Evolution-Creation?

[Donald45]

Some folks with more than a passing interest in the subject of this thread might find the following books helpful:

Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God & Evolution (HarperCollins, 1999).
Robert T. Pennock, Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (MIT Press, 1999).
Karl Giberson, Worlds Apart: The Unholy War Between Religion & Science (Beacon Hill Press, 1993).
Keith B. Miller, Perspectives on an Evolving Creation (Eerdmans, 2003).
Edward J. Larson, Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory (Random House, 2004).

Each of these texts (with the exception of Pennock who’s an agnostic, although a fully-credentialed philosopher of science) is written by a Christian (Kenneth Miller is a Catholic), and all are excellent. Larson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of science.

Buy, read, enjoy!

Donald

 

[Andrew_Hinkley]

and don’t forget Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box. The book is a biochemical challenge to Darwinism, by a Catholic and a professor of biochemistry.

(The copy I have is ISBN 0 684 83493 6)

 

[Zosimus]

CARose:

When reading Genesis, the Catholic Church allows us some leeway in what we believe. At the same time, there are certain aspects of the story which must be believed as written. We aren’t required to believe all aspects of the creation story because the story of Genesis is written using figurative language (see CCC 390). At the same time, parts need to be believed as written, for example the Fall.
Hi Rose!

I think the church stands cautiously or gives leeway in fear of any scientific discoveries that may point the way in other directions thus if the church states Genesis is not just a story per say and that it must be taken literally they may be proven wrong by science and that doesn’t look good for the church.(Just my opinion please dont stone me for that statement) So they like to leave room for interpretation on some things that do not affect the gist of Catholicism

I think the church stands cautiously or gives leeway in fear of any scientific discoveries that may point the way in other directions thus if the church states Genesis is not just a story per say and that it must be taken literally they may be proven wrong by science and that doesnt look good for the church. So they like to leave room for interpretation on some things that do not affect the gist of Catholasism

 

[Donald45]

Andrew Hinkley:

and don’t forget Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box. The book is a biochemical challenge to Darwinism, by a Catholic and a professor of biochemistry.

Yes, this is a good book to read to get the Intelligent Design (ID) side of the issue. And, although Behe’s main theses have (in my understanding) been soundly refuted in the first two texts on my list (Post #181), this would not rule out the design argument per se, as a philosophical principle. It does, however, rule it out as a scientific concept.

God bless,
Donald

 

[Brad]

Zosimus:

CARose:

When reading Genesis, the Catholic Church allows us some leeway in what we believe. At the same time, there are certain aspects of the story which must be believed as written. We aren’t required to believe all aspects of the creation story because the story of Genesis is written using figurative language (see CCC 390). At the same time, parts need to be believed as written, for example the Fall.
Hi Rose!

I think the church stands cautiously or gives leeway in fear of any scientific discoveries that may point the way in other directions thus if the church states Genesis is not just a story per say and that it must be taken literally they may be proven wrong by science and that doesn’t look good for the church.(Just my opinion please dont stone me for that statement) So they like to leave room for interpretation on some things that do not affect the gist of Catholicism

I think the church stands cautiously or gives leeway in fear of any scientific discoveries that may point the way in other directions thus if the church states Genesis is not just a story per say and that it must be taken literally they may be proven wrong by science and that doesnt look good for the church. So they like to leave room for interpretation on some things that do not affect the gist of Catholasism

Not so much standing cautiously but standing boldly for the faith. The Church is the protector of doctrines and the faith. She is not a guardian of science or math. Doctrines, such as original sin, God created the world etc. are important for our faith. How gravity works is not important for the faith.

 

[Brad]

Donald45:

This is a popular misconception about Darwin. The myth sometimes even includes the claim that he converted to Christianity on his deathbed. What’s clear from reading his writings, however, is that he in fact never entirely abandoned a belief in God’s existence, although he certainly no longer believed in His goodness (or, at least, in His direct involvement in the world). The slow and agonizing death of his precious 10-year-old daughter, Annie, was the final straw for Darwin, and he found he could no longer hold to a conventional faith in the Victorian God of his past experience. As a father myself, I can relate keenly to Darwin’s religious struggles in the face of such personal suffering.

On the Darwinian “urban myth” you described, there’s a fine book by James Moore, entitled The Darwin Legend (Baker Books, 1994). I’m not certain if it’s still in print, but I’m sure you can locate a used copy on the net.

God bless.

Is it not true that Darwin was looking for a way to disprove the faith?

 

[buffalo]

Donald45:

YIt does, however, rule it out as a scientific concept.

God bless,
Donald

Maybe not. The goal of ID is to empirically detect design in nature. using a formalized, objective and systematic approach. The construct goes like this - there are only three explanatory causes for any event - chance, necessity, and design. Detection of design seeks evidence that rules in design and rules out chance and necessity. Sounds like science to me.

 

[Clint_Ellis]

I was disappointed to see the poll did not allow the option of God creating man by means of evolution.

The Church directly affirms that The Bible is True, but acknowledges that The Bible is written in many different styles, some of which uses symbolism, allegory and metaphor.

The Bible is full of instances where God chose to do things in very subtle ways; births to ‘barren’ women is a good example - He could have simply caused a baby to appear in their living room. Jesus cured a blind man with a ‘medicinal’ paste made of mud and spit while at aother times he didn’t even touch the person being healed.

God Did It (regarding the creation of man) - the specific details of how He did it is not particularly important to me - but I see a rich tapestry of meaning in the creation stories.

Clint

 

[Donald45]

Brad:

Is it not true that Darwin was looking for a way to disprove the faith?

No, I don’t think so. “The faith,” for Darwin, consisted of the Victorian Anglicanism of his day, which was often nothing more than a social aspect of English life, and he certainly departed from that. Darwin actually attended Cambridge University for a degree in Divinity (the Anglican ministry), not out of any particular religiosity on his part, but because it would give him time to do what he really enjoyed, which was to study natural history (science). When he joined the Beagle expedition, he was a “creationist” in that he affirmed both God’s existence and his role in the creation of the natural world; he fully supported William Paley’s argument from design. Early on, he wrote:

“Another source of conviction in the existence of God…impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist” (Autobiography).

Over the years, however, Darwin drifted ever further from a conventional idea of the religion of his time, eventually describing himself as an agnostic. “In my most extreme fluctuations,” he writes, “I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally…an agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”

Ultimately, Darwin arrived at a position that one might label “agnostic deism,” in effect the belief that one cannot be entirely rationally certain of God’s existence but that, if he did exist, he clearly was uninvolved in the workings of nature. In an 1860 letter to the American botanist, Asa Gray, Darwin wrote:

“I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do…evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a benificent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.”

So, the most that I think we can say about Darwin’s religious views is that he rejected the classical Anglican understanding of God, and moved to a deistic concept more in line with that of his wife, who herself came from a family of Unitarians. And, while I certainly disagree with his personal theology—which was clearly flawed—I can sympathize with his tendency to doubt the conventional wisdom of his day.

That’s my “short” answer. God bless.

Donald

 

[Donald45]

buffalo:

Maybe not. The goal of ID is to empirically detect design in nature. using a formalized, objective and systematic approach. The construct goes like this - there are only three explanatory causes for any event - chance, necessity, and design. Detection of design seeks evidence that rules in design and rules out chance and necessity. Sounds like science to me.

Actually, it sounds like Paleyism to me. William Paley’s argument from design comes from his book entitled Natural Theology. This is telling. Open any philosophy of religion textbook, and you’ll find the Design Argument under the heading “Proofs for God’s Existence.” This is a question historically categorized as a problem of religious philosophy or, as Paley observes, theology. The ID movement wants to take a philosophical argument (one which I happen to agree with, though not as a “scientific” concept), dress it up in scientific terminology and imagery, and label it a “scientific” approach to the natural world. One can do the same thing with the Cosmological Argument, or the Moral Argument, but this will not make them “scientific” methodologies. So, while one can definitely make a strong philosophical argument for theism from the analogy of design in nature, this does not thereby make such an argument a “scientific” conclusion.

In Christ,
Donald

 

[buffalo]

Donald45:

Actually, it sounds like Paleyism to me. William Paley’s argument from design comes from his book entitled Natural Theology. This is telling. Open any philosophy of religion textbook, and you’ll find the Design Argument under the heading “Proofs for God’s Existence.” This is a question historically categorized as a problem of religious philosophy or, as Paley observes, theology. The ID movement wants to take a philosophical argument (one which I happen to agree with, though not as a “scientific” concept), dress it up in scientific terminology and imagery, and label it a “scientific” approach to the natural world. One can do the same thing with the Cosmological Argument, or the Moral Argument, but this will not make them “scientific” methodologies. So, while one can definitely make a strong philosophical argument for theism from the analogy of design in nature, this does not thereby make such an argument a “scientific” conclusion.

In Christ,
Donald

However, if you can make it empirical it is science.

 

[Donald45]

buffalo:

However, if you can make it empirical it is science.

With respect, I must disagree. While it’s true that science is an empirical discipline, the reverse (i.e., that what is empirical must be science) is not necessarily true. In other words, all science is empirically based, but not everything that is empirical is necessarily “science.” Any number of activities can be considered “empirical” in that they utilize physical materials to complete physical tasks—plumbing, chess, auto mechanics—but we don’t speak of “the ‘science’ of pipe-fitting,” or “the ‘scientific’ end game” (at least, we don’t use such terminology in the same straightforward technical sense in which we describe the natural sciences). To reduce the idea of “science” to any and all empirical (i.e., material) activities or concepts would be to render the term “science” essentially meaningless. At that point, brushing one’s teeth, riding a bicycle, tying one’s shoes, and any number of physical endeavors, would have to be considered “science,” and the word would thus be drained of all significant meaning.

The ID movement’s supposed “scientific” design model is nothing more than an age-old philosophical principle known as the Teleological Argument for God’s existence wrapped up in pseudo-technical jargon and passed off as a “scientific” methodology. ID’s approach commits what philosophers call a category fallacy, wherein one removes a concept from its proper category (in this case, philosophy), and attempts to apply it in a completely separate and foreign category (in this case, science). In common terms, it mixes apples and oranges (or, more appropriately, apples and tennis balls—the comparison is only apparent, merely imaginary).

Kenneth Miller, a Catholic microbiologist at Brown University, has written a fine book on the subject titled Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God & Evolution (HarperCollins, 1999). I also highly recommend Robert Pennock’s Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (MIT Press, 1999).

Take care,
Donald

 

[Ric]

God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

1:3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning–the first day.

1:6 And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning–the second day.

Note that the evening and the morning were literal 24 hour periods.

 

[TOME]

It is my opinion that the Book of Genesis does not give us the “Blue Print” on how God created the world. I base my opinion on a couple of things. First, that wasn’t, in my opinion, the purpose of Genesis at all. In Genesis I find the “Revelation” that is the truth revealed to us - the truth about God himself, His Nature and an important of this revelation is the God is the Creator, what God creates is done with a plan thus all of creation has a plan and purpose and isn’t the result of chaos forming itself into an order by chance. In short God is God. Also in the two creation accounts God reveals to us the type of relationships God has intended for humankind to have first between God and ourselves (Creator to created) our relationship with and responsibility to the Earth and beyond and finally which is rooted to the first to our relationship and responsibility to one another.

 

[Sir_Shane]

I think there is a problem with the question. When you say “a literal creation by God,” do you mean the traditional six-days? If so, I think the poll should specify that.

 

[Faithful_One]

Ric:

God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

Note that the evening and the morning were literal 24 hour periods.

Not only so, Ric, but contrary to the statements of many previous posters, God DID specify HOW he created the world in those six days…He SPOKE it into existence! His WORD created all these things:

"And God said, “Let there be light,…and there was light.”

And God SAID, “Let the earth bring forth grass…and it was so”.

And God SAID, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly…”
etc…

Moses himself bears witness to the literal six days when he said:

“For in six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, the sea, AND all that is in them…” Exodus 20:11

The psalmist also showed his understanding of how God created the world instantaneously by the power of His spoken Word:

"For by the Word of the Lord where the heavens created and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth,…FOR HE SPAKE AND IT WAS DONE; HE COMMANDED AND IT STOOD FAST." (Pslam 33:6-9)

Doesn’t sound like evolution to me!

Being a Catholic, it really troulbles me that the Catholic Church appears to be, in effect, teaching evolution out of one side of its mouth, and trying to teach Adam & Eve out of the other side.
To me, the two are irreconcilable. Even the unbelieving evolutionist can see that. Due to the Church’s apparent compromise by embracing evolution, there is a commonly heard statement among unbelieving evolutionists, "Even the Catholic Church believes the Adam & Eve story is a myth."
“And of course, if Adam & Eve is a myth, then so is that nonsense about sin.”
Thus the Catholic Church becomes guilty of promoting the “no such thing as sin” philosophy simply by failing to take the words of Genesis literally.

And, as much as I am ashamed to admit it, these unbelieving evolutionist are correct in their logic, the Catholic Church is giving them license to adopt that ungodly philosophy…at least, it certainly appears that way to me.

Faithful One

 

[Ric]

Faithful One,

God Bless you!

You have read your Bible, and read it well! It seems to me that you have let the Holy Spirit lead you!

I wish you lived in Orlando, having you in my Bible Study would be just awesome!
Faithful One:

Not only so, Ric, but contrary to the statements of many previous posters, God DID specify HOW he created the world in those six days…He SPOKE it into existence! His WORD created all these things:

"And God said, “Let there be light,…and there was light.”

And God SAID, “Let the earth bring forth grass…and it was so”.

And God SAID, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly…”
etc…

Moses himself bears witness to the literal six days when he said:

“For in six days the Lord made the heaven and the earth, the sea, AND all that is in them…” Exodus 20:11

The psalmist also showed his understanding of how God created the world instantaneously by the power of His spoken Word:

"For by the Word of the Lord where the heavens created and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth,…FOR HE SPAKE AND IT WAS DONE; HE COMMANDED AND IT STOOD FAST." (Pslam 33:6-9)

Doesn’t sound like evolution to me!

Being a Catholic, it really troulbles me that the Catholic Church appears to be, in effect, teaching evolution out of one side of its mouth, and trying to teach Adam & Eve out of the other side.
To me, the two are irreconcilable. Even the unbelieving evolutionist can see that. Due to the Church’s apparent compromise by embracing evolution, there is a commonly heard statement among unbelieving evolutionists, "Even the Catholic Church believes the Adam & Eve story is a myth."
“And of course, if Adam & Eve is a myth, then so is that nonsense about sin.”
Thus the Catholic Church becomes guilty of promoting the “no such thing as sin” philosophy simply by failing to take the words of Genesis literally.

And, as much as I am ashamed to admit it, these unbelieving evolutionist are correct in their logic, the Catholic Church is giving them license to adopt that ungodly philosophy…at least, it certainly appears that way to me.

Faithful One

 

[Faithful_One]

Ric:

Faithful One,

God Bless you!

You have read your Bible, and read it well! It seems to me that you have let the Holy Spirit lead you!

I wish you lived in Orlando, having you in my Bible Study would be just awesome!

Thanks, Ric; I appreciate the kuddos; however, I think this on-line Bible study right here is all I can handle at the moment…Besides, coming to Florida is out of the question…there are too many sharks! He, he.

 

[Ric]

Faithful One:

Thanks, Ric; I appreciate the kuddos; however, I think this on-line Bible study right here is all I can handle at the moment…Besides, coming to Florida is out of the question…there are too many sharks! He, he.

Ah, don’t worry about my friends!

 

[TOME]

I would like to address two points made by Faithful One. First, in the general metaphysical understanding of the time ( although the Jews didn’t really have a metaphysics as the Greek/Roman world) to speak was more than just to express words or thoughts. Your “Word” is you more than just than expressions of thought. John’s prologue expresses this, “And the Word was God”. So in Genesis, to “Speak” refers to or express the Nature of God which is to create. The second point is about the term myth. It seems that in the general understanding of this word is equal to a ficticious story something like Sci -fi. Myths however are tales with deep and symbolic meaning gained through human understanding realized through God’s gifts of human reason and intellect.