Techno2000: The principal environmental pressures producing the variety of organisms on the planet today were geological, such as the forming and dispersing of huge landmasss and oceans, which in turn had global effects on climate, atmospheric composition, marine pH and so on. At smaller scales simple geographical isolation, biological competition and interaction all played significant parts.
Although evolution is complicated science, its principles are simple, and are indeed taught to, and understood by children, although, as we see here, some fairly fundamental misconceptions (that we are ‘descended’ from our cousins, for instance, or that speciation is instantaneous) still arise. Much the same can be said of biblical exegesis.
edwes211: Once again, an appeal to the authority turns out to be no such thing. Where does ‘the Catholic Church’ teach that ‘Adam and Eve were two literal individuals’? or ‘Eve was not born’?
Your two quotes from the popular science press may look like nonsense to you, but they do not look like nonsense to me. They are both somewhat simplistic reports of discoveries of extinct creatures related to the evolutionary branches from which humans have developed. Of course it is impossible to say whether this or that particular sea-squirt was my direct ancestor, but it looks as if it may have belonged to a group of similar organisms one or more of which were. Millions of years later, when the desendants of these little sea-squirts had diversified into thousands of other different kinds of animals, one group of little rat-like creatures evolved the adaptations which eventually led to the birth of you and me, although whether these particular teeth belonged to a direct ancestor is impossible to say.
J_the_Centrist: John Paul II’s remark “two truth’s cannot contradict each other” was of course not original. In this context it was first said by St Augustine of Hippo, who was also anxious to point out that if one of the alleged truths was rationally substantiated, the other (even if apparently biblical) needs to be more correctly interpreted to conform. His tone, it has to said, was fairly derisory:
“Now it is quite disgraceful and disastrous, something to be on one’s guard against at all costs, that they [pagans] should hear Christians spouting what they claim Christian literature has to say, and talking such nonsense that they can scarcely contain their laughter when they see them to be utter moonshine.”
You say that you: “honestly cannot see why God cannot have created man with souls immediately” and that’s fair enough. Me neither. He could have done anything. The question under discussion concerns what he actually did, not what he could have done.
Rau: The reason evolution is unlikely to be overthrown as ‘yesterday’s theory’ is not because of its scientific rationale, any more than was the discovery of the grandeur of the universe. It is because of its philosophical and theological beauty. Far from distancing God, it enhances his creativity and involvement in his universe such that the simplistic conjuring trick of spontaneous creation seems rather tawdry by comparison.
