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SocaliCatholic
Guest
Ok you caught me spreading innuendo again… Just don’t tell Alec!
Well to be completely honest if one were an atheistic evolutionist, then there would be no such thing as evil in the first place!
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MichelleTherese
Guest
“Anti-evolutionists” Hmmmm. Nice way of putting it. We sound like a bunch of bigots now. Thanks!
Rather then label folks who do not embrace the Theory of Evolution with both arms as “anti-evolutionists” can’t you consider us Those Who Have Different Opinions? We are not bigotted anti-anything. We just know that there is more then one way to explain the creation of our Universe and the life within.
Rather then label folks who do not embrace the Theory of Evolution with both arms as “anti-evolutionists” can’t you consider us Those Who Have Different Opinions? We are not bigotted anti-anything. We just know that there is more then one way to explain the creation of our Universe and the life within.
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MichelleTherese
Guest
Darwin wasn’t a scientist. He was a christian minister riding around on the Beagle and creating interesting stories about “isolated” finches.
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SocaliCatholic
Guest
That explains it!
No wonder evolution doesnt make any scientific sense!
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Apologia100
Guest
My only question is why do people feel so compelled to spend all this money, time and energy trying to figure out where we came from, when we should be spending it on figuring out where we ARE GOING. 
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neophyte
Guest
Brian,
I’ve taken a quick look at Humani Generis and a couple of things jump out at me.
The encyclical seems to be dealing with those who misuse the results of scientific inquiry by claiming that such results contradict the infallible teaching of the Church. This is indeed an abuse of science, because science is not able to speak to matters over which the Magesterium has authority.
Paragraph 5 seems at first glance to be flatly contradicting evolution. I think the key is the phrase “Some…hold that evolution…explains the origin of all this…”. What is the “all this”? Look back at paragraphs 2, 3, and 4, which speaks of moral truth and the freedom from error with which we must know it, the credibility of the faith, and the signs God has given. So then, was Pope Pius XII correct in saying that evolution does not explain the reality of moral truth or the historical evidence for the existance of Christ? Certainly he was, but that’s not the same as saying that it can’t explain anything at all.
I’m not aware of any evidence for polygenism, but I’m no expert – I imagine that there are some who say it exists. I think most of us have heard of the DNA analysis that indicates that all people are descended from a single female.
Based on the overwhelming evidence that Jesus is the Christ and the Church is His Body, having the protection of the Holy Spirit against the incorrect exercise of its teaching authority, I have no doubt that if evolution turns out to be true then it will not be in conflict with any infallible assertion of the church.
I apologise again for getting off track earlier, most of the posts here have nothing to do with what you were asking. I have some comments, but I’ll start another thread.
I’ve taken a quick look at Humani Generis and a couple of things jump out at me.
The encyclical seems to be dealing with those who misuse the results of scientific inquiry by claiming that such results contradict the infallible teaching of the Church. This is indeed an abuse of science, because science is not able to speak to matters over which the Magesterium has authority.
Paragraph 5 seems at first glance to be flatly contradicting evolution. I think the key is the phrase “Some…hold that evolution…explains the origin of all this…”. What is the “all this”? Look back at paragraphs 2, 3, and 4, which speaks of moral truth and the freedom from error with which we must know it, the credibility of the faith, and the signs God has given. So then, was Pope Pius XII correct in saying that evolution does not explain the reality of moral truth or the historical evidence for the existance of Christ? Certainly he was, but that’s not the same as saying that it can’t explain anything at all.
I’m not aware of any evidence for polygenism, but I’m no expert – I imagine that there are some who say it exists. I think most of us have heard of the DNA analysis that indicates that all people are descended from a single female.
Based on the overwhelming evidence that Jesus is the Christ and the Church is His Body, having the protection of the Holy Spirit against the incorrect exercise of its teaching authority, I have no doubt that if evolution turns out to be true then it will not be in conflict with any infallible assertion of the church.
I apologise again for getting off track earlier, most of the posts here have nothing to do with what you were asking. I have some comments, but I’ll start another thread.
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wanerious
Guest
SocaliCatholic said:
Evolutionary theory is certainly scientific. It makes predictions that may be verified/modified/discarded based upon experiment, observational evidence, and correlations with similar theories.
I truly, honestly cannot follow your argument. Snowflakes are “ordered” by the laws of physics — is that your “outside force”? The claim was that order cannot form from disorder. The formation of snowflakes is a direct contradiction to this. What’s the problem?
Evolutionary theory will of course change over time to be a more precise description of nature than what we have today, just like every other physical theory. Often, creationists hope to present their worldview as a scientific theory — certainly the burden of evidence is upon them to explain the geologic, astronomic, botanical, and biological evidence we have amassed. Those who don’t want creationism to be a scientific theory are under no obligation to explain anything.
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wanerious
Guest
I don’t think it is at all clear that there was a single progenitor for all life forms. Perhaps it is, and I’m just not aware of it. I think a possible scenario is for life to have formed/developed at more than one location, but this is somewhat beside your point. Yes, offspring are generally genetically different from their parents. This “copying error” tends to be fairly random, but this is not the whole story. Each of these distinct descendants could possibly possess enhanced characteristics that could lead to better competition against other organisms for limited resources. In addition, the environment may change over time, so disadvantages at one time may turn out to be advantages at some later age. The crucial point is that these enhances characteristics are passed on to later generations and themselves become the basis for future change. “Random” means that whatever occurs now could be capriciously undone. Similarly, random typing is a poor way to construct a computer program good at a specific task. Instead, we can quickly build a program by testing each iteration against some expected outcome and, if it is somewhat successful, modifying it slightly for the next iteration while keeping the past successful changes
This can easily account for speciation. Suppose there are a number of successful groups of similar animals. As time passes, perhaps either competition or the environment favors some different aspect of their morphology — sort of a rock/paper/scissors arrangement. To enhance the advantage of each, the most successful breedings occur only amongst like animals, and a distinct breeding pool forms.
The problem of transitionals is really only one of vocabulary. Evolutionary biologists usually don’t use that word since it is not consistent with the model. Every fossil is transitional, since it is only humans a long time after the fact that artificially group these animals into species. The map is not the territory. That said, Phil posted a link to many examples of fossils that fit the usual “transitional” category — those animals who were the ancestors of 2 or more later branches. This is also where we have to be careful. The model is of a tree of life, not a ladder. We don’t expect to see transitional fossils between a frog and human; rather, we postulate that long ago our two branches came together in a common ancestor.
Your hypothesis is close to Darwin’s original one, but the evidence points towards periods of rapid speciation and extinction, probably closely correlated with catastrophic environmental changes. Two well known episodes are the Cambrian explosion (a period of rapid speciation) and the Permian extinction (the fairly sudden end to 95% of all species alive at the time — this was before the dinosaurs).
My thoughts exactly.
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Brown10985
Guest
This my help you. It’s taken from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
310 But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better. But with inifnite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world “in a state of journeying” toward its ultimate perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.
There has always been physical evil though not spiritual evil. Spiritual evil came into the world with the fall of man.
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Brown10985
Guest
I think we have gotten completely off track here. We’re not discussing theist evolution vs atheist evolution. We’re discussing how someone can hold to both theist evolution and monogenism.
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Brown10985
Guest
Pope Pius XII states: “When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani Generis 37).
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SocaliCatholic
Guest
Macro evolution did not occur. Therefore no atheistic or theistic evolution.
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SocaliCatholic
Guest
No. Nobody has actually lived long enough to witness and verify evolution theory - we only have piecies of a puzzle without the complete picture of how to put the pieces back together.
The power of Science is that it can confirm or invalidate theories and predicitons with observations.
My statement was in response to the infallible talkorigins archive that evolutionists on here are so fond of referring to, so I gave you a simple refutation of its claims to discredit it.
Using this logic, the sand dune ordered itself out of chaos before it even existed as a sand dune.
The only other alternative is that there was a prior existing order that ordered the millions of bits of sand that consitute a sand dune. That prior existing order is great enough to order the formation of all necessary occurances of sand dunes provided the right conditions.
Yes and hopefully evolution theory will evolve to become science one day.
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DavidFilmer
Guest
MONKEYS ON TYPEWRITERS
Hmmm. Apparently some folks are still unclear on the concept of why an unordered process CANNOT and WILL NOT EVER produce a (non-trivial) ordered result, even given all of INFINITY. I tried the example of shaking the parts of a watch in a sack – they would NEVER assemble into a watch. Let’s try a different example, and I’ll demonstrate exactly WHY a random process CANNOT produce an ordered result.
Consider the old example of monkeys on typewriters. Some people (including educated people) have claimed that if infinite number of monkeys type on an infinite number of typewriters (a metaphor for purely random text generation), one of those monkeys would, at one point, type all the works of Shakespeare.
At first, it might seem reasonable. A random page of text might be gibberish, or it might be a sonnet, right? It’s random – why NOT a sonnet? Seems logical.
Wrong. The English language is a highly ordered product. A random process over an INFINITE time period will NEVER produce more than maybe a very short phrase (a trivial product).
Here’s why: In the English language, some letters occur much more frequently than others (vowels, especially the letter “E” are more common). Some letters are highly uncommon (such as “X”). That’s why your Scrabble game doesn’t have the same number of tiles for each character. But a random process (given a large enough sample) will produce exactly as many E’s as it produces X’s (and A’s and B’s and C’s – they would ALL occur evenly).
But, even if the random process somehow produced characters with a frequency rate that matches English character frequency, it STILL wouldn’t work. Here’s why: English characters aren’t arranged in random fashion (French characters are, maybe, but not English). There are RULES and CONVENTIONS which govern order and placement of characters. For example, the ‘I’ before ‘E’ rule – the letter ‘I’ will usually precede the letter ‘E.’ But, in a random process, the letter ‘I’ will precede the letter ‘E’ as often as it follows it.
Furthermore, certain character-pairs (such as ‘OO’ or ‘AI’) occur much more frequently than other character-pairs (such as ‘NQ’). But, in a random process, the pair ‘NQ’ will occur as often as ‘AI’ (and the letter ‘Q’ will be followed by ‘U’ only every twenty-sixth occurrence, whereas “U” follows “Q” in every English word except one, that I know of).
A random process will NEVER produce a non-trivial ordered result.
For amusement, visit the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator which uses thousands of distributed computers to compare random text to Shakespearean works. As of this writing, after 579,440 billion BILLION BILLION simulated monkey-years, a digital monkey managed to type 22 characters (four words and part of a fifth word) from the tragedy Cymbeline.
Hmmm. Apparently some folks are still unclear on the concept of why an unordered process CANNOT and WILL NOT EVER produce a (non-trivial) ordered result, even given all of INFINITY. I tried the example of shaking the parts of a watch in a sack – they would NEVER assemble into a watch. Let’s try a different example, and I’ll demonstrate exactly WHY a random process CANNOT produce an ordered result.
Consider the old example of monkeys on typewriters. Some people (including educated people) have claimed that if infinite number of monkeys type on an infinite number of typewriters (a metaphor for purely random text generation), one of those monkeys would, at one point, type all the works of Shakespeare.
At first, it might seem reasonable. A random page of text might be gibberish, or it might be a sonnet, right? It’s random – why NOT a sonnet? Seems logical.
Wrong. The English language is a highly ordered product. A random process over an INFINITE time period will NEVER produce more than maybe a very short phrase (a trivial product).
Here’s why: In the English language, some letters occur much more frequently than others (vowels, especially the letter “E” are more common). Some letters are highly uncommon (such as “X”). That’s why your Scrabble game doesn’t have the same number of tiles for each character. But a random process (given a large enough sample) will produce exactly as many E’s as it produces X’s (and A’s and B’s and C’s – they would ALL occur evenly).
But, even if the random process somehow produced characters with a frequency rate that matches English character frequency, it STILL wouldn’t work. Here’s why: English characters aren’t arranged in random fashion (French characters are, maybe, but not English). There are RULES and CONVENTIONS which govern order and placement of characters. For example, the ‘I’ before ‘E’ rule – the letter ‘I’ will usually precede the letter ‘E.’ But, in a random process, the letter ‘I’ will precede the letter ‘E’ as often as it follows it.
Furthermore, certain character-pairs (such as ‘OO’ or ‘AI’) occur much more frequently than other character-pairs (such as ‘NQ’). But, in a random process, the pair ‘NQ’ will occur as often as ‘AI’ (and the letter ‘Q’ will be followed by ‘U’ only every twenty-sixth occurrence, whereas “U” follows “Q” in every English word except one, that I know of).
A random process will NEVER produce a non-trivial ordered result.
For amusement, visit the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator which uses thousands of distributed computers to compare random text to Shakespearean works. As of this writing, after 579,440 billion BILLION BILLION simulated monkey-years, a digital monkey managed to type 22 characters (four words and part of a fifth word) from the tragedy Cymbeline.
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wolpertinger
Guest
Actually, all you have you said so far is that the lower the probability, the longer it takes to happen. Your basic claim that a low probability equals impossibility remains unproven.
Even if it were so, the proposition you try to prove is not a claim that evolutionary theory makes, therefore your argument is doubly fallacious.
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amarischuk
Guest
Brian, I am glad to meet you.
Last year I was in a seminary studying for the Catholic priesthood when I came a similar problem. In fact I have discussed this problem at length here in several threads, some old, some new.
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=23152
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=2132&highlight=amarischuk
The problem came to a head for me when I was thinking of monogenism, transanrmism and polygenism and I ran across this article: rtforum.org/lt/lt73.html
In order to get a less anti-scientific view I broke out my Theological Investigations vol. II by Karl Rahner and Rahner, though granding room for transformism (barely) acknowledged that polygenism was officially out. I would suggest you read the section on monogenism in Rahner’s book.
To top it off, my uncle Stephen was professor of bio-chemistry at the University of Ottawa, one of my best friend Joseph is researcher at the neurology department at UBC (having recently completed his PhD in evolutionary microbiology) and another friend Bob is in med school (I studied medieval history, literature and philosophy). I would frequently have discussions about this topic with my friends. I am not willing to admit to the latin-averroism of Joseph and we would frequently debate the problem (he is insistent on someday writeing a book on the subject with me).
It is true that much of Catholic doctrine rests on this dillema; what’s more, many Catholic doctrines also rest on other anthropomorphism and myths found throughout the bible.
I would also suggest you get Lawrence Boadt’s Introduction to the Old Testament, and books by Donald Senior and Raymond Brown on exegesis (such as the St. Jerome’s Biblical commentary or the Catholic Study Bible).
One thing to remember when reactionary Catholics insist that you abandon your knowledge for ‘faith’ is that they have abandoned Aquinas and the whole spirit of Catholicism according to such greats as Aquinas, Maritain, Gilson, de Lubac, Congar, Rahner, Schillibeeckx, de Chardin, Kung, Jungmann and Chenu.
I personally love the writings of Hilair Belloc, G.K. Chesterton and Arnold Lunn, but one thing they have in common is a latent anti-scientism found in thier writings. Such as in the Everlasting Man, or in Is the Catholic Church Anti-Social, or in Vincent Brome’s Six Studies in Quarreling.
Remember that the East (Orthodox and Eastern rite Catholics) reject the doctrine of original sin. Catholism evolves like any other system of thought. If monogenism doesn’t fit, much like some believed that heliocentrism didn’t fit…it is not the end of the world. Do not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Like I called for in the thread about hell, it is perhaps time to abandon many of these juvenile and mythological superstitions in Catholicism. Don’t let the fundamentalists take over the Church by abandoning it. This is the Scopes trial for the Church.
Adam
Last year I was in a seminary studying for the Catholic priesthood when I came a similar problem. In fact I have discussed this problem at length here in several threads, some old, some new.
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=23152
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=2132&highlight=amarischuk
The problem came to a head for me when I was thinking of monogenism, transanrmism and polygenism and I ran across this article: rtforum.org/lt/lt73.html
In order to get a less anti-scientific view I broke out my Theological Investigations vol. II by Karl Rahner and Rahner, though granding room for transformism (barely) acknowledged that polygenism was officially out. I would suggest you read the section on monogenism in Rahner’s book.
To top it off, my uncle Stephen was professor of bio-chemistry at the University of Ottawa, one of my best friend Joseph is researcher at the neurology department at UBC (having recently completed his PhD in evolutionary microbiology) and another friend Bob is in med school (I studied medieval history, literature and philosophy). I would frequently have discussions about this topic with my friends. I am not willing to admit to the latin-averroism of Joseph and we would frequently debate the problem (he is insistent on someday writeing a book on the subject with me).
It is true that much of Catholic doctrine rests on this dillema; what’s more, many Catholic doctrines also rest on other anthropomorphism and myths found throughout the bible.
I would also suggest you get Lawrence Boadt’s Introduction to the Old Testament, and books by Donald Senior and Raymond Brown on exegesis (such as the St. Jerome’s Biblical commentary or the Catholic Study Bible).
One thing to remember when reactionary Catholics insist that you abandon your knowledge for ‘faith’ is that they have abandoned Aquinas and the whole spirit of Catholicism according to such greats as Aquinas, Maritain, Gilson, de Lubac, Congar, Rahner, Schillibeeckx, de Chardin, Kung, Jungmann and Chenu.
I personally love the writings of Hilair Belloc, G.K. Chesterton and Arnold Lunn, but one thing they have in common is a latent anti-scientism found in thier writings. Such as in the Everlasting Man, or in Is the Catholic Church Anti-Social, or in Vincent Brome’s Six Studies in Quarreling.
Remember that the East (Orthodox and Eastern rite Catholics) reject the doctrine of original sin. Catholism evolves like any other system of thought. If monogenism doesn’t fit, much like some believed that heliocentrism didn’t fit…it is not the end of the world. Do not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Like I called for in the thread about hell, it is perhaps time to abandon many of these juvenile and mythological superstitions in Catholicism. Don’t let the fundamentalists take over the Church by abandoning it. This is the Scopes trial for the Church.
Adam
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wanerious
Guest
…and this is what happens. If you’re also prepared to call astronomy not a science since we can’t go out and directly measure stellar structure, then the word “science” means something different to you than it does to scientists. Directly witnessing events would be great, but we’ll have to make do with observations and experiments indirectly.
Again, I don’t remotely follow this. There are some favored configurations of lowest energy in natural systems, like snowflake structure, that require first an (name removed by moderator)ut of energy to achieve. Sand dunes are not the state of lowest energy, or maximal entropy. Over time, they are worn down and disappear. They owe their structure to the energy (name removed by moderator)ut of the winds together with the topology of the underlying terrain.
Of course you’re free to disagree with the talk.origins archive, and it is by no means infallible (as I suspect you know, you’re just being hyperbolic), but I really wonder if you’ve even read it.
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SocaliCatholic
Guest
DavidFilmer said:
I do not support this argument for creation.
Eternity is a looooooooooong time. What is any amount of time compared to eternity? The number may seem large to mere humans, but in reality eternity outlasts deep time. An evolutionist can claim this and easily refute the monkey analogy.
God is eternal. What is any amount of time, no matter how large, compared to God?
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wanerious
Guest
DavidFilmer said:
Hi David,
I don’t think you fully understand what the word random means. In an infinitely random sequence of numbers, every possible sequence is included. It is true that over the entire sequence there is a uniform number of each letter, but there are local sequences of highly “ordered” patterns. Will there be a sequence of 1 million straight “A”'s? Sure. Somewhere, a sequence corresponding to all of “Moby Dick”? Sure.
Aha! Only on the average. There will also be sequences of 10,000 ‘E’'s with no "I’s immediately preceding them.
This is just wrong. It will produce an infinite number of ordered results, of any degree of order you want.
This only illustrates your lack of understanding of infinity. It is a really big number.
Also, it must be said again that evolutionary theory does not make the claim that it is driven by only random processes, so our entire discussion is somewhat irrelevant.
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SocaliCatholic
Guest
You are confusing direct and indirect observation with no observation.
What do you classify as direct, indirect and no observation.
A space satellite such as the Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-Ray Observatory are tools for making observations of events that occured in the distant past. By the time the light reaches our telescopes, the event has long since transpired yet we still have a complete picture.
With evolution, you have the fossil record, but it did not come to us as a complete picuture.
Let me make this more simple if possible. All events that occur must obey the physical laws and order that preceeded it.
We humans may give different names to these observations like sand dunes or snowflakes, but the elements that compose these structures had a previous form, ordered differently.
Yes I spent a few hours reading through it before I came to discredit it as compliant with the philosophical foundations of science.
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