reason, “there can never be a true divergence between faith and reason, since the same God who reveals the mysteries and bestows the gift of faith has also placed in the human spirit the light of reason.” This is reminiscent of St. Augustine of Hippo, who wrote that “truth, wherever it is to be found, belongs to our God.”

As befits the dignity of our species, we humans are forever in a search for truth to help us understand not only the world in which we exist but the meaning of that existence as well. We should use all the tools at our disposal, all the while recognizing the goodness of this distinctively human inquiry.

In other words, we need to profess that God created everything. And it’s all good.
The manner in which He made that happen? Either way is acceptable for Catholics, so long as we believe He is the creator of all.
 
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I think it’s important for those on this thread to make clear what they believe about evolution or what they don’t believe about evolution. Do you believe we descended from apes? Or that God created Adam and Eve at a later date, and maybe did not evolve? Perhaps, you believe instead, that God just created everything in longer time periods rather than a week and that we did not evolve from apes?
 
The issue is that Christinas who are nonchalant about being evolved from apes, really haven’t consider the grave implications to Hamartiology. I have never read a cohesive doctrine on this, because there can be none.
In secular anthropology crime/sin in an invention of civilization. It’s the ultimate ugly duckling story. There is no problem with us. We are just being natural. Being a nice guy, is a artificial invention of civilization to improve our quality of life. Christian theology is that Jesus came to restore us to our original God’s image. What evolutionist Christians are basically saying is that to sin is to be uncivilized. So Jesus was just trying to make us for civilized.
 
misstherese said:
I think it’s important for those on this thread to make clear what they believe about evolution or what they don’t believe about evolution. Do you believe we descended from apes? Or that God created Adam and Eve at a later date, and maybe did not evolve? Perhaps, you believe instead, that God just created everything in longer time periods rather than a week and that we did not evolve from apes?
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I am Buddhist, so the Abrahamic God is of little significance to me. He cannot attain nirvana for me.

I accept evolution, not “believe”, because that is what the scientific evidence shows, and scientific theories are determined by the available evidence. As the evidence changes, so does my acceptance change and the theory change.

The scientific evidence shows that humans are members of the Hominidae, and that we are descended from earlier members of that group. Chimps, Gorillas and Orangutans are also members of the Hominidae, so in scientific terms we are ourselves apes and are descended from earlier apes, just as we are mammals and are descended from earlier mammals.

$0.02

rossum
 
I don’t put much stock in theories. The purpose behind most scientific theories is to disprove there is a god, and no theories are ever proven to be factual, that’s why they’re only theories. Logic usually trumps theory. Like what’s more logical, everything was created by a higher power or nothingness exploded from nothing and resulted in talking, thinking, walking pieces of meat.
 
Maybe dragons were dinosaurs, maybe they weren’t.

Evolution requires faith, and we should not have faith in things that are not Divine.
 
‘The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches … in any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the gradual transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.”’-Stephen J. Gould
 
twf said:
Respectfully, your comments reek of fundamentalist Protestant pseudoscience
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I don’t know how you can say that when I haven’t actually made clear what I believe about evolution. I’m open to the possibility. But at the same time evolution is not 100% proven to be the case. We don’t really know if that was the only force involved in the development of life on this planet. Evolution also doesn’t explain how life arose in the first place. The chances of a random molecule suddenly becoming alive are like a billion to one.

To be honest, I don’t worry too much about it.
 
“It remains true, as every paleontologist knows, that most new species, genera, and families, and that nearly all categories above the level of families, appear in the [fossil] record suddenly, and are not led up to by gradual, completely continuous transitional sequences.”- George Gaylord Simpson

“One of the most surprising negative results of palaeontological research in the last century is that such transitional forms seem to be inordinately scarce. In Darwin’s time this could perhaps be ascribed with some justification to the incompleteness of the palaeontological record and to lack of knowledge, but with the enormous number of fossil species which have been discovered since then, other causes must be found for the almost complete absence of transitional forms.” -A Brouwer
 
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“There is no need to apologize any longer for the poverty of the fossil record. In some ways, it has become almost unmanageably rich and discovery is outpacing integration. The fossil record nevertheless continues to be composed mainly of gaps.”- T Neville George

“Unfortunately not a single specimen of an appropriate reptilian ancestor is known prior to the appearance of true reptiles. The absence of such ancestral forms leaves many problems of the amphibian—reptile transition unanswered.”- Lewis L Carroll
 
Simplistically put, yes. That’s what the overwhelming genetic and fossil evidence suggests. God gave us the gift of reason.
 
Maybe we are past the point of this in the discussion, but I’m curious what point you are making in the OP, @RoseofMary1. Pictures of dragons appear in lots of ancient cultures, and the word dinosaur didn’t appear until the 1800s. What do either of those things have to do with evolution? I feel like it’s supposed to be proof of something, but I’m not making the connection.
 
It “is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil ‘groups’ can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another.”- Gareth V Nelson

“Despite the bright promise that palaeontology provides means of ‘seeing’ Evolution, it has provided some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and palaeontology does not provide them.” David Kitts

“The problem has been set aside, not for want of interest, but for lack of evidence. No fossil structure between scale and feather is known, and recent investigators are unwilling to found a theory on pure speculation.” Barbara J Stahl

“It seems, from the complex construction of feathers, that their evolution from reptilian scales would have required an immense period of time and involved a series of intermediate structures. So far, the fossil record does not bear out that supposition.” Barbara J Stahl
 
Not true. When God formed Adam from the mud of the earth (which you can read literally or symbolically as a long evolutionary process), He singled Adam apart from the animals by breathing on him. In that moment, Adam became truly spiritually alive and aware of God…base animal matter was sanctified, made holy. In Christ, man is not only restored to that primordial holiness, but raised far above it, for the divine and human natures have been United.
 
“The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for gradual change. All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.” Stephen J Gould

“Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the process we profess to study.” Stephen J Gould

“We have no idea why most structures in extinct organisms look the way they do. And, as I already have noted, different species usually appear and disappear from the record without showing the transition that Darwin postulated.” David M Raup

“Instead of finding gradual unfolding of life, what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record.” David M Raup
 
Well there was discovered DNA and proteins in dinosaur tissue that is “apparently” 130 million years old. Even though it is absolutely 100% impossible for proteins let alone DNA to last that long. The tissue is even stretchy and still holds its form very well.

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