Flaws with Theistic Evolution

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salvereginadude said:
. The pastor said that you cannot be Christian and believe in theistic evolution, and he gave proof for this which was pretty outstanding.
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I hope what I am about to say makes sense.

I don’t think that his statement is logical.:confused: The fact that there* are* Christians who believe in theistic evolution make his entire argument false. He might have excellent reasons as to why he thinks that Christians shouldn’t believe in evolution but that doesn’t negate the fact that there are Christians who do believe in theistic evolution.

Isn’t he judging another Christian’s salvation? How can he do that in good conscious?
 
buffalo said:
Theistic evolution has to reconcile these two points of constant Catholic teaching.

Adam and Eve’s preternatural gifts

and

Eve coming from Adam

God could have created Adam and Eve and inserted them into the timeline anywhere He wished regardless of what may or may not have been happening on the earth at that time.
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There are two mistakes you can make.
One is to say that “fundamentalism is real Christianity, and any attempt by a Christian to reconcile evolution with it is pure sophistry by people who have enough education to accept the scientific reality, but a cultural or ideological attachment to Christianity”.
The second is to say “evolution and religion - non-overlapping magisteria. Theories about how God created humans simply have no relevance to questions about why God created man, or how man should behave”.

Truth cannot contradict truth, and a change so major as evolution in our understanding of how humans came to be cannot but have an effect on theology. It does present certain problems for Catholics - for instance the doctrine of original sin, we now know, is unlikely to represent anything historical, at least in a simple way. Evolution presents far more problems for many non-Christians, which is why, for instance, Marxists like Gould and Lewontin oppose evolutionary psychology so fiercely.
 
Malcolm_McLean said:
It does present certain problems for Catholics - for instance the doctrine of original sin, we now know, is unlikely to represent anything historical, at least in a simple way.
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**390 **The account of the fall in *Genesis *3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
 
buffalo said:
**390 **The account of the fall in *Genesis *3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
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The catechism is a summary of current thought for non-theologians. It is not really helpful here, where the issue is difficulties that evolution presents for Catholic theology.

Our understanding would be that, as the brain developed, behaviour became more and more sophisticated, and the capacity for moral or immoral action gradually became stronger. If you could stretch a line of your ancestors back five million years to the split with the chimpanzees, and a line of chimpanzees back to the present, then you could traverse a chain of fathers / sons from you to a modern chimpanzee, with each son looking substantially like the father, and no obvious dividing line.
Whether there was an obvious discontinuity in behaviour is another matter. Presumably the answer is no, but we can’t be sure of that.
 
Malcolm_McLean said:
The catechism is a summary of current thought for non-theologians. It is not really helpful here, where the issue is difficulties that evolution presents for Catholic theology.

Our understanding would be that, as the brain developed, behaviour became more and more sophisticated, and the capacity for moral or immoral action gradually became stronger. If you could stretch a line of your ancestors back five million years to the split with the chimpanzees, and a line of chimpanzees back to the present, then you could traverse a chain of fathers / sons from you to a modern chimpanzee, with each son looking substantially like the father, and no obvious dividing line.
Whether there was an obvious discontinuity in behaviour is another matter. Presumably the answer is no, but we can’t be sure of that.
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First off, theologians do not have any teaching authority. That rests with the Bishops and above. They can speculate all they want.

When something is Divinely Revealed it is to be held definitively by all the faithful.

If you look at the footnotes in the Catechism you will see the source of these teachings.

Pope JPII said the Catechism is the sure norm for teaching the faith.

Faith and reason cannot contradict. Where they intersect has to be reconciled. We know Divine Revelation cannot be false for it is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit. Bottom line - we must look deeper on the science side.
 
Wasn’t the key premise of this topic the assertion that animals didn’t die before man was created and sinned? I don’t have a catechism on me, but I don’t think it addresses the mortality of animals, does it? I think the death we are talking about is death that only results from the disorder sin introduced into the universe. One example might be natural calamities. Maybe in a still-ordered universe tornadoes and such might not have existed and therefore the only kinds of death in the animal kingdom would have been the “ordered” kinds of death that are necessary to further more life.

LT
 
Looks like all of Cardinal Schonborn’s lectures on creation and evolution are available at EWTN, good stuff.

Creation and Evolution: To the Debate as It Stands
In the Beginning God Created…
He Created Each Thing According to Its Kind
He Upholds the Universe by His word and Power
You Govern All Things…: Suffering in a World Guided by God
What is Man that Thou are Mindful of Him?

Here are articles addressing that “death before the Fall” objection directly:

No Death Before the Fall: A young earth problem by Rich Deem
Death Before the Fall: The Theology by Glenn Morton
Animal Death Before the Fall by Reasons to Believe
Death by Design by Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason
Animal Death Before Human Sin by Craig Rusbult and ASA
No Physical Death Before the Fall long answer by Glen Kuban (the Paluxy Dinosaur-Man footprints guy, he is a Christian)
No Death before the Fall short answer by TalkOrigins

Some of these guys do not accept evolution (except Glen Kuban, Glenn Morton, and Talk Origins), they are “old earth” creationists. Some day I’m gonna print all this out and make an article for my page here.

Phil P
 
buffalo said:
First off, theologians do not have any teaching authority. That rests with the Bishops and above. They can speculate all they want.
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Does that include the folks at Kolbecenter.org?

Peace

Tim

ps - I noticed that Kolbe is using the bombadier beetle as an example of irreducible complexity. Sigh.
 
salvereginadude said:
When I embraced Catholicism one of the things I loved about it was how it allowed for the faithful to hold the theories of evolution as valid and not contradictory with Scripture because the Creation account in Genesis is not necessarily meant to be taken literally, even though it can be.

At my LCMS school we began a unit on evolution today. The pastor said that you cannot be Christian and believe in theistic evolution, and he gave proof for this which was pretty outstanding. He said that if animals evolved into the bodies of humans over a course of millions of years how could death be allowed in this equation? Death, he said is a direct result of original sin, why was there death if the sin had not occured yet? Because, obviously, the earth isn’t capable of holding unlimited amounts of animals for this great amount of time between Creation and the Fall, there are some serious flaws in this theory. He said if Christians still believe in theistic evolution in spite of this fact it erases the need for a Savior and everything that Jesus did on the Cross.

Up until today I have been a very avid supporter of theistic evolution, but the point my teacher raised did seem to make a lot of sense. Ever sense he said it I really have been trying to come up with a good argument for it. I’ve come up with a weak one but it’s an argument. It goes as follows: Sin is something that does not confine animals, our teacher even mentioned today that animals do not go to heaven. If sin does not control animals maybe death would have been natural for them? I know this is a very weak argument.

I’d like your insight on the topic because I very much would like to believe in theistic evolution! Thanks!
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I haven’t read through all the thread, but a huge gap in his logic seems to be jumping out to me. How does his argument help the Young-Earth argument at all? I mean, is he trying to say that all animals started dying after Original Sin? That seems to be quite strange to me.

I would respond simply by saying that animals have always been subject to death. The original man was not - and nor was the original woman - until Original Sin. Doesn’t that make sense?
 
Zahmir said:
You are totally right. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Genesis account IS allegorical and not factual. That’s all. I didn’t mean to be bitter, but that in defending the meaning of Genesis, one shouldn’t claim that it’s not history, but rather, one should argue for its theological meaning.

In all honesty, it doesn’t matter how it happened, but the truth is the same. So anyway, hope this clarifies what i intended.
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I understood your point and no offense was taken on my part. I may not have many posts here but I’ve been around a few other boards for years. I know too well how easily the tone of a post can be misinterpreted by either party.
 
I went to a talk by the Dominican priest Fr. Michael Dodds last week, and he explained very simply how there’s no need for “theistic evolution” or “intelligent design” when one properly understands the mode of God’s causality. Since God is literally the “cause of causes”, there’s no need to go looking for how this particular cause is actually a miracle. God, as a Transcendent Cause, already circumscribes all possible causes, including contingent and random ones, in such a way as to make it only necessary to say “God is” to shoot down all atheistic arguments from science.

In the Thomistic model there is nothing that’s truly “random” to God anyway, so there’s no need to demonstrate that there is some obvious guiding principle behind things like evolution. The fact that God is transcendent, and that evolution happens, proves in itself that evolution is not outside the purview of God. All arguments that try to make God the direct efficient cause of instances of physical evolution actually make God a LOT smaller than would be acceptable to most Thomists. God trancends and encompasses “efficient causes”, even “random, natural efficient causes”. 😃

Peace and God bless!
 
salvereginadude said:
When I embraced Catholicism one of the things I loved about it was how it allowed for the faithful to hold the theories of evolution as valid and not contradictory with Scripture because the Creation account in Genesis is not necessarily meant to be taken literally, even though it can be.

At my LCMS school we began a unit on evolution today. The pastor said that you cannot be Christian and believe in theistic evolution, and he gave proof for this which was pretty outstanding. He said that if animals evolved into the bodies of humans over a course of millions of years how could death be allowed in this equation? Death, he said is a direct result of original sin, why was there death if the sin had not occured yet? Because, obviously, the earth isn’t capable of holding unlimited amounts of animals for this great amount of time between Creation and the Fall, there are some serious flaws in this theory. He said if Christians still believe in theistic evolution in spite of this fact it erases the need for a Savior and everything that Jesus did on the Cross.

Up until today I have been a very avid supporter of theistic evolution, but the point my teacher raised did seem to make a lot of sense. Ever sense he said it I really have been trying to come up with a good argument for it. I’ve come up with a weak one but it’s an argument. It goes as follows: Sin is something that does not confine animals, our teacher even mentioned today that animals do not go to heaven. If sin does not control animals maybe death would have been natural for them? I know this is a very weak argument.

I’d like your insight on the topic because I very much would like to believe in theistic evolution! Thanks!
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The main theological flaw with YEC is that to explain away the findings of science they inadvertantly portray God as a trickster. In other words, one of the claims is that all those findings are things put there by God to test our faith. Nowhere in the Bible will you find faith tested by deception except the temptations of Christ and those were done by Satan and not God. Even in the Book of Job, faith was tested by endurance and the lesson given in wisdom but trickery was never part of it. Any deception of faith in the Bible was the work of Satan and man’s own folly and not that of God. God is love, not deception. That very argument pulls the rug out from under the feet of the YEC argument.

Perhaps this example will help you.
 
Salve Regina Dude,

My personal explanation for the presence of death before the Fall is what Douglas Adams called “reverse temporal engineering.” The effects of the Fall worked backwards in time as well as forwards in time, subjecting the whole of Creation to futility.

One of your respondents has already mentioned the problems with Young Earth Creationism as running counter to some rather obvious observations of science on the age of the earth.
  • Liberian
 
steppenwolf1218 said:
The main theological flaw with YEC is that to explain away the findings of science they inadvertantly portray God as a trickster. In other words, one of the claims is that all those findings are things put there by God to test our faith. Nowhere in the Bible will you find faith tested by deception except the temptations of Christ and those were done by Satan and not God. Even in the Book of Job, faith was tested by endurance and the lesson given in wisdom but trickery was never part of it. Any deception of faith in the Bible was the work of Satan and man’s own folly and not that of God. God is love, not deception. That very argument pulls the rug out from under the feet of the YEC argument.

Perhaps this example will help you.
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The tricktser argument is a poor one. Don’t use it anymore. Our limited ability to fully see reality can make it appear that way, but that is our problem…
 
buffalo said:
The tricktser argument is a poor one. Don’t use it anymore. Our limited ability to fully see reality can make it appear that way, but that is our problem…
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I agree.
Amazing how much faith and trust we put in current scientific methods of dating. I am not a physicist, and am not aware of all the methods used to date the earth. But I do recall reading in the Britannica Enc. (forgot where-its been several years ago) about how carbon dating is based on several assumptions. And I don’t remember if this was one of them, or if it’s just a thought I’ve had. My understanding is that carbon dating is based on behavior of atoms in current physical envionment. Now, who can even imagine what physical factors might have been present at the “big bang” and what effects they might have produced on the molecular and radioactive level.

A question for any evolutionists on the forum. What *real *scientific evidence exists to support evolution? I’m not asking to be facetious or sarcastic; I would really like to know. To my knowledge, there is none. (I’m not interested in scientific conjecture or opinion- no matter how esteemed the scientist) Would appreciate a website link if nothing else.

Nita
 
Regarding scientific evidence for evolution - I’m speaking of macroevolution - specifically human beings from apes.
 
Nita said:
Regarding scientific evidence for evolution - I’m speaking of macroevolution - specifically human beings from apes.
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I am not a scientist, so I might be off. I don’t think that scientist say that humans came from monkeys but that they believe that we come from a related species.
 
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