Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.0

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Aloysium said:
I’m not sure why someone would assert that evolution and polygenism is how God goes about His business when it is a major deadly incompatability with the truth He has revealed through His dialogue with us.
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The incompatibility does not lie in scripture, but in in the various interpretations of scripture. Evolution deals with the development of the material human body. It says nothing about the soul. The Pope talks about “true humans” when discussing evolution. A “true human” has a human soul as well as a material human body. An upright ape without a human soul is not a “true human”. That ape had a material body, and so is covered by evolution, and we have fossils of some of them. The first true humans arrived when God added newly created souls to two of those upright apes. Alternatively, if you insist, he directly created two biologically compatible primates with souls.

All modern humans can be directly descended from those two, we have many universal common ancestors; any mating pair could be the first souled upright apes.

The evidence from human genetics shows that the human population was never reduced to as low as two (or eight for that matter) since we split from the our LCA with the chimpanzees.

You may not accept those scenarios, but many Catholic and Christian scientists do.

The incompatibility you talk about is not in scripture, but is in some of the various interpretations of scripture.

rossum
 
"Adam and Eve: Real People

"It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Gen. 2–3) as a fiction. A question often raised in this context is whether the human race descended from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) or a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).

"In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: “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).

“The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states, “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” (CCC 390).”
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Evolution is a fact about reality, it does not belong to one person that wrote about it. There is no Bob’s theory of gravity for example. Darwin made the idea of exploring the fact of evolution popular through his research and publications, but it does not belong to him alone since we continued on from his work to where we are now in the current understanding of the fact of evolution.

Why evolution works is a bad question. It’s like saying, why does the ball drop due to gravity? Gravity is the term we use to describe that physical event of a ball dropping. Evolution is the physical event that takes place to describe the process of speciation over time. The proper question needs to be: How did dinosaurs become birds? By the process of evolution. Just like: How did the ball go from 10m up there to down here? By the process of gravity.
 
“evolution is a fact”? How so? Gravity I can test all day. Evolution? No.
 
Rossum has beaten me to it. The idea that humans descended from two, and only two individuals, is incompatible with current scientific thinking, and will probably continue to be so. It is absolutely true that human generis declares the opposite, but theology is catching up with evolution, and I have no doubt whatever that the theology of original sin will eventually be officially found not to be incompatible with polygenism, probably within a couple of years. Furthermore, the more we understand how God works, the better will be our relationship with him and the rest of his creation, not the worse. When evolution is properly understood this will be improved, not destroyed, and our children’s appreciation of their privileges and responsibilities greatly enhanced beyond what I learnt as a child.
 
I see no reason for a change in the Church’s understanding. Pre-humans were animals like apes. How God works is beyond the domain of science.
 
The question genetic polygenism is something I have not yet found a clear answer on. (The idea Adam and Eve’s children bred with non-true humans, hence genetic diversity but with monogenism as all still goes back to Adam and Eve.) But as Catholics we defer to the Church. (And I’d also have to wonder how far back Adam and Eve go,)
 
rossum said:
Evolution deals with the development of the material human body. It says nothing about the soul.
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Let’s say life is a rainbow.

The scientific study of life would be similar to looking at the rainbow in black and white, representing life’s physical aspects, with colours being relegated to the metaphysical.

Under this lens, the rainbow appears as a ribbon of varying shades of gray. It’s all fine and good to have this limited view. In medicine it could get a bit weird hearing people in a waiting room referred to as a fractured femur, a swollen gall bladder, or say perhaps an enlarged prostate. It does happen actually, although it shouldn’t.

But then evolutionary theory steps in to explain how life diversified. The analogous explanation would be that the addition of the colour white to black is how we can make a rainbow. When someone steps in to point out that rainbows are formed from a bringing together of basic colours yellow, red and blue, the explanation is excluded from science class because it belongs in art, aka metaphysics and religion.
 
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Aloysium said:
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rossum:
Evolution deals with the development of the material human body. It says nothing about the soul.
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Let’s say life is a rainbow.

The scientific study of life would be similar to looking at the rainbow in black and white, representing life’s physical aspects, with colours being relegated to the metaphysical.

Under this lens, the rainbow appears as a ribbon of varying shades of gray. It’s all fine and good to have this limited view. In medicine it could get a bit weird hearing people in a waiting room referred to as a fractured femur, a swollen gall bladder, or say perhaps an enlarged prostate. It does happen actually, although it shouldn’t.

But then evolutionary theory steps in to explain how life diversified. The analogous explanation would be that the addition of the colour white to black is how we can make a rainbow. When someone steps in to point out that rainbows are formed from a bringing together of basic colours yellow, red and blue, the explanation is excluded from science class because it belongs in art, aka metaphysics and religion.
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Right, evolution can’t explain things like why some people have an abundance of virtues and
some people don’t have any.
 
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On the contrary, Evolution explains everything. From the ground up. Take Evolutionary Psychology. Like biological robots, we have been programmed.
 
edwest211 said:
On the contrary, Evolution explains everything. From the ground up. Take Evolutionary Psychology. Like biological robots, we have been programmed.
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To take that in a different key:
On the contrary, Theology explains everything. From the ground up. Take God’s complete foreknowledge. Like theological robots, we have been programmed.
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It is wonderfully easy to take incomplete knowledge of a subject and think that you can refute it with simple arguments. Those arguments are only simple to those with incomplete knowledge.

rossum
 
Except we are talking about you and me. When you speak of creation you have to account for the fact that you think and can know. Regardless of your physical and psychological make up, irrespective of their intactness, you are human. Being alive involves perception; the visualization of this screen truly happens beyond the mathematics, graphs and graphics that we can use to describe its physical aspects happening inside and outside of the body. Such is the case for all the senses - hearing, touch, taste and smell. We also have emotion, thought and the capacity to act, all channels for the relational nature of ourselves as one with everything. All this is created new in each of us, and we all are brothers and sisters, the offspring of one man and one woman only. At some point we gave up the idea of phlogiston, and Darwinism as a method of creation, we will also. People should not pretend that it has anything more to contribute than why some finches have bigger beaks than others and why some iguanas swim. Straying out of that area, it is simply an illusion, ideas having no substance and no connection to what is and what was.
 
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Evolutionary theory hasn’t described everything. But where there is a good description, you’ll find evolutionary theory.

As for a discussion of why some people are virtuous, this is both known and obvious: where competing natures are present in the species, there is an advantage in genetic fitness to both.

For example, loyalty has strong advantages: the trust and support of friends in survival, and the knowledge that your wife’s babies are spreading your DNA into another generation, since she would never cheat on you.

Disloyalty also has strong advantages. Treachery allows you to profit-- maybe to become very rich indeed–in certain circumstances. Cheating on your spouse, especially if you’re a man, allows you the chance to have additional offspring, meaning your genetic information multiplies itself into the population.
 
An example of how to eliminate objective goodness, reducing every action to necessity.

You are supporting Ed’s claim that evolution does nothing practical but spread atheism.
 
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edwest211 said:
Evolutionary Psychology
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benjamin1973 said:
Evolutionary theory hasn’t described everything. But where there is a good description, you’ll find evolutionary theory.

As for a discussion of why some people are virtuous, this is both known and obvious: where competing natures are present in the species, there is an advantage in genetic fitness to both.

For example, loyalty has strong advantages: the trust and support of friends in survival, and the knowledge that your wife’s babies are spreading your DNA into another generation, since she would never cheat on you.

Disloyalty also has strong advantages. Treachery allows you to profit-- maybe to become very rich indeed–in certain circumstances. Cheating on your spouse, especially if you’re a man, allows you the chance to have additional offspring, meaning your genetic information multiplies itself into the population.
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Thanks… you just described… Evolutionary Psychology.
 
Aloysium said:
People should not pretend that it has anything more to contribute than why some finches have bigger beaks than others and why some iguanas swim. Straying out of that area, it is simply an illusion, ideas having no substance and no connection to what is and what was.
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If you’re saying evolution can only be used to explain the physical origins of creatures alive today, then I can agree. I don’t think any of the Catholics here are trying to say evolution provides philosophy, just the science of physical origins. And if my reading of what you’re saying is correct, I’ll agree it doesn’t answer the question of how we should live our lives or how God loves us. And it’s been, for me, when you talk about how evolution can’t answer those questions, I’ve felt a disconnect between what we’re saying to each other because I’ve never held evolution to be a moral/philosophical code.
 
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