Evidence for Design?

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inocente said:
I very much like your straight-forward directness but from what I’ve learned on this thread, it isn’t the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes, there is no righteousness that is by faith from first to last, and what may be known about God isn’t at all plain, because God hasn’t made it plain. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—haven’t been clearly seen, not being understood from what has been made, so that people have loads of excuses as the evidence is really, really complicated, I mean don’t get me started on how really complicated it is, you would not believe how ridiculously complicated it is. 😃

With apologies to Paul (Rom 1).
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LOL! Excellent post. I would like to just understand what the point of all the rhetoric is supposed to be. In a thread this long, sometimes the point gets lost.
 
buffalo said:
Indeed, in the beginning God breathed the language of DNA into the kinds.
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Buffalo, what do you mean by “kinds”? Are you using it in the sense that Young Earth Creationists and Flood Geologists use it when they defend a literal Noachian Flood?
 
StAnastasia said:
Buffalo, what do you mean by “kinds”? Are you using it in the sense that Young Earth Creationists and Flood Geologists use it when they defend a literal Noachian Flood?
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The “kinds” would be the type of genetic instruction and purpose each was given when thought of by God during the creation.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Al

**But I see that you have shifted your position. Some 20+ pages ago you claimed that abiogenesis could not have happened by natural causes. **

As usual, you are not honest in this discussion.
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I am always honest. Perhaps there was a misunderstanding.

And by the way, you always raised doubts about abiogenesis by natural causes, so I just took what you said.
What I clearly said is that evolution is not possible by chance or random events.
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See, but this is the problem with your view point right there. Chance or random events are part of (the laws of) nature, they are part of the evolutionary process, and they can still fall under Divine Providence. Read paragraph 69 of Communion and Stewardship:

vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20040723_communion-stewardship_en.html

And of course, if you cannot allow for any chance events to fall under Divine Providence, then yes, abiogenesis by natural causes is excluded. Which explains our misunderstanding, if there was one.
Evolution could be natural and simultaneously designed to occur in the mind of God. If you do not believe this, you are not a Catholic, nor even a Christian. :rolleyes:
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Well, that is precisely what I believe, so we have no disagreement!
 
From paragraph 69 of Communion and Stewardship:

But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1).
 
Al_Moritz said:
From paragraph 69 of Communion and Stewardship:

But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1).
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I don’t think I ever got an answer from you on this:

Did Adam look as God planned?
 
 
Al

I will take it that you misunderstood, or I misled, or a little of both. No time to go back and look.

See, but this is the problem with your view point right there. Chance or random events are part of (the laws of) nature, they are part of the evolutionary process, and they can still fall under Divine Providence. Read paragraph 69 of Communion and Stewardship:

Exactly what distinction would you make between Intelligent Design and Divine Providence?

If God divinely ordained that chance evolution would produce humans, how can you say Man was not Intelligently Designed to appear in the evolutionary process? After all, pure unalloyed chance (with no God to direct it) might have produced a universe without humans.
 
buffalo said:
I don’t think I ever got an answer from you on this:

Did Adam look as God planned?
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I have been playing up until now. But It is now time to end this discussion

God planed that organisms should freely evolve because the nature of Love is as such that it does not discriminate over what entity should exist and what should not. Thus evolution as a method of creation is a necessary product of Gods nature because love does not discriminate over the value of things and therefore does not determine their existence based on some degree of value that God has not given. If God were the kind of being that discriminated over the value of things like we do, nothing would exist except for God himself, for he is objective value itself, and is therefore the greatest kind of value, and does not require the existence of other creatures before having that objective value, and as such does not need creatures to be fulfilled in his nature. Nothing lesser in value than God has a right to exist. We have no right to exist. We exist out of Gods love. God loves all creation and allows it to freely express itself.

There is a kind of organism or form that is best suited for ensoulment. When the organism Homosapien came into being as the result of millions of years of evolution, God ensouled two of their kind after they had reached the age of maturity. These two were called Adam and Eve.

This is the truth. This discussion is now over.

ID science is heresy.
 
inocente said:
Why do you think God planned how Adam would look? (Put another way, does God micro-manage?)
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If from the beginning God wanted a moral and spiritual response from the universe, I imagine She conceived the plan by which the quarks from the Big Bang would organize themselves into mater and energy, and into biochemically rich planets surrounding enduring second-generation stars, and eventually into organic beings. Whether God pre-specifed that this moral and spiritual response take the form of a primate of the order Chordata is not clear, but that is what He got. On other biochemically rich planets in the universe, perhaps the moral and spiritual response has taken or will take the form of a bipedal, large-brained marsupial, or of a bipedal, warmblooded reptile. The morphological platform may matter less than the openness of the response, as hinted by the great Neo-Thomist Eric Mascall in The Openness of Being."

StAnastasia
 
Al_Moritz said:
From paragraph 69 of Communion and Stewardship:

But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1).
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👍👍👍👍👍
 
MindOverMatter2 said:
I have been playing up until now. But It is now time to end this discussion There is a kind of organism or form that is best suited for ensoulment. When the organism Homosapien came into being as the result of millions of years of evolution, God ensouled two of their kind after they had reached the age of maturity. These two were called Adam and Eve.

From you point of view.
This is the truth. This discussion is now over.
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Julia_Mae said:
So the thread is about evidence that all that exists (outside of the Creator) does so by the Intent of the Creator. Is that correct?
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No!
  1. Moral and physical evil do not exist due to the Intent of the Creator.
  2. Moral and physical evil are permitted by the Creator because they are the inevitable consequence of creating autonomous creatures and a physical universe.
  3. The injustice, suffering and premature deaths which occur in the world are not due to the Intent of the Creator but to the wills of His creatures.
  4. Suffering and premature deaths are also due to the complex interplay of natural laws which results in unintended coincidences.
 
inocente said:
Before going any further, how in heaven’s name are they against the laws of nature? Which laws of nature do you think they break?
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They are not “against” the laws of nature. They are due to the complex interplay of natural laws which results in unintended coincidences.
 
Al_Moritz said:
From paragraph 69 of Communion and Stewardship:

But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1).
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“Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation.”

“within” is the key word. Human beings exist by necessity whereas physical evil happens from contingency. Nor does St. Thomas exclude miraculous intervention…
 
StAnastasia said:
If from the beginning God wanted a moral and spiritual response from the universe, I imagine She conceived the plan by which the quarks from the Big Bang would organize themselves into mater and energy, and into biochemically rich planets surrounding enduring second-generation stars, and eventually into organic beings. Whether God pre-specifed that this moral and spiritual response take the form of a primate of the order Chordata is not clear, but that is what He got. On other biochemically rich planets in the universe, perhaps the moral and spiritual response has taken or will take the form of a bipedal, large-brained marsupial, or of a bipedal, warmblooded reptile. The morphological platform may matter less than the openness of the response, as hinted by the great Neo-Thomist Eric Mascall in The Openness of Being."

StAnastasia
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There seems no obvious reason why God should not direct the course of development and put the finishing touches to a masterpiece **inspired by love **rather than remain aloof and leave everything to unguided processes. The universe is certainly independent to some extent but not entirely out of control… 😉
 
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