Is Darwin's Theory Of Evolution True? Part Two

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edwest211 said:
Adam and Eve were two individuals. They were given specific gifts from God, including immortality.
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And no one should expect science to uphold or contradict such a position. There is no scientific evidence one way or the other.

But there is ample evidence for evolution. Now perhaps God interjects in a miraculous way for various purposes. Ok. But science neither supports nor opposes this - there is no evidence one way or the other.
 
Rau said:
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edwest211:
Adam and Eve were two individuals. They were given specific gifts from God, including immortality.
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And no one should expect science to uphold or contradict such a position. There is no scientific evidence one way or the other.

But there is ample evidence for evolution. Now perhaps God interjects in a miraculous way for various purposes. Ok. But science neither supports nor opposes this - there is no evidence one way or the other.
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The same evidence for evolution can be used to support the biblical account. The difference is that one does not have God and the other does. Since God is the living Truth itself, any account that seeks to explain who we are, why we are and how we got here, but does not include Him at its centre, will be absurd. And, evolution is absurd in its claim that all this, and I am talking about the complexity who is the unified being reading this, that it exists through chance. I’m not calling it happenstance because the suffering, inevitable in life, makes it anything but fortuitous. There are reasons for our existence, and seen through the eyes of faith, they are obvious, revealed in scripture and the teachings of the Church. Of course I expect science to discover the truth, unless what we are doing is not science but magic, playing with matter to perform slights of hand.
 
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LeafByNiggle said:
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Aloysium:
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goout:
Evolution is a good description of how that happens.
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Perhaps if you explain what you mean by evolution and what exactly it says about Adam’s creation, it would convince Ed and enlighten me. I’m serious, because to me it isn’t even good science.
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“Good science” does not need to explain Adam’s creation as distinct from the creation of any other man. The uniqueness of Adam has no basis within the rules of science, until someone comes up with a scientific definition of who this Adam fellow was.
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Please refer to the post above.

I would think the definition of Adam is obvious.

A science that abandons God will find “truth” to be irrational nonsense. That’s how it knows it’s gone off track.

People should follow up on Buffalo’s links, btw.
 
goout said:
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Aloysium:
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goout:
Evolution is a good description of how that happens.
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I’m serious, because to me it isn’t even good science. I may be better able to explain my issues with it if you explain what you think is good about its description. We can all learn from this, even if we don’t end up agreeing.
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How would you know evolution is not good science, especially in light of it’s acceptance as a general explanation of a natural process, even by Popes?

If you’re a credentialed scientist that has groundbreaking material, the onus is on you to show why the general, almost universal, scientific community is so wrong.
If not, what difference would it make for me to lay out elementary scientific principles?This is a matter of you educating yourself in basic science.
That is your responsibility, not mine.
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You seem more interested in discussing me rather than the OP - Is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution True?

So let’s get personal; to answer your questions:

I know using my God-given intellect.
When I’ve read various comments made by Popes on the matter, they seem to give voice to thoughts that I hadn’t yet been able to express. In other words, I find no contradiction in thinking that Evolutionary Theory is bad science and believing that science can illuminate the truth.

That’s not how science works. There isn’t the intellectual solidarity that you describe. I’m guessing you read none of Buffalo’s really interesting articles. At any rate, consensus is hardly the definition of truth.

Just to get the credentials out of the way, in a bankers box with crushed sides, nestled among others, there an early edition of James Watson’s textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene, part of the reference material for a course taken long ago. In other words, I’ve been doing science for a long time. I don’t consider it a burden to be here discussing these matters with you. I do feel it is sort of a responsibility to share. As to the bigger picture, i may be cynical, but just as in entering politics, one most likely will surrender one’s principles to advance, in science, one has to conform. There’s a freedom of thought that is permitted in a vehicle such as this that is rare in academia. Whatever, this is fun.

I thought you might have a point of view that you wished to share and explore. We can if it’s too much of a bother to do otherwise, but we don’t just have to accept what we are told. If there is a question, it will be answered to our satisfaction, eventually that is.
 
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Aloysium said:
The same evidence for evolution can be used to support the biblical account.
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No it cannot. Genesis has birds (day 5) appearing before land animals (day 6). Evolution has land animals appearing in the Devonian, long before birds, which appeared in the Jurassic. This is a definite error in Genesis.

rossum
 
While Genesis reveals the truth, it is not a science book telling us the specifics of how God brought the universe into existence at the beginning of time. The nuts and bolts of it, in spite of being rational, are beyond our pay grade, as they say. But we can get close. Genesis is consistent with the overall picture of the Big Bang Theory for example. But there too, some of the concepts it uses like the plasma cooling is a sort of backwards view of the creation of subatomic particles, then becoming hydrogen.
 
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Aloysium said:
While Genesis reveals the truth, it is not a science book telling us the specifics of how God brought the universe into existence at the beginning of time.
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Maybe so, but that is not what you said in your earlier post:
Aloysium said:
The same evidence for evolution can be used to support the biblical account.
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It was your “same evidence” that I was criticising. The available fossil evidence supports the standard biological account that birds appeared later than land animals. That evidence contradicts the order of appearance in Genesis.

If Genesis is not a scientific account, which I agree it isn’t, then the scientific evidence is irrelevant to Genesis, and should not “be used to support” Genesis. We do not use historical evidence to “support” the account of the Battle of Borodino in ‘War and Peace’, the historical evidence is not relevant to judging Tolstoy’s novel.

If scientific evidence is relevant to Genesis, then Genesis should be judged as a science text, a judgement it fails. If Genesis is not a science text, then scientific evidence is irrelevant and cannot offer support to the text.

rossum
 
These matters are difficult to communicate. I’m not prepared to write a book, you’re getting the short of it and I will try to explain.

The biblical account has Adam as the first man from whom we all spring. He is a person in history and at the same time represents all humanity. The evidence in the fossil record and in the genome, if interpreted correctly, would be found to be consistent with that revealed truth when consideration is made that creation did not happen on its own but was brought into existence by God, as He brings every time and every place from eternity. When we think about matter behaving through its inherent properties, reason tells us that it could not result in life. Stay tuned for more.
 
Aloysium said:
The biblical account has Adam as the first man from whom we all spring.
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There are many men (and women) from whom we all spring. There are many, many common ancestors to all humans. Not all of those common ancestors are human if you go back far enough.
Aloysium said:
consideration is made that creation did not happen on its own but was brought into existence by God
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I would like to see your evidence that it was the specific Christian Trinitarian God, as opposed to the non-Trinitarian Jewish, or Muslim, versions of the same God. What scientific evidence do you have that it was not Vishnu, Amaterasu or any other sufficiently powerful deity?

I very much doubt that you will be able to derive that from the scientific evidence. At most you might be able to use science show the existence of an external cause, such as the postulated Multiverse. Getting beyond that to the specifics of the Trinitarian version of the Abrahamic God will not be easy, to put it mildly.

rossum
 
Aloysium said:
You seem more interested in discussing me rather than the OP - Is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution True?
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You challenged me to provide you with easily available material that contradicts you point of view. And then accuse me of ad-hominem. You simply don’t like the way this conversation is going.
Maybe you should consider an openness to the generally accepted opinion of science. The Church shares that same openness.
I know using my God-given intellect.
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A person’s intellect only operates with integrity in the context of others. if your intellect is steering you away from well accepted thinking by people of good will, AND the Church, then you need to reconsider your intellect.
 
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That’s the mythos if these modern times. The truth is something other.
 
I wasn’t accusing you of an ad hominem because nowhere did you try to refute what I was saying. Read what you wrote and clarify your argument if I misread. For sure you don’t understand what I’m trying to say; I will endeavour to be clearer. But then it could be that you are looking for a fight in which case it will get distorted regardless.
 
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Aloysium said:
That’s the mythos if these modern times. The truth is something other.
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So, you have no scientific evidence favouring your God over Vishnu or Durga etc.

What about showing some property of the Multiverse that matches your God, but not Shiva, say?

I am not Christian, so I do not share some of your assumptions about the universe. You cannot just assume that science agrees with your assumptions, you have to show the evidence.

Generally it is easier to leave the material aspects to science, where science is strong, and leave the theological aspects to the theologians.

rossum
 
This is a wrong view. Leave the theological aspects to the theologians. How many times have I read here that what the Popes have said about evolution somehow lends support to the theory? Or that there are Catholic scientists that believe the theory, a sort of guilt/agreement by association nonsense observation. One scientist could be a Muslim, another a Protestant and another a Catholic. As long as all get their jobs done and published so that others may duplicate their work, it doesn’t matter.

What decades of programming has done in Universities has been the passing along of a useless idea as fact. When the evidence can only be viewed one way as if it were the 11th Commandment and unbreakable, other alternatives are automatically rejected. Speaking generally, I say, stop the charade now. Stop selling this product called evolution. Why? Because to Christians at least, it presents a highly distorted worldview. And if science is all that matters then please realize that people who accept faith not as primitive ritual but as an actual part of their lives alone.

As far as I’m concerned, this is about: the Bible is wrong about this and science is God. To my brothers and sisters in Christ, and to those who present the phony idea that others will look at us as superstitious or irrational about this subject, consider:

After Consecration, is the Eucharist ‘the body of Christ’ literally?

Did Pope John Paul II have actual miracles attributed to prayers of intercession?

Is the Sacrament of Penance/Reconciliation real? Is a priest to act in the person of Christ (persona Christi) to get God to forgive us?

If you don’t recognize the above as superstition or irrational, then you are on the right track.
 
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edwest211 said:
How many times have I read here that what the Popes have said about evolution somehow lends support to the theory
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Most of those quotes are not about the science, but about what parts of science it is permissible for Catholics to accept. The Popes are ruling on Catholic belief, not on science.
edwest211 said:
After Consecration, is the Eucharist ‘the body of Christ’ literally?
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“Literally”, no. A literal body has flesh, bones and the rest. A small piece of unleavened bread has literally none of those. As to transubstantiation, I do not accept the existence of Thomist ‘substance’, I only accept the existence of the ‘accident’. In the absence of substance, then transubstantiation is obviously impossible.
edwest211 said:
Did Pope John Paul II have actual miracles attributed to prayers of intercession?
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Yes, he had miracles attributed to him. Whether that attribution was correct is a different question. A lot of people have miracles attributed to them: the Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, Moses, Krishna etc.
edwest211 said:
Is the Sacrament of Penance/Reconciliation real? Is a priest to act in the person of Christ (persona Christi) to get God to forgive us?
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The sacrament is real, it exists, just as various Hindu and Muslim ceremonies exist. Forgiveness, or not, has not been shown. That is another question for the theologians.

rossum
 
The argument we are having is like you claiming the sun revolves around the earth, and you asking me to prove otherwise.

Perhaps you can see the problem. If you won’t accept what just about every qualified scientist in the world can see, and you are not qualified to refute them, then…what?
What is anyone going to say that will change your mind? You have a highly individualized view of the matter. You have landed on an island and refuse to look outward.

You need to read a 100 level geology and biology textbook, and consider the Church’s view of this issue more seriously.
 
edwest211 said:
This is a wrong view. Leave the theological aspects to the theologians. How many times have I read here that what the Popes have said about evolution somehow lends support to the theory? Or that there are Catholic scientists that believe the theory, a sort of guilt/agreement by association nonsense observation.
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Ed, what you are doing is fact by assertion. Your assertions do not amount to reality anymore than mine.

You talk about
what the Popes have said about evolution
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Maybe you should stop making assertions about what Popes have said, and just read the documents, and read some basic earth science.
Personal assertions do not make good science or theology.
 
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