"Early Hominids" and Catholic Teaching?

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twf said:
God works through natural processes. He didn’t “poof” me into existence.
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If you are a human being, and not a “hominid”, then He did “poof” the most important component of you into existence: your immortal soul. The human person (unlike every other creation of God) is “made in the image and likeness of God” for a reason: the human vocation - calling - the very reason why God made you and me - is for eternal, intimate, supernatural communion in divine love with Him (God the Holy Trinity) and with all other human persons in Him.

There is a “quantum leap” accomplished in the creation of man, the immediate supernatural creation of a completely human personal soul - which gave uniquely human life to the body formed from “the mud” as one poster posted. The soul cannot “evolve”. Neither can there be a spiritual entity that is “a part-human soul” - partially human and partially nonhuman. This radical, discontinuous distinction of man, separating him from all else, is essential to our understanding of who we are - who each of us is - and by the way imposes the issue of morality upon and into any philosophy of our being.

To the extent that evolutionists negate/deny/erase the essential place of morality from the question of human origins - to that extent they are workers in the city of man, busy with eliminating God from the picture, and thus dehumanizing man and mankind.
 
Capta(name removed by moderator)rudeman said:
I’m ignoring the rest of your post because it’s irrelevant. What you’ve said here is completely false. Evolution is compatible with God. Full stop. Evolution does not “marginalize” God, it does not erase thought or need of God. All it does is explain, with explanation derived by evidence obtained through observation, why life has taken the course it has.
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If evolution does not literally “marginalize” God, how do you suppose that atheists find evolution so attractive? Evolution opens the door to the complete elimination of (as they imagine) any “need” of a god. Look around you, listen to Western culture, measure the decline of humanity, as the city of man grows and expands and consumes all dignity and beauty, in human society. We grow more brutal, harder, colder, more lost, impoverished, louder and empty and alone, generation by generation.
 
fide said:
If evolution does not literally “marginalize” God, how do you suppose that atheists find evolution so attractive?
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They find it attractive for the reason I do: it’s a worldview backed up by everything we know about life’s development. It has nothing to do with atheism and everything to do with science. On the other hand, I find that many religious people reject evolution and science in general because they view science as conflicting with their interpretations of scripture. Young Earth Creationism is attractive to them because it allows them to reject science, which they personally see as conflicting with religion.

As for the rest of your post, evolution is not linked to civilization’s decline. That’s linked to a rejection of the family, of sex properly understood, and of virtue in pursuit of fleeting, simple happiness. Science expands my awe of God. How wonderful the mind that created a universe so tailored that the end result of its foundational laws was mankind, which God then ensouled and has loved so much? How wonderful the mind that made such an expanse? How can you look at the night sky, the majesty of prehistoric animals, or the intricacies of physics and think “yeah, that’s the result of (insert secular first cause here)”? The only way to do that is to be immersed in a culture, in a world, that requires a rejection of God. Creation is not the problem, we are.
 
I explicitly and specifically mentioned the supernatural creation of the soul for each and every human in my post. As such, respectfully, your post doesn’t really address my point…
As I said, creationist literalists are scandalized and even disgusted by the idea that man, in the biological flesh, descended from animal hominids, yet take no issue with the Genesis narrative that God formed man from mere dust…gross, icky, lifeless mud.

Humans and chimpanzees are incredibly closely related. A chimp shares more DNA with a human than it does with other apes. Biologically, we are next of kin. Yet, the differences are obviously monumental… this only goes to show how important the soul is…how great a gift it is… without the supernatural gift of the eternal soul, we would just be chimps with big brains. Understanding this affirms the dignity and unique status of man…contrary to your assertion.

Regardless… Holy Mother Church takes no issue with biological evolution.
 
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It definitely seems plausible. CS Lewis imagined something like this.

The hominids might have some primitive form of language, like something imagined by a linguist: Pleistocenese (JBR Palaeolang) But higher forms of language like poetry would be beyond their grasp. This is only for ensouled humans.
 
Capta(name removed by moderator)rudeman said:
They find it attractive for the reason I do: it’s a worldview backed up by everything we know about life’s development. It has nothing to do with atheism and everything to do with science.
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They like it because it has nothing to do with God, and God has nothing to do with it or them. The god-free world is the future, as many see it - a world in which man is king over all; man is a god unto himself. That was the desire in the beginning - the deadly temptation into which Adam and Eve fell, and to which the evil one continues to lure men and women today.

After this, please excuse me. This is already far too much time spend on the subject, for me. It is Sunday - our day of worship of the Lord…
 
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I find value in understanding Creation. I find value in understanding and knowing how the world works. Understanding Creation is how one draws closer to God. As I explained in my second paragraph, I find more love of God in loving what He has made than many other pursuits. It’s the way I grow closer to Him.

Just to be clear, I don’t appreciate your dismissal of my point in your first paragraph. Atheists do not love evolution because it lacks God. It’s all about science.
 
Yes, a love for science that explains without any need for God. That, in itself, is irrational - yet most see no problem in godlessness. For them, God is only useful to explain what man has not YET explained.
 
If your words are honest, how can a man like myself love God and the pursuit of science?
 
Capta(name removed by moderator)rudeman said:
If your words are honest, how can a man like myself love God and the pursuit of science?
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I found that although one could, it would be with great difficulty, and with little or no peer support if not peer ridicule and rejection. It would be a career with little help from “the scientific community.”

The current agreement among scientists that I found was that science does not/cannot include matters beyond the natural. I concluded that a more prudent path, for me, in my search for Truth (which was the reason I went into science in the first place - to find Truth), was to search for God by means of His divine Self-revelation, rather than through His creation. Truth is inseparable from God Who IS Truth, as Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

There are many very interesting issues that ought to be revisited afresh, with an open mind - the age of the earth, and fossils, and the sun - the energy source of the sun - the limitations of quantum mechanics - special relativity - well, many areas of physics - but so many presumptions have been made and settled on in the world of modern science - with theories now built upon past theories, and now there is such a settled “modern scientific orthodoxy,” that I concluded that that was a hill I was not willing to die on. Life is brief. I sensed my vocation elsewhere.

BUT - maybe the Lord wants you to do both. Jesus revealed a relevant truth when He told His disciples, If they hated me, they will hate you - no matter what “work” you do, if you faithfully do it in Him!
 
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fide said:
The current agreement among scientists that I found was that science does not/cannot include matters beyond the natural.
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Just curious if you are familiar with Rupert Sheldrake. If you are, what’s your opinion of him?
 
fide said:
I know nothing about him. Is he relevant to this issue?
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Absolutely. He is a biologist who worked at Cambridge. He’s written a lot of books and also has documentaries that were on TV, now on youtube. https://www.sheldrake.org/ He’s now in his 70s–he’s been around a long time.

I think you would like him–I’ve read several of his books, and his point is that science can only explain so much. There are things that science can’t explain–he doesn’t say that science won’t be able to explain them in the future, and he certainly believes in science, but he has the same reservations as you do. He’s not explicitly religious, but he thinks there is “something” beyond the range of reductive science. You should check him out–his own web site, Amazon, you tube.

One of my favorite examples is turtles. If a turtle is upside down, and another turtle passes by, the turtle will go out of its way to flip the upside down turtle rightside up. Altruistic turtles! There are several youtube videos of this. So how does the turtle know the other turtle is in trouble? Why does it care? Why does it always help the other turtle?
 
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