Final causality and Evolution

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ServusDei1

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Fellow Thomists, how do we respond to the evolution counter argument against final causality?
 
This question I shall directed only to the students of St Thomas Aquinas. Thomsism is actually one of the most respected Roman Catholic philosophies since the Middle Ages.
 
i wondered what you meant by Thomists. thanks I haven’t read any of him. I might be considered an augustinite then 🙂
 
A public persona wore one similar recently and I couldn’t identify it. Thanks.

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While you wait for your fellow Thomists to respond, I’d like to add this short post. I am far from an expert on Thomas Aquinas, but am currently reading a book by someone who is. The book is Aquinas and Evolution by Fr. Michael Chaberek, O.P. The author has a Doctorate in Fundamental Theology. He believes Aquinas would be against the theory of evolution in principle because, for one, it would require the change of forms from God’s initial perfect creation (as I understand his argument). Chaberek believes that Thomas especially would require the special (direct divine) creation of humans and quotes many passages from the Summa Theologica and other sources in support. I hope you are familiar with the Aquinas and Evolution book or will consider reading it.

I know many Thomasts espouse natural evolution of species and give their own reasons why they think Thomas would “go along” with it. However, as you might tell from the long threads on the CAF concerning the veracity of totally naturalistic evolution, not everyone agrees with it.

If naturalistic evolution is eliminated, there is no challenge to final causality, is there?
 
I would simply think since God looks into time and knows all the future - so evolution is presented as false contradiction/polemic since God would be perfectly aware of the evolution His creation would take. [I don’t take a necessary position one way or the other because I’m not involved with the study of biology, so nothing prompts me for a position.]

The passage in the bible 1000years is like a second in Our Lord’s eyes gives the necessary flexibility for reading the moment before and after the fall from the garden of Eden. And I don’t personally think Genesis is allegorical but plentifully literal, factual, and personal in many of it’s passages.
 
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“According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” ( Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” ( Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).”

Source - Communion and Stewardship
 
As you’re specifically interested in a Thomistic response, you may be interested in thomisticevolution.org

It also has more from Fr. Austriaco, the priest in Maximillian’s link.
 
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