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edwest211
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Keep it up.
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LateCatholic
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You are not supposed to take it on faith. Scientists do not take it on faith. Scientists (and otehrs) look at EVERY shred of evidence every uncovered, every experiment ever done, every observation ever made, and every validated mathematical equation ever studied - and NOT ONE contradicts the basic tenants of Evolution. This does not mean Evolution is complete or perfect, but it is by far the best explanation we have for the diversity of life on earth. This is not in dispute. The fact that is conflicts with some religious dogma and theologies does not in any way weaken the theory. It is up to religions to adapt. Some will, some won’t.
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edwest211
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The Catholic Church will continue to provide the whole, complete answer. Evolution has no practical scientific application.
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LateCatholic
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Evolution is a concern for Christians because:
- It contradicts the creation story.
- More importantly, it contradicts the notion that all human beings descend from one human couple.
- By extension, original sin - as defined by Christianity - is false
- Ergo, most (not all) atonement theories of Jesus death and Resurrection are invalid.
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edwest211
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See, when used to discredit religion, it is not being science anymore, it becomes ideology. This leads people to adopt paganism.
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LateCatholic
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Don’t blame the messenger. Evolution has no “ideology”. The problem is with Theology. You can ignore Evolution if you want. All Creationists do- they simply pretend it doesn’t exist. Thus, no problem. The challenge arises for those Theologians that accept Evolution AND want to maintain their current theology.
Specifically, if you are a Christian AND you believe in Evolution, you need to come up with a way to rationalize “Original Sin”. The standard approach is to claim that at some distant point in our history, ONE man rejected God. All other genetic lines died out, and every human being is a descendant of that man. This introduces many other problems, but it’s a reasonable proposal to discuss.
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edwest211
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Not for Catholics. The Church has Divine Revelation, science does not. I don’t need to rationalize anything and neither does the Church. Evolution is an ideology, it has no practical scientific use.
LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
Your last sentence does not follow from the ones before it. Did you mean it as an independent opinion? Or did you think it is implied by the first three sentences?
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edwest211
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I have no idea what you mean. The Catholic Church is the source of all truth. Science isn’t. Evolution is useless in any practical sense.
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LateCatholic
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I’m not sure why you seem to think that is a good thing. Of course science doesn’t have divine revelation. ALL religions claim revelation. There are no facts or evidence. The ONLY thing they claim is revelation.
You do not understand Evolution. Gravity is not an ideology. Quantum Mechanics is not an ideology. Aerodynamics is not an ideology. Evolution is not an ideology. If you want to be Catholic AND accept Evolution, you’ve got some serious monkey wrenches to deal with, even if you realize Creationism is false.
Laughable. Evolution is the foundation of modern zoology. Genetics, which underlies Evolution and was predicted by it, is the foundation for all modern biology. I always ask those who deny Evolution why the get flu shots, because they are obviously wasting their time.
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LateCatholic
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I don’t understand what you are saying here. Let’s deal with a parallel, imaginary example:
Consider a religion for a tribe of people on an island with no birds. Let’s say in their religious tome (their Bible) it is written that nothing will ever leave the bounds of the earth. Nothing ever has, can, or will fly. And let’s say a lot of the underlying dogma for their religion is based on that.
At some point, birds are found on the island, or they migrate to it, are introduced or whatever. The Theologians on the island, claiming divine revelation, and say this is an illusion. Fine. But then scientists on the island study the birds. They come up with a theory of aerodynamics. They run experiments. They gather evidence. They refine this theory. The engineers use this theory to develop airplanes. Soon people on the island start flying around.
The orthodox on the island continue to claim it is all an illusion, because they have “divine revelation”. The progressive faithful on the island say, you know what, maybe we should adjust our theology.
Now, why would anyone say “Aerodynamics is an ideology”? Why would anyone say “aerodynamics is not useful”? Your comments, in all honesty, make no sense whatsoever.
Look, here’s the deal. Christians have two choices. Deny Evolution entirely, and maintain the current Theology OR accept scientific discovery and make adjustments to the theology. Ideology has nothing to do with it.
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rossum
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- Evolution only contradicts some interpretations of the creation story. The YEC six days 6,000 years ago interpretation is contradicted by a great deal of science from astronomy to geology to evolution. The Theistic Evolution interpretation of Genesis is completely compatible with evolution and with the rest of science.
- Evolution confirms that there are many couples form which all humans are descended: M-Eve’s parents, her grandparents, great-grandparents etc. and the same for Y-Adam’s ancestors. Any one of those couples is ancestral to all living humans and could have been given souls by God. Science cannot tell whether a given human fossil had a soul or not.
- No. There are many scientifically confirmed possibilities for Adam and Eve. See 2 above.
- Your premise is false so your argument fails.
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Bradskii
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I would say that it puts certain fundamentalist interpretations of religion in a bind. If you believe in a young earth, a global flood etc. then you have a problem.
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LateCatholic
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Right - but the big problem is with Original Sin - and thus the Atonement. Specifically, a fundamental belief of Catholicism is that ALL humans descend from one person that at one point in our past rejected God. All other genetic lines died out. You don’t have to believe in Adam and Eve and the Creation story, but you MUST believe in that. Evolution causes lots of issues regarding that principle, and also introduces a lot of unsavory concepts.
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Bradskii
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I wouldn’t disagree. I think that if I were Catholic then I might be able to correlate the science and the faith. If you read the catechism on Adam and Eve it is written in a very indefinite way that allows a scientific interpretation. It’s certainly not a reiteration of the biblical version.
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LateCatholic
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Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam are not real people. They are designations that can change, similar to ‘king’ or ‘queen’. In addition, they are not a “couple”, they could have lived tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years apart.
There have been quite a few attempts by Theologians to rationalize Evolution with Christian dogma. yes, you can get past the orthodox interpretation of the Old Testament and the Creation story easily enough.
The hard part is Original Sin. You’ve got to really stretch credulity to get there. Cardinal Ratzinger made the best attempt - that God decided at one point in history to give ONE person a soul. No one else got a soul. By coincidence, even though there were literally tens of thousands of that ancestral species (they probably were not homo sapiens) alive at the time, the one and only ‘person’ the omniscient and omnipotent God selected to carry the first soul then rejected God. This was original sin, and the underlying need for the Atonement.
Now, to take it further, no one else got a soul, and new souls are ONLY created via one’s genetic progeny. Over thousands of years, the “people with souls” lived side-by-side with the people without souls. Eventually, all the “soul-less” genetic lines died out, and only humans from that one chosen ancestor remain.
The above is how you rationalize Evolution with Christianity. You can do it, but it’s a tough one. Personally, I think a better approach is to adjust the foundation theology of Original Sin. In my opinion, it’s OK to modify some core beliefs to jive with scientific discovery. Maybe Original Sin IS in fact the result of Evolution. For example, maybe ‘survival of the fittest’ - a principle that was required to get us to where we are today, and certainly has some unsavory moral principles behind it, is what we need to be saved from. This is much cleaner. But you have to completely change Christian dogma to get there.
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Bradskii
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I think it’s obvious that if Catholicism were to start today, then it would reflect today’s current knowledge. The problem is in trying to fit stories from millenia ago (that could be interpreted as being metaphorical in any case) as factual events into what we know to be true.
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o_mlly
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The essential belief in the creation story is God’s direct act in the ensoulment of the first human beings. Evolution limits itself, as it should, to only the material aspects of life on earth.
What part of evolution theory claims that the macro evolution of human beings was not a singularity?
Again, not so because sin and sanctity are spiritual properties and beyond the grasp of science which limits itself to observable things. We cannot see sin or sanctity in fossils.
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rossum
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Yes, the designation can change but despite that they were real people who has many ancestors. Any couple among those ancestors could have been Genesis’ Adam and Eve. When the designation changes, then the old holder of the title will always be an ancestor of the new holder.
God could have given one or two people souls initially. He could even have created the second person from the first person’s rib. Neither option can be proved or disproved by science. The Cardinal is correct about the surrounding unsouled population. They would have been biologically compatible and have supplied the base for the level of genetic diversity we see in modern human populations. A single couple can have at most four alleles (two each) between them. We also know the rate at which new alleles spread through populations. Doing the calculations shows that the population of Homo sapiens has never fallen below about 10,000 breeding pairs.
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buffalo
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From the Royal Society ( what I have been posting for many years now - a must read) -
Why an extended evolutionary synthesis is necessary
“But in the past decade, without much notice by general audiences, a more wide-ranging debate has arisen from different areas of biology as well as from history and philosophy of science, about whether and in which ways evolutionary theory is affected, challenged or changed by the advances in biology and other fields.”
While documenting numerous empirical and theoretical advances, at the level of core assumption most current textbooks on evolution, whether explicitly or implicitly, still offer a theoretical framework that is largely based on the MS of the 1930s and 1940s. (hat tip to @edwest)
His comments on Natural Selection (hat tip to @buffalo)
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2017.0015
Why an extended evolutionary synthesis is necessary
“But in the past decade, without much notice by general audiences, a more wide-ranging debate has arisen from different areas of biology as well as from history and philosophy of science, about whether and in which ways evolutionary theory is affected, challenged or changed by the advances in biology and other fields.”
While documenting numerous empirical and theoretical advances, at the level of core assumption most current textbooks on evolution, whether explicitly or implicitly, still offer a theoretical framework that is largely based on the MS of the 1930s and 1940s. (hat tip to @edwest)
His comments on Natural Selection (hat tip to @buffalo)
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2017.0015
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