The World we live in was made by God. Something that “fits” the world ipso facto also “fits” with what was made by God. As far back as Saint Augustine the Catholic Church has known that it has to take into account secular knowledge of the outside world. Saint Thomas Aquinas agreed.
Any Church that wants to take account of all of God’s work has to take into account the material world, since that material world is God’s work. To fail to take the material world into account is to ignore part of what God has done. Would you rather follow a church that only agrees with part of what God has done or a Church that agrees with all that God has done?
rossum
Excellent points, rossum. After reading the debates here and elsewhere, a few points. There is a war going on between good and evil. I believe in a literal devil and a hell. That said, I have noticed that evolution is one subject that exhibits a bias or even a schizophrenia here. At best, Catholics are encouraged to believe something, or the word believe is excluded and substituted with accept. Either way, there is undeniable evidence here of hundreds of posts geared toward one purpose: accept it and accept it quickly.
Is there any actual science involved in evolutionary theory? I once thought there was but I find a good deal of it involves wishful thinking and faith statements. Such as, trust us, a bunch of chemicals came together and became life. There is zero empirical evidence for this. I’m not going to trust, believe or accept that statement ever.
Second, it is unconvincing to me that random mutation and natural selection are sufficient, by themselves, to have generated increasingly complex organisms and novel organs. Yes, yes, I’ve seen the evidence presented often enough. In Communion and Stewardship, St. Thomas Aquinas is quoted as saying that even though things happen in certain visible ways that they are guided
infallibly. All I have to do is quote Stephen Jay Gould or even Kenneth Miller to show that on both sides of the fence, the default position is that man ‘just happened’ to appear. Guided? No. Just happened to show up, and according to Mr. Gould, if things could be rewound, different (name removed by moderator)uts would result in different outputs. Mr. Miller, along with Father Coyne, formerly with the Vatican Observatory, both give nature the controlling interest as opposed to say, God. Interesting but wrong. Just flat out wrong.
The schizophrenia occurs when I’m told science is silent about God and certainly, the Bible. Communion and Stewardship warns about things science cannot demonstrate as true. Pope John Paul II stated that science cannot provide an answer to what he called the “ontological leap” to man. He also stated that there is actual design in nature and to deny that is to deny things as they appear to us. It seems to me that a paper thin line separates that reality from Richard Dawkins who acknowledges things appear designed but actually, are not.
Finally, there are those who post here who look for any tiny phrase to say, See, See, Your Pope gets it, or St, Augustine gets it, What’s
your problem? Then, when challenged, they try to say, On, you misunderstand, the Pope was speaking symbolically or metaphysically or just doesn’t know what he’s talking about – Popes are fallible too when they are just talking in regular conversation. I am positive Pope Benedict is aware of the difficulties caused by this subject and the questions raised. I am also positive that he is not Pope because he is fond of making off the cuff remarks. He was a university professor as well.
So all that said, I am seeing not an attempt to inform but attempts to engineer consent, sometimes blatantly so, other times more subtly. Couple this with the current state of the global media that is promoting living without God, outside of His commandments, and the Dictatorship of Relativism that recognizes no absolute truths.
When secularists widely published the quote from Pope John Paul II about evolution being more than a hypothesis, they leave out that part of his address where he goes on to say it is more correct to say
theories of evolution. In Communion and Stewardship, these other theories are included, along with neo-Darwinism, as having a requirement, they cannot explicitly deny to divine providence a truly causal role in the development of life. Period. And that’s when the ‘science is silent about God’ statement comes out.
I see here that the goal is not to reconcile science to divinely revealed truth but to reform divinely revealed truth not for scientific reasons but for ideological reasons. Pope John Paul II recognized a two-way relationship between science and religion: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.” I suspect some who just read that felt the adrenaline flow through their veins with the first sentence, and a big question mark appear over the heads with the second part.
What gives man the idea that now is the moment in history when what is held as only provisional must be accepted by the faithful? What, other than the statements of a handful of ideologues convinces them? The evidence? I don’t think so.
Among the responses to a PZ Myers youtube interview was a comment that science should concede nothing to religion. I think that is what is driving most of the comments here. There is an inability of some to recognize that man is saying to the Bride of Christ: Hey! We got some science here dat says your holy book is wrong, here, here and here. Listen up!"
I am satisfied when Pope Benedict linked Pope John Paul II’s statement about evolution to one of his own, “But it also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory.” That is as far as the Church, and I, will go.
Peace,
Ed
