Evolution: Is There Any Good Reason To Reject The Abiogenesis Hypothesis?

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I really liked your article!! It teached me more about theistic evolution and thomistic mataphysics.

The only problem I see is that Aquinas’ solution to the Cosmogonical fallacy makes it impossible to explain any miracle, any divine intervention, that we know happen.
 
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buffalo said:
And no, the Church does not accept it because it is not empirically proven.
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The Church absolutely allows for it.
buffalo said:
I do not have a personal revelation. I quote what the Church has taught for centuries.
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Well, you’ve contradicted the Catholic docs Ed posted to this thread. 🙂 I don’t want to get too hung up on that though. I’m just trying to understand how you believe Adam came to be. It’s the 4th time I’ve asked. If you don’t want to answer you can say so. I’m just looking for a paragraph or two in your own words.
 
AlbMagno said:
The only problem I see is that Aquinas’ solution to the Cosmogonical fallacy makes it impossible to explain any miracle, any divine intervention, that we know happen.
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I’m not sure I understand your concern. Miracles are simple acts of Creation, taking place outside of the natural order. The point being made is that if we insist that a natural act is actually a miracle then we are diminishing God’s Act in the natural order. God can of course cause miracles, but we needn’t insert miracles into the natural order to prove God’s Power because the very existence of a natural order itself proves God’s power.

Consider “random” events in the material world: a roll of the dice is called random only because we don’t understand all of the factors and can’t predict the outcome. In reality the dice will roll according to its weight distribution, the force applied to it, the air density ect. A human manipulates only a few factors, and isn’t even aware of many others, so the result of the roll is unknown and can be called random. God, however, doesn’t just know all the factors but even CAUSES them; every single factor exists by God’s eternal Knowledge and Will. When nature “rolls a six” it is because of a million factors that God has forseen and Created.

So when we say that evolution is natural and random we take absolutely nothing away from God, because God’s Will and Knowledge extends even to random natural events. To say that God must intervene in the natural world to make life is simply saying that God isn’t powerful enough to organize natural causes so that they can produce His intended effects.

Peace and God bless!
 
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buffalo said:
Yes, several did. Not a problem for a human without the heavy genetic load that we have.
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Unevidenced personal belief is not science. And no, the Sumerian King lists are not scientific evidence of people living for 1,000 years.
 
Gorgias said:
OK, but… 98% / 92% / 44% doesn’t imply “each directly created by God”… right?
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Each individual organism exists because of God, and each as a living being had an ancestor, a first of the kind of thing it is. I don’t believe they would share a common ancestor. Rather each is an expression of some sort of simian, in the first case, a rodent in the second, and fly in the third. Given the complexity of the organisms themselves, both physically and behaviourally, and their diversity, the first of each kind would have the capacity to produce offspring with different morphologies as needed or to express a creative potential in time. Stem cells were mentioned earlier as analogous to this view of what was initially created directly by God, just as He had previously brought light into existence light and then atoms. Each step in the hierarchy of being that is the world, was created to produce an environment that allowed for the next. We are dealing with kinds of being, different relational attributes, which are more complex with each step. These had to be created as they do not arise spontaneously from the constituent parts of an organism.
Gorgias said:
to say that we’re not animals – in a biological sense – doesn’t seem to be a workable claim.
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Then what we consider the biological is illusory, since the reality of what we are is different, perhaps
as the Eucharist is not a piece of bread.
Gorgias said:
the Church doesn’t weigh in on scientific propositions, right
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Science is a human enterprise. The Church would not weigh in on the empirical results we obtain in the field or in the lab, but it must voice an opinion on their interpretation. Evolution is an interpretation. The idea that a two month old fetus is a product of conception is another. Definitely if the interpretation of the evidence is distorted to fit a vision of a Godless or amoral ground to our being, it must weigh in.
 
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Aloysium said:
Then what we consider the biological is illusory, since the reality of what we are is different, perhaps
as the Eucharist is not a piece of bread.
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Interesting take on things, but in a philosophical perspective, that comparison doesn’t hold up. Christ is present in sacramental mode; we are not.

The reality of “what we are”, on the other hand, is a composite of body and soul. The body is not illusory.
Aloysium said:
The Church would not weigh in on the empirical results we obtain in the field or in the lab, but it must voice an opinion on their interpretation.
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Let’s see one, then. Ed attempted to assert, it seems, that Humani generis is a doctrinal assertion on a scientific position. I would disagree; rather, Humani is a reflection on origins theology, not origins science, per se. It sounds off on scientific propositions which would appear to be in conflict with our theological tradition, certainly, but it does not posit scientific theories of its own. (For instance, its statements vis-a-vis ‘monogenism’ and ‘polygenism’ are situated in the context of the ensouled human being, which is a purely theological concept.)
 
Gorgias said:
Interesting take on things, but in a philosophical perspective, that comparison doesn’t hold up. Christ is present in sacramental mode ; we are not.

The reality of “what we are”, on the other hand, is a composite of body and soul. The body is not illusory.
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I didn’t like using that analogy, but it was meant to address the transformation of matter when possessed by a particular kind of soul, an organizing prinicple of matter that results in a new form of being, whether that creature is a human being, an ape or a patch of grass.

The reality of the body lies in its existence, what we think it is may be illusory. In terms of this discussion, what would be illusory would be a belief that changes in the matter, random mutations of the genome produce new kinds of living things, that an animal can produce human offspring for example, as a result of changes in the morphology of the DNA.

There’s been no discussion by those who believe that we arose as a result of evolutionary processes, as to exactly how that happened. I suppose that it is considered by many to be allegorical when it is written that “the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” I’d be interested in hearing what people think this translates to in their terms. One may consider it to be speaking to an ontological reality, but what specifically happened in time and space.
 
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Aloysium said:
There’s been no discussion by those who believe that we arose as a result of evolutionary processes, as to exactly how that happened. I suppose that it is considered by many to be allegorical when it is written that “the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” I’d be interested in hearing what people think this translates to in their terms. One may consider it to be speaking to an ontological reality, but what specifically happened in time and space.
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Earlier in Genesis we read “Let the earth bring forth…” which is an indirect process, not a direct one. So, in those term non-human animals are in essence earth/dust/clay. The process is earth → animals → primates → humans. We know that the Bible can sometimes leave out intermediate steps, see Mark 1:1 “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

On this interpretation those non-human primates evolved a physical body similar to (or the same as) Homo sapiens and two of those earth/dust derived individuals were given human souls, the “breath of life”. The other non-human animals that the earth brought forth earlier did not get this “breath of life”, yet they are alive, so “breath of life” is something more than simple non-human animal life: it represents human life with a human soul.
 
Hobgoblin said:
It’s the 4th time I’ve asked. If you don’t want to answer you can say so. I’m just looking for a paragraph or two in your own words.
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Adam and Eve were specially created and inserted in the timeline where God wished. They were the archetypical humans.
 
buffalo said:
Right you are. What evidence do you have they didn’t live that long?
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Teeth, as I said. Skeletal development at time of death for deaths in childhood.

I have evidence and you do not. This is science so you lose I’m afraid.
 
buffalo said:
What magisterial document allows for molecules to man evolution?
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Humani Generis does:
  1. For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter
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Evolution is science, so refers only to the human body: souls are not part of science. Humani Generis allows for the evolution of the human body from “pre-existent and living matter”. That is our physical bodies evolved from pre-existent living primates.

The Church is correct to allow acceptance of the evolution of the human body.
 
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