Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.1

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Hugh_Farey said:
Absolutely not. When children who have been taught about evolution at school are told nonsense about it in church, deliberate misrepresentation that they can see immediately is a lie, then they are led to reject the whole of Christian teaching. That’s what encourages atheism, and the many of the Creationist commenters on this site are at the forefront of it.
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Children are taught in school that squirrels morph into whales, a fairy tale of reality in the name of science. They go to church and are taught that squirrels come from squirrels and whales from whales. Then children go into the real world and what do they find? Indeed, squirrels come from squirrels and whales from whales. Who is doing the misrepresentation of reality here?
 
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Richca said:
Children are taught in school that squirrels morph into whales, a fairy tale of reality in the name of science.
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Oh dear. Just as you were doing so well. You know that the statement above is completely untrue. So why write it? An attempt at humour? Satire? A barefaced lie? To what end? To demonstrate the falsity and dishonesty of Creationist arguments? To drive people away from the search for truth? To actively proselytise for Atheism? … sigh …
 
“edwest211 said:
Absolutely yes. The biology textbook is a secular bible. Blind Unguided Chance is how human beings came to be. Period.

From Biology textbooks:

“Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that evolutionary change occurs without any goals.’ The idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.”
(Life: The Science of Biology by William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, & H. Craig Keller, (6th ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co., 2001), pg. 3.)
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Yes, the antithesis of Aristotlelian/Thomism and the final cause.
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“edwest211 said:
“Of course, no species has 'chosen’ a strategy. Rather, its ancestors ‘little by little, generation after generation’ merely wandered into a successful way of life through the action of random evolutionary forces. Once pointed in a certain direction, a line of evolution survives only if the cosmic dice continues to roll in its favor. “[J]ust by chance, a wonderful diversity of life has developed during the billions of years in which organisms have been evolving on earth.
(Biology by Burton S. Guttman (1st ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pgs. 36-37.)
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Chance is the first argument St Thomas Aquinas eliminates in his discussion of the cause of the distinction of creatures in the Summa Contra Gentiles.
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Any number of things? There’s a lot of potential variables. I mean, I’m no evolutionary biologist but it doesn’t seem controversial that traits affect the life of the individual. We’ve seen that something as simple as coloring can affect a population of moths. Anything that gives an individual an edge increases its likelihood that it’ll reproduce. And over the course of generations, the spread of genes within a population changes.
 
edwest211 said:
That is why all Catholics should know that God actually did something, infallibly. When they’re told about ‘the blind watchmaker’ who just happened to do this or that then where does God fit in? Unguided chance then leads to the atheist view that no one made us.
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So God has never sat back and watched things unfurl in their own sweet time. You know, just hasn’t got involved and has left the world to its own devices. Just letting the dice roll as they will.

I think you’ll find that He has…
 
Again,not an evolutionary biologist.

But I know there’s a clear progression of sensory organs. First with just photosensitive cells that can tell light vs. darkness, to a curved folded organ of photosensitive cells for directional sensation, to pinhole-type openings that allow for precise sensitivity, to an enclosed filled chamber, to a lens added in, and then to a cornea-iris separation.

These are all “types” of eye-like organs we’ve encountered. Does that mean that’s the only way for it to go? No. Does that mean that’s the way to “get to an eye”? No. It just shows that we’ve seen how small changes can affect organs and change the way it is used for similar purposes.

If you want a step-by-step account of how, say, a single-opening digestive tract turns through the eons into a modern mammalian digestive tract, you aren’t going to get it. That’s now how a process that takes millions of years and billions of generations works.
 
You can believe that but it is not what the Church tells us.

“According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” (Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).”
 
edwest211 said:
Absolutely yes. The biology textbook is a secular bible. Blind Unguided Chance is how human beings came to be. Period.
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That’s a pretty impressive set of quotations you’ve dredged up from some creationist website there, and I would not wish to defend them. Most were apparently written by atheists, no doubt driven to their belief in the face of the absurdity of Creationism. And all, of course, are from biology rather than philosophy text books. They all acknowledge this, and make some remark or other in their prefaces or explanatory notes that alternatives to unguided evolution are philosophically defensible, but that they cannot be considered in a science text book. Your last quote sums this up succinctly: “as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.” That’s true. But philosophy may be able to show a little more. I believe it does.
 
But you believe it as well. You believe in the flood. Maybe you can explain why God had to step in and clean things up. He’d obviously let things go a little. Otherwise…why the need to drown everyone?
 
Bradskii said:
So God has never sat back and watched things unfurl in their own sweet time. You know, just hasn’t got involved and has left the world to its own devices. Just letting the dice roll as they will.

I think you’ll find that He has…
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This would involve a denial of the truth of divine providence of which our Holy Scriptures speak much about everywhere and Jesus too. Divine providence can also be philosophically demonstrated, for example, it is already implied in St Thomas Aquinas’ five proofs for the existence of God. What you are referring to is Deism.
 
What I find interesting is that aside from some extinct animals, all of the preexisting creatures exist today. From whales to single-celled organisms. Why weren’t they all eliminated by some super-predator over millions or billions of years? Why are animals so diverse when - after millions of years - we should only have a small handful of animals since natural selection should have developed animals that had advantages over others in terms of reproduction over time, and regardless of niche, just ate other animals who were slower or less well equipped with claws or other defenses? A handful of super-animals on every continent. Why are things like trees and fish that were missing for millions of years being found alive today?
 
edwest211 said:
What I find interesting is that aside from some extinct animals, all of the preexisting creatures exist today. From whales to single-celled organisms. Why weren’t they all eliminated by some super-predator over millions or billions of years? Why are animals so diverse when - after millions of years - we should only have a small handful of animals since natural selection should have developed animals that had advantages over others in terms of reproduction over time, and regardless of niche, just ate other animals who were slower or less well equipped with claws or other defenses? A handful of super-animals on every continent. Why are things like trees and fish that were missing for millions of years being found alive today?
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The simple answer is that Darwinism never happened.
 
Because of trophic levels? Because of survival strategies? Because until humans came about, animals who out-competed the other animals in the biome would balance out - wolves and deer. If the deer population gets too scarce, the wolf population starts to decline, and the deer population will start to grow again. Again, there are lots of variables. Biowebs are VERY complex and affected by a lot of things that aren’t obvious on the face of it.

And the sheer number of extinct species are staggering. Diversity of species is going down, according to surveys. It’s quicker to eliminate a population than change it through the generations. Look how quickly the US nearly destroyed the bison.
 
Why should biowebs be so complex and interrelated? There is no need for balance. Wolves could have evolved into super predators that preyed not only on deer but on any other animal that they could catch and eat. The population of wolves should have spread like a devouring wall to be in the top tier of only a handful of other predators.
 
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