Is Darwin's Theory Of Evolution True?

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Aloysium said:
All you’ve done is vent and insult the people you are talking to.
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If the many atheists online forums I’ve participated in are any guide, most (if not all) atheists consider Christians to be superstitious fools - the ones who reject evolution are considered to be especially stupid and ignorant. At least Bradskil doesn’t use foul language, as is standard fare on atheist sites.
 
A ‘genetic throw of the dice’? So if there had been a real genetic throw of the dice, we could have all become lizard men, right?

Ed

That might work in comic books.
 
Kei said:
I know at least St Augustine thought that Genesis was showing the creation to the angels, and not a description of the creation account as it happened.
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The early Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church who didn’t’ believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis were the exception, not the rule.
 
Yes, I’ve been to those sites, and sites where those claiming to be scientists wonder how they can explain “science” to a group of people whose religion is full of it. Uh… pure nonsense. If the Church says anything that threatens the current secular dogma, the verbal torches and pitchforks come out, but if the Church says anything positive about the secular dogma, she is praised.

William F. Buckley — ‘Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.’

Science is not a god.
 
If evolution is true, it doesn’t have a mind of its own; it must be guided by God.
 
Glark said:
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LeafByNiggle:
Not the origins of life. The origins of species.
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You splitting hairs. As far as we humans are concerned, going from an ape to a human is the origin of life.
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This is a very important point. Darwinian evolution describes how species evolved from prior species. It does not address the question of where the first life form came from at all. I believe evolution is true. But I choose to believe that the first life form was created miraculously by God, even though I cannot prove it scientifically.
Glark said:
If this race of pre-Adamic humans existed for eons (as they must have, if evolution is true), why didn’t they invent the wheel or writing or metallurgy?
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First, they were not human - not in the theological sense - any more than mud is human, assuming God formed Adam from mud.

Secondly, why would you assume that any species that existed for a long time must necessarily have invented those things? Ants have existed for much longer and they haven’t invented any of those things either.
Glark said:
Soul-less humans would have no sense of morality, so these kiddies got off to a bad start.
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Perhaps they were taken from the biological parents and raised directly by God in Eden? By all accounts, Adam and Eve had a flawed sense of morality anyway.
Glark said:
A wolf can mate with a Labrador and produce viable offspring, so I imagine they belong to the same species.
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They do, because scientists have decided arbitrarily to define “species” in terms of what can interbreed.
Glark said:
The early Church Fathers and Doctors of the Church who didn’t’ believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis were the exception, not the rule.
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For it to be binding Catholic doctrine in the deposit of faith, it would have to be unanimously and explicitly agreed.
Glark said:
Yet for hundreds of thousands of years they must have had the same intelligence as Adam.
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There is no evidence that Adam was all that smart.
 
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edwest211 said:
William F. Buckley — ‘Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.’
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When it comes to freedom of speech, the Liberals are complete hypocrites. Incidentally, my online interactions with atheists indicates that 99.999% of them belong to the Loony Left. Their support for homosexuality, abortion and feminism (the unholy trinity) is rabid and matched only by their hatred of traditional Catholicism.
 
I was making the response to the idea that there was a consensus among the Church fathers.
 
Glark said:
How anyone can interpret Genesis 2:7 (and supporting verses) as Adam being formed from a pre-existing creature is a complete mystery to me. I don’t consider it a valid interpretation but an erroneous one, which I suspect is the result of Scientism, not sound Catholic theology.
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Your inability to understand it is not grounds for its validity.

We are not obligated to interpret it in the literal sense, as there are other senses of scripture, which we as Catholics ascent to.

Yes there is mud, clay, but in which sense is to be taken as? Is it literal and dogmatically the only one interpretation? Please show me an authority which supports such a claim.

Mud is pre-existing matter, and is it literal mud or the same mud apes are made of? Or are the apes mud? Could we not take the clay to be those souless animals? What council or Catholic authority refutes that?
 
Glark said:
Catholics are obliged to believe that only Adam and Eve were our first parents - ie, one man and one woman, not a race of many.
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This does not exclude many souless pre-men and their existence. Adam and Eve were the first because they had souls. There could be many non-human humanoids running about at the same time.

Where do you suppose Adam and Eves son and daughters in law came from?
 
Aloysium said:
God may have created a perfect couple of canines, with a surplus of genetic material which would be progressively cleaved from the original template. Reproduced with such modifications, successive generations would see the emergence of the diversity that includes wolves, feral dogs, domesticated dogs, foxes, and coyotes. It’s sort of reverse evolution with little to no random chemical activity involved, and visions of doggy or vixen perfection as the selector.
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Oddly enough, it is the imperfections in living forms that is supportive of Darwinian evolution, for if all of creation was created directly and immediately by God, there would be no need for these imperfections. Keep that in mind when talking about perfection. It doesn’t exist in nature. Far from it. Living forms have lots of design imperfections.

One such design imperfection is the location of the testes in Man. They are currently located outside of the body core because lower temperature is more conducive to sperm production. But how did they get there? Examination of the physiology and embryology of Man shows that the testes start out inside the body core in every male fetus. Then at some point before birth, the testes descend to the normal exterior location in the scrotum. This passage of the testes leaves open a gap in the abdominal wall that makes men more subject to hernias. This is clearly not ideal. Why would God design Man with this flaw if He could just as easily designed Man with testes that started out in an external scrotum and avoided the weakness to hernias. However that is how random variation and natural selection would work, where each generation has to start with whatever was present in the previous generation and modify it slightly. There is no opportunity to “tear up the plans and start from scratch,” which is why we see so much imperfection.
 
Techno2000 said:
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Bradskii:
Now is there anything at all that I have said so far that is unreasonable?
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The baby birds would be easily scooped up by the dogs.
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The ones that can’t reach the lower branches make nests on the ground. Those can reach the lower branches make nests there. That makes sense - if it’s relatively safe in the brances and dangerous on the ground, then stay in the branches.

A better point would be to consider the dogs. Which don’t climb very well. So eventually, if all the chooks end up on the lower branches, the dogs would become extinct.

But let’s say that a few dogs are slightly better climbers and now and then can get to those lower branches. They would survive whilst the dogs that were not such good climbers would die off. Pretty straightforward?

So what do we have now? It’s like an arms race. The dogs that can climb to the lower branches survive and the chooks that can get to a slightly higher branch also survive.

If the dogs can climb no higher, they become extinct and the chooks remain as they are. There is nothing that is taking the least able flyers out of the gene pool. But if a greater proportion of the dogs being born have a genetic tendency passed on to be good climbers, then we still have this ‘arms race’.

Sound reasonable? It’s like poachers shooting elephants with long tusks and taking them out of the gene pool so we are left with elephants that are genetically inclined to have short tusks. If the dogs which are good climbers take out the chooks which can’t fly very well, then we are left with ones that can.
 
That is against Church teaching. Adam and Eve were our first parents. There were no almost-humans. They were humanoid animals like some apes alive today. Adam and Eve were special creations.
 
Hmmm. Frog is still comfortable. Nice warm water. Happy frog. 🙂
 
edwest211 said:
That is against Church teaching. Adam and Eve were our first parents. There were no almost-humans. They were humanoid animals like some apes alive today.
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What exactly is Chirch teaching on that? Adam and Eve are our first parents, but it doesn’t follow that they didn’t have animal parents for their biology. Please cite the source for the teaching you claim I spoke against.
 
They are the counterparts of the ovaries. If the testes did not move to outside the body, ovaries would have to migrate inside. The process is a lot more complex than you describe here. It sounds perfect to me. Random to you? Really? OK, then.
 
What exactly do you mean by parents? I mean, how would it happen that a human being came about through the mating of two animals?
 
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