Is Darwin's Theory of Evolution True? Part 4.1

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Of course.

God had to do something with these animals to make way for us.

Lest we find ourselves on the menu instead of the chicken.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
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Techno2000:
According to rossum there were birds living right along side with the dinosaurs.
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He’s right. But they weren’t chickens.
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So, the bird genes were successful,and the dinosaurs genes were also successful. 🤔
 
No, I am not getting it. You may be,

If evolution was designed it has purpose and has foresight.
 
Hugh_Farey said:
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buffalo:
Could he have designed it to look like evolution?
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Of course. Evolution is his design. That’s what we’ve been saying all along. I think you’re getting it at last.
Techno2000 said:
So, the bird genes were successful,and the dinosaurs genes were also successful.
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No. Yes. It depends what you mean by successful.
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Both… the bird and the dinosaur are reproducing
successfully, the bird is hanging out with its own transitional form. 🤔
 
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PetraG said:
Why do you feel free to conclude that Darwin was not describing the mode of artistic expression chosen by an Almighty God who does not make arbitrary laws but rather bases all of His laws on the natural laws of cause and effect built into His creation?
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Even assuming what you say concerning Darwin and that is debatable, than his idea of the relationship between cause and effect is irrational. It is a reasonable, observable, and philosophical axiom in classical philosophy that no effect is greater than its cause. Darwinism proposes the opposite, namely, that effects are greater than its cause. In Darwinism, one goes from a single cell life form to a human body composed of some 39 trillion cells or so; an ever increasing step by step complexity in an effect from a cause that doesn’t possess it. No cause can give to an effect what itself does not possess.
 
“69. The current scientific debate about the mechanisms at work in evolution requires theological comment insofar as it sometimes implies a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. Many neo-Darwinian scientists, as well as some of their critics, have concluded that, if evolution is a radically contingent materialistic process driven by natural selection and random genetic variation, then there can be no place in it for divine providential causality. A growing body of scientific critics of neo-Darwinism point to evidence of design (e.g., biological structures that exhibit specified complexity) that, in their view, cannot be explained in terms of a purely contingent process and that neo-Darwinians have ignored or misinterpreted. The nub of this currently lively disagreement involves scientific observation and generalization concerning whether the available data support inferences of design or chance, and cannot be settled by theology. But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. 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).”
 
There is a difference between a proposed mechanism and what kind of philosophical conclusions people project into it.

Proposing that it is far easier to mathematically model the earth as a small body orbiting the massive sun than to model the massive sun orbiting the earth or saying that the paths of the other planets are far more perturbed by the gravitational pull of the massive sun than by the relatively small pull exerted by the earth says nothing at all about the place of the earth or the sun in salvation history. It is possible to read all sorts of things into scientific models that are not necessary to the models.

The cause of genetic mutations? When water boils on a stove, what is the cause? Is it the fire under the kettle or is it that someone wanted to make tea? Do you see my meaning?
 
Well, everything is designed and built for God’s purposes.

One could well argue that everything that happened from the beginning made this planet perfect for us.
 
buffalo said:
If evolution was designed it has purpose and has foresight.
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Not quite. Keep at it. A washing machine is designed, but in itself it has no sense of purpose and no foresight. It swirls clothes about more or less randomly, and the result is clean clothes. Evolution too.
 
“may” “perhaps” More speculation. Nobody was around billions of years ago.
 
Washing machines are designed to wash clothes. That is the purpose.

God did not design life to wash clothes.
 
Thank you for your quotation from the ITC’s Texts and Documents, Section 69. Presumably you think the ITC speaks with some authority on current theology as it applies to the topic?

Would you care to post Section 63?
 
buffalo said:
God did not design life to wash clothes.
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Yes he did. The fact that I wash my clothes is evidence enough for that - unless you think such an action is entirely coincidental.
I concede though that God designed evolution to do other things, specifically to progress life along evolutionary pathways, without any intervention of spontaneous creation.
 
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