If by creationism you mean young earth creationism, or that Genesis is literally true, then it deserves a good bashing because it’s false. Of course, we should always treat others with kindness, even when they say stupid things. But we shouldn’t defend the indefensible. Would you agree?I’m not a creationist (Like the world being a few thousand years old), however I have a lot of atheist friends who quite bitterly bash creationism. Should I be saying something, or should I just let them exercise free speech?
Young earth creationism has a specific point. However, Genesis has 50 chapters.
What’s your point? Both views are wrong.
) adds to the confusion, by promoting the false notion that Genesis 1-2 is derived from Babylonian cosmology and myth. While there are some similarities, we should ask ourselves in which direction the influence flowed: it is equally probable that, at the time of the “tower of Babel” incident (which has good support from linguistics - many of our spoken languages today are derived from a common “ancestor”, sometimes called “Proto-Indo-European”) - corrupted versions of the original (inspired) cosmology survived in Babylonian culture and civilization.According to Catholicism, there are theological (faith and morals) truths in the first three chapters of Genesis. These are part of the Catholic Deposit of Faith.
What I said was that a literal interpretation of Genesis is wrong, in any of its chapters. I said nothing of the theology of Genesis, which is all true.
Welcome to CAF RPR:As a Catholic who’s done his share of science, including publishing in medical journals, this debate is one I’ve been holding with myself for ages.
While I believe that science does tell us a lot about the world, I think most scientists would agree that we do not have a “Grand Unified Theory of Everything”. Most attempts to achieve this, even in physical science, end up multiplying complexities to a point that would make William of Ockham cry “Uncle!” (the “multiverse”, 11-dimensional supersymmetrical string theory, “M”-theory), etc.
In biology, scientific findings about evolution and speciation have been sadly blended with ideology and an at times complete rejection of the role of God in creation or in the origin of life. This makes most “evolutionary theories” (and psychiatry, my own field, is full of them) doubtful to begin with.
Even if we could fix the problems with existing physical or biological theories, they would not tell us about how the universe came into being - how it was created. Attributing this to “random quantum fluctuations” is a cop-out - especially given the fact that, in the space of all possible universes, the odds that this one was created by chance is ridiculously small. (A calculation to this effect is given by Roger Penrose - a Platonist and atheist, but forced to call the facts as they lie - in his book “The Emperor’s New Mind”.
Bible “scholarship” (the quotes denote sarcasm
Should the six days of creation be viewed figuratively? That is a difficult question, but I believe that the seeds of an answer can be found as follows:
We often hear a figure being quoted (such as 14.2 billion years) for the age of the universe, based on various considerations from physics. All these make certain fundamental assumptions - the main one being that the “laws of physics” are immutable and have never changed. While this is an attractive proposition (as it accords with belief in an unchanging God), there is some evidence to suggest that this is not the case - for example, some scientists believe that, at a much earlier point in time, Newton’s law of gravitation did not hold. Remember, “God rested on the seventh day” - meaning that at this point (after 6 days), and not earlier, we could assume that these “laws of physics” were fixed
If this is the case - and each day of creation involves God, in his role as Sovereign and Creator, moulding Nature as He sees fit - then the assumption of “immutability of the laws of physics” (and many calculations of the age of the universe) have to be revised accordingly.
Second, recall Genesis 1:2: “and the earth was void and empty” - the Hebrew words “tohu” and “bohu” mean “trackless waste” and “emptiness” (New Jerusalem Bible, footnote). We could conceive of this “void” state as consisting of information about each and every particle in the universe, a creation ex nihilo (in the manner of a “quantum state vector” for an “entangled state” representing the whole universe), whose positions were then fixed by God - bringing order (that is, “reducing” the vector) and leading to the successive epochs or days of creation. As the created world grew in order and complexity under God’s sovereign guidance, God successively created the necessary laws of physics, chemistry and biology, leading to His creation of plant and animal life, and finally of man. (This would not imply “theistic evolution”, as Genesis teaches that God created the species individually, but something more like intelligent design.)
Were these literal days? The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) says that we are free to speculate otherwise, as long as we do not stray from the truth that God is the Creator of the World. But my opinions - based on the above speculations, but also on faith - is that, yes, they are. 6 days was probably the time it took for the above process to take place - for God to “fix” every facet of creation, from light (here meaning the basic forces and particles of the material world) to man. Because of the properties of matter (including “natural constants” such as the speed of light), the actual natural processes may have taken more than that “in human time” - but the actual process of Divine creation took 6 days.
(An example, if the above is too confusing: It could take me an hour to write a computer programme that would print out pi to 2,000,000,000 decimal places - but the computer would spend thousands of years carrying it out, because of limitations on the speed of information transfer. Should I then say that I took “thousands of years” to “create” a program to compute pi, or one hour?)
Of course, all these are the speculations of a medical man whose knowledge of physics is very much at the basic level. But I do believe that - when we have a more complete understanding of science - we may be able to reconcile the contradictions. And if we cannot achieve this, we must at least make every honest attempt - using the principles of our faith, as well as those of human reason - to do so.
I understand the difficult debate in your post 5 in principle not in actual science.
Thanks a lot!
However, I’m sure that much of this will be rediscovery of Church teachings (about the soul, free will, etc.) and integration of this with scientific findings about the brain, etc.
Father William of Ockham
Excellent point, which is why - somewhere along the way - I had to divest myself of “functionalism”, “biological naturalism” and other purely material theories of human nature and behaviour, and became a dualist.
My apologies! I wasn’t sure if “Father” or “Brother” was the correct address… it comes from reading too much Umberto Eco in my misspent youth, I guessFather William of Ockham
Well, let me “leap in”…What I said was that a literal interpretation of Genesis is wrong, in any of its chapters. I said nothing of the theology of Genesis, which is all true.
Please read carefully before leaping in!
RPR:Thanks a lot!
Literally, the Greek word psyche means “soul”. The secondary meaning, “mind”, was attached to the word later. Subsequently, “psychology” came to mean “the scientific study of the mind and behavior”, which is the common usage in compound terms like “social psychology”, “animal psychology”, etc.
The shift from “soul” to “mind” probably occurred after the 17th century, with the emphasis on “something that could be scientifically studied” - many people, even today, are uncomfortable with the word “soul” in a “scientific” context (unless it’s a metaphor, as in “the soul of discretion”, etc.) This was probably a reaction against dualism, as systematically described by Descartes, which partitioned soul and body quite neatly.
One unfortunate result of this shift in meaning was the degradation of the word “psych”, which came to mean:
Descartes wasn’t wrong about dualism, though - even “secular” philosophers like David Chalmers now agree that consciousness is irreducible to purely physical terms. If we could study this view further, we could re-lay the foundations for a psychology (a study of the soul) that has both scientific and moral / theological dimensions. In my most grandiose moments, I have even thought of a catchy title for a book about this: The Theology of the Mind.
- an abbreviation for “psychology” (‘applied psych’)
- a verb for motivating oneself or another (‘I psyched him up’)
- a root for a broad term for mental illness (‘psychosis’)
- a root for derogatory terms about the mentally ill (‘psycho’)
I’m not quite sure myself why the “e” was dropped, unless it was part of the process by which a compound word is formed (as in neurology = neuron+logia; the “n” is dropped.)
I’m actually a psychiatrist, not a psychologist - and, yes, I realize that that term literally means ‘doctor of the soul’, but I hardly live up to that billing!
I would have thought it would be ‘brother’. A common reference to the individual in question (note how I avoid the trap of using the wrong title there!
) in contemporary manuscripts is ‘Frater Occam’ (or Ockham) - this being the Latin for brother, of course, and also the term from which we derive the modern ‘friar’ meaning a mendicant male religious.
Oh, I’m very imperfect in the flesh… it’s only when I have time to think things through and write about them that I do a bit better. Thanks a lot!RPR:
Well, I was hoping for an adequate answer, but absolutely did not expect such a perfect one! Thank you very much. That was near-perfection!
God bless,
jd
This is post 2.What I said was that a literal interpretation of Genesis is wrong, in any of its chapters. I said nothing of the theology of Genesis, which is all true.
Please read carefully before leaping in!
How can Genesis not be literally true? why would any book in the Bible be false seeing it is the Word of God? His word is not a lie, Dont you think that His first book would be literally true even if we cannot look at it without accepting the mystery of it, that we cannot comprehend hardly what God’s time is compared to ours, but it is still his first book that he represented himself in, so why would we want to bash it? i dont understand where your coming from to get to this statement, i am not saying that i dont know who you are coming from at all, but could you reply and help me see why you cant take the first of His words Literal? and please tell me why you came to that conclusion, cause i’m not understanding why you said that. seeing im not a prophetess and i’m just an ordinary person who loves Jesus, could you please elaborate and give me some way to understand your persceptive and how it could be not a right or wrong thing? earnestly i dont want to mock you, i just want to know why you say that and what person reasons you have that might allow for that opinion. i mean no offense to you, i would like to try to understand why you are so strong in that opinion.