Evolution refuting catholicism?

[wanerious]

PhilVaz:

Eventually everyone would have a soul inherited from Adam/Eve, and be effected by the original sin of Adam/Eve. PROBLEM AND OBJECTION SOLVED. I think.

Hmmm, I think that doesn’t get us out of the woods. I was thinking a similar thing, but the newer evidence posted by Alec seems to indicate, if I’m interpreting it correctly, that if we consider genes from all living humans, there were at the fewest 29 possible ancestors for us (and most likely thousands). The evidence rules out as few as 2. So it indeed seems that if the Pope declared (infallibly) that one must believe that there were precisely 2 forebears to all extant true persons, then it must be that a significant number of humans alive today are not true and full persons or the evidence is wrong. Or, from the non-Catholic perspective, the Pope was wrong.

 

[wanerious]

Newman60:

Phil,
I believe that would be theory of evolution, estimate of earth’s age and law of gravity (since that can be replicated).
Newman60

This is interesting. Why did you promote gravitation from a theory to a law? What, exactly, do you mean by “replication”?
Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter.

 

[Newman60]

vern humphrey:

Evolution – that is the descent of present-day species from earlier species – is a fact.

No. It is a theory - founded on a series of assumptions.

“The Theory of Evolution…”

The question is, are those who would impose a sola scriptura …on the Church, Catholic?

Obviously not so why bring it up? That’s like those who want to only use John 3:16 out of context instead of taking the entire chapter and perhaps the end of John chapter 2 and the beginning of John Chapter 4 since it is all the inspired word of God and seems to be one thread. (not this one!)

The Holy Father has said,
“In his Encyclical Humani generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation, on condition that one did not lose sight of several indisputable points (cf. AAS 42 [1950], pp. 575-576).” (Emphasis mine.)

“…about man and HIS VOCATION, ON CONDITION THAT ONE DID NOT LOSE SIGHT OF SEVERAL INDISPUTABLE POINTS…”(emphasis mine)

Newman60

 

[Newman60]

wanerious:

This is interesting. Why did you promote gravitation from a theory to a law? What, exactly, do you mean by “replication”?
Now we’re getting to the heart of the matter.

Wanerious, Don’t be disingenuous. You know very well that gravity is a fact which has been and can be repeatedly demonstrated or REPLICATED. I don’t have to take it on faith. It isn’t an estimate nor a guess.
Newman60

 

[wanerious]

Newman60:

Wanerious, Don’t be disingenuous. You know very well that gravity is a fact which has been and can be repeatedly demonstrated or REPLICATED. I don’t have to take it on faith. It isn’t an estimate nor a guess.
Newman60

Not at all — this is crucial and subtle. By “gravity”, you could mean either the “fact” that locally objects exhibit an acceleration approximately towards the Earth’s center, or you could mean the theoretical framework that attempts to explain this behavior and make accurate predictions. Similarly, you can speak of the “fact” of evolution, that organisms are genetically different from their parents, and the theory of evolution that attempts to explain this fact and makes accurate predictions about the relationships amongst living and extinct organisms.

Gravitational theory is most definitely a theory and a guess. It has undergone changes in paradigm and understanding, from Newton’s concept of forces to the modern framework involving the lack of force and geodesic motion. Along the way, it made more precise predictions and is accurate to within the limits of modern engineering. Why do you think that you can wholeheartedly believe general relativity and not evolutionary theory? They are both “guesses” to explain the facts, or observations, and both probably incomplete and at some level imprecise. General relativity is as universally adopted by physicists and astronomers as evolutionary theory is adopted by those in the life sciences. It simply does not occur to those professionals to question or defend it since it is stunningly successful at explaining the observations across many different disciplines.

 

[Brown10985]

PhilVaz:

If per chance the immediate descendents of either “Adam” or “Eve” or their relatives with souls were to marry an “almost” human (someone with a human body but without a soul), wouldn’t their child be born with a soul? So eventually everyone would have a soul. It is Catholic theology that the soul is created at conception, God creates the soul, and this of course can’t be detected by science.

Phil P

Inter-marriage with those without a soul? If these people don’t have immaterial souls then they don’t have the ability to reason. Inter-marriage couldn’t have been possible because the “soul-less” almost humans wouldn’t be able to comprehend that they were getting married in the first place.
Suggesting this is to suggest that those with a soul raped those without a soul leading to reproduction of a human with a soul.

 

[SocaliCatholic]

hecd2:

There is a very important reason for this. If scientists, doing science, accept the possibility of supernatural intervention, then their method is fatally undermined. Any phenomenon can be explained by supernatural explanations and science has no means to determine when natural explanations should supplant or giv way to supernatural explanations. So unless scientists assume that all phenomena, without exception, have natural explanations, its explicatory power is undermined - it’s easy to say ‘it’s a miracle’, and such a statement has no power to explain the universe.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

Alec,

I am angry that you didn’t write this solution to me earlier. Do you realize how important what you said here is?

It is not within the domain of science to incorporate the miracles of God, because those miracle occured by the direct intervention of God *outside * of the control of science. This includes the miracle of creation. God leaves some things for us to control, or else he would be doing everything Himself.

This simultaneously explains both my anti-evolution evolutionist stance, and also the reason why ** creation and evolution has no logical solution and can never be reconcilled**.

Unless…

*Outside * science evolution makes no sense becase it does not take into account the need for confirmation through direct observation.
*Within * science evolution is reasonably permissible because it is the best conclusion possible from the availible evidence.

** Anti-Evolution Evolutionist = evolution impossible ( evolution possible ) ]

] = reality, necessity of a Creator
( ) = science, non-necessity of a Creator**

 

[SocaliCatholic]

<< but I couldn’t get the tank game to get past 2 fps and im running win2000 with plenty of ram. What is the problem? >>

Ah ha, send the following information in private message to me:

The name of your graphics card – in Windows 2000 look in Control Panel – Display – and see what it says under your monitor. I will look up your graphics card to see if it supports OpenGL. All the latest NVIDIA (GeForce) and ATI (Radeon) cards are fine, and many of the INTEL cards also work. Might be problem with your graphics card trying to render OpenGL commands in software, rather than in hardware on the card. I’ve seen 2 FPS on my older Win98 machine as well (card is Rage IIC by ATI which does not support OpenGL).

And tell me what year you got your computer, what the processor is, and how much RAM you got. I’ve seen my game run at 50 FPS on an older computer (500 Mhz purchased in 2000) and on another computer purchased the same year, I’ve seen 2 FPS. You’ll need at least 30-40 FPS for a playable game.

Phil P

Ok I checked, its a Pentium III MMX CPU at 450 Mhz and the video card is a ATI RAGE 128 GL PCI is it too old to play the game?

 

[PhilVaz]

Newman60 << You know very well that gravity is a fact which has been and can be repeatedly demonstrated or REPLICATED. >>

Hello, evolution has been repeatedly demonstrated and replicated, small scale. The evidence for macroevolution is strong. Now I’m sure you’ve read these articles by now. What’s your response?

Gravity is a theory and a fact

Another one here on gravity

Evolution is a theory (natural selection) and a fact (common descent) too

On relations of truly humans (human bodies with souls) and non-truly humans (human bodies but no souls) not really a problem, they could still mate. But obviously if we are talking 100,000 years ago or more, there wasn’t a “formal” marriage ceremony. It was more like caveman bonked cavewoman on the head, and bingo they are married. I don’t know how to interpret the early Genesis text yet, working on it. Haught my man Haught soon.

Phil P

 

[PhilVaz]

Better one on gravity from the Wikipedia

Newman60 says gravity is a law and fact, but not a theory. This source calls gravity a theory and a law. I wonder why? Maybe because evolution is a theory and a fact too. There are laws, theories, hypotheses, and facts. This science stuff gets so confusing.

And the article on evolution from the same Wikipedia, compare and contrast please

Phil P

 

[wanerious]

SocaliCatholic:

This simultaneously explains both my anti-evolution evolutionist stance, and also the reason why ** creation and evolution has no logical solution and can never be reconcilled**.

Unless…

*Outside * science evolution makes no sense becase it does not take into account the need for confirmation through direct observation.

Forgive me for being dim, but I still don’t know what you’re driving at here. What do you mean by “confirmation through direct observation”, and how is it that evolutionary theory is lacking? Are there certain aspects of evolution, holes in the theory, if you will, that require divine intervention to fill?

 

[Steve_Andersen]

pnas.org/cgi/content/full/97/13/7360

This link seems to indicate that our “Most Recent Comon Ancestor” could have been 59,000,000 years ago, rather than 6 Million?

Chuck

I just scanned the abstract but it appears that they are talking about a common HUMAN ancestor for the modern population
Not a common ancestor of apes and humans; those lines split off millions of years ago.

When and how humanity split into its modern geographical distribution is a hot topic

 

[Steve_Andersen]

Brown10985:

Inter-marriage with those without a soul? If these people don’t have immaterial souls then they don’t have the ability to reason. Inter-marriage couldn’t have been possible because the “soul-less” almost humans wouldn’t be able to comprehend that they were getting married in the first place.
Suggesting this is to suggest that those with a soul raped those without a soul leading to reproduction of a human with a soul.

Not necessarily
(a) I thought that all living things have souls but not immortal souls (but I could be wrong on this)
(2) There are many examples in nature of animals that mate for life and show distress if their mate is lost. Obviously (as in all things) there is a continuum of understanding from cells in a dish to a human rather than a black/white distinction
(III) Possession of a soul does not guaranty reason. My brother has Down’s Syndrome and while he’s no great thinker he has one of the biggest souls around.

Besides is rape worse than the alternative which would be incestuous breeding?

 

[Steve_Andersen]

SocaliCatholic:

…
*Outside * science evolution makes no sense becase it does not take into account the need for confirmation through direct observation.
*Within * science evolution is reasonably permissible because it is the best conclusion possible from the availible evidence.

** Anti-Evolution Evolutionist = evolution impossible ( evolution possible ) ]

] = reality, necessity of a Creator
( ) = science, non-necessity of a Creator**

I really don’t understand the point you are making

There have been many direct observations of evolution in action.
Ask anyone who has an anti-biotic resistant infection. Why do you think that we have to change flu vaccines every year?

You seem to be trying to create a division where none exists.

 

[ISABUS]

Steve Andersen:

I just scanned the abstract but it appears that they are talking about a common HUMAN ancestor for the modern population
Not a common ancestor of apes and humans; those lines split off millions of years ago.
When and how humanity split into its modern geographical distribution is a hot topic

**Nature **published an online article on December 1, 2004 that was very interesting :

Ancient mammal genes reconstructed

Roxanne Khamsi http://www.nature.com/images/spacer.gifSequenced genomes provide key for tracing ancestral DNA. http://www.nature.com/images/spacer.gif
[snip]

"The researchers attribute the success of their technique to the fact that mammalian genomes are generally very diverse. This makes any regions of DNA they share in common stand out more clearly. “It’s a pleasant surprise that mammals diversified so rapidly into different lineages that have surviving members today,” says Haussler. “It gives us this opportunity to uncover the past.”

Back to the future

"Once they had determined that the technique was accurate, the researchers used the algorithm on DNA sequences from real mammals.

"The team took 19 modern mammals, including the pig,** human** and rat, and used the algorithm to work out the genome of their common ancestor, thought to be a shrew-like animal that lived more than 70 million years ago. They focused on a small region of the genome that codes for ten genes.

"One surprising result was that, compared with the ancestral sequence, the human sequence has lost only 11% of the genetic units called bases, whereas in rodents around 39% have been deleted. The researchers think this is probably because rats and similar animals go through generations more quickly, so they accumulate mutations faster.

“The comparison with the recreated ancestral DNA should give other researchers clues about how and when the various descendants branched off. “You can see what special twists made each species different,” says Haussler.”

nature.com/news/2004/041129/full/041129-5.html

Mary~

 

[buffalo]

vern humphrey:

Let’s get on the right ground here. And you making a sede vacantist argument? Are you claiming the current Pope is an invalid Pope, or his teachings are somehow tainted?

Absolutely not.

Here is more on the translation -
Evolution: What the Pope Said

 

[buffalo]

Newman60:

Welcome back. You and Buffalo are discovering, just as I did, that hecd2 and Vern and others can make statements like: “Theory of evolution” and scientific “fact” of evolution in the same sentence while conveniently glossing over the correct wording which would be ASSUMED “fact” of evolution. Honest science will always say assumed when something cannot be replicated and when it is therefore the best guess of many scientists.
They also conveniently disregard the proviso in the Pope’s most recent statement that it can’t disagree with the established teaching of the Church. He certainly didn’t contradict his predecessors nor did he rewrite the Catechism. The pope is Catholic.
It isn’t our faith that has a problem. It is that those supreme arbiters of what is good science and what is ignorant can’t seem to admit that they too are acting on faith - a faith in several unprovable assumptions.
Newman60

I believe the Pope is saying faith and reason cannot contradict. We have the faith part right, others need to get the science right. When that happens everyone will

 

[vern_humphrey]

buffalo:

Absolutely not.

Here is more on the translation -
Evolution: What the Pope Said

And that hair-splitting is what this is all about? THAT is enough to force Catholics to accept a Fundamentalist view of evolution?

 

[buffalo]

vern humphrey:

And that hair-splitting is what this is all about? THAT is enough to force Catholics to accept a Fundamentalist view of evolution?

I don’t think it forces a view either way. And as for hair splitting - if hair splitting is how finely we have to go to find the real truth, I see no problem with it.

It is very important to understand exactly what the Pope said as it influences the thinking of many. We definitely should get that part right.

 

[ISABUS]

According to the following article, the Vatican’s International Theological Committee on October 8, 2004 issued ‘a report accepting the prevailing tenets of evolutionary science’. I haven’t had any success yet in locating the report and was wondering if anyone might have already found it.

Here is the article:

---

A giant step for Catholic thinking on evolution

10-08-04

THE DIRECTION of Catholic theological thinking is toward full acceptance of the scientific theory of evolution, and that might come as a surprise to some Catholics in the Bible Belt who are heavily influenced by fundamentalism.

The Catholic News Service story from Vatican City on page 1 today reports that the International Theological Committee, a church body of scholars who works with the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation, has issued a report accepting the prevailing tenets of evolutionary science.

The church has been moving in this direction for some years, after an apology for suppressing medieval astronomer Galileo’s support of the Copernican theory on the rotation of planets in our solar system and after Pope John Paul II in 1996 told the Pontifical Academy of Sciences that the theory of evolution was “more than a hypothesis.”

The pope’s remarks caused shock among some Catholics and ignited efforts to rephrase or discount the significance of what he said. There were Catholics who wrote letters of protest to Texas Catholic asserting that the church does not endorse the theory of evolution.

We suspect that the latest story on evolution will rattle fewer cages because there has been a continuum of Catholic scholarly thinking in recent years that there is no conflict between the truths of science and of faith — we just have to learn how they relate.

Catholic science teachers have been free to teach about evolution. Catholic biblical scholars have continued to point out that a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible is not the Catholic approach. Catholics even have been encouraged to oppose schemes by so-called “creationists” to rid public school science textbooks of any reference to evolution or, at least, to require inclusion in the books of some nonscientific “creationist” thought as if it were on equal scientific par.

Faith, in Catholic thinking, presupposes the existence of a creator, but does not limit the creator’s capabilities of letting life develop slowly over millions of years.

So, is the debate over evolution finally being put to rest? Probably not yet for some people in the Bible Belt, but we hope Catholics are not among them if they value the power of reason and the power of faith, working hand-in-hand in the human intellect.

—BLH
http://www.texascatholic.com/default.asp?IsDev=False&NodeId=928

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Mary ~