Pope Francis: ‘Evolution … is not inconsistent with the notion of creation’

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Rin said:
Other hominidae do not have a rational soul; this is what constitutes being made in God’s image and likeness. Not our DNA, nor which family we belong to biologically. It is a matter of metaphysics, not biology.

Similarly, the “infusion” of the rational soul may have corresponded with our biological evolution, since the soul, “that which animates”, cannot come into being separately from our bodies (pre-existence is not Catholic teaching, except in the case of Logos). The soul is not material, but it is closely “connected” to the material. Catholic teaching clearly says that we were given our souls as a result of God’s active will, however there is no reason why our evolution, while seemingly random on a naturalistic level, cannot have been actively willed. Consequently, there is no reason why our souls cannot have come into existence at the point of evolution where we attained rational thought.

The above may seem like validation of so-called Intelligent Design, but there is a major difference; the ID crowd believe such direction to be demonstrable scientifically, something for which they have zero proof. Whether or not our evolution was directed, whether or not we have a rational soul, whether or not this soul was given to us through God’s active will, and whether or not there even exists something such as a soul, are metaphysical considerations, and can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed by natural science. This is where the ID ideologists step horribly wrong. It is also where many atheists step horribly wrong - it is the same error of thought.

Lastly: This should not even be controversial. Creationism and ID are not Catholic ideas - they stem from Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. Sadly, these ideas have seemingly infected the American part of the Church. I have problems comprehending how this could have happened, since both ideas run contrary to the classic, Christian teaching about God. To borrow from someone I saw in a similar thread, they make God into a Minecraft player, rather than the Creator and Sustainer of the universe.
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👍👍👍
 
Al_Moritz said:
Really, you guys cite the ICR and a research pulbished in an Answers-in-Genesis ‘Research Journal’ as debunking the chromosome 2 fusion? Really? Come on, you can’t be serious. If the alleged debunking were true, it would already have been published in Nature or Science, or at least in PNAS. Oh no, I forgot, there is a conspiracy amongst scientists…I forgot that little detail :eek: 😃
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Discuss the points made in the paper.
 
TMC said:
I have actually only “seen” American Catholics who claim otherwise on-line, all those I know in real life agree with the last seven Popes on this point.
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Your claim is the Church supports blind unguided chance? :nope:
 
Seamus_L said:
But the big question is. Has the Catholic Church always taught this or is it a very recent interpretation ?
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Recent. The long held teaching is Eve came from Adam. This is a thorn in the side of evo.
 
Jon_S said:
How could it be separate?

There was a time when there was nothing but single cell creatures.

Many millions of years later mammals emerged in the form of small creatures.

Many millions of years later mammals were diversified into the species we now see

Somewhere in that process millions of years ago, modern apes did not exist nor humans, but perhaps some other creatures that led to the species we see today.

Perhaps such an idea explains Neanderthals. Perhaps they were “soulless” hominids. That God gave us our soul transforming us into a new creation which emerged as humans leaving others like Neanderthals behind.
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Neandertals are us. They were human.
 
Jon_S said:
This just isn’t true. Perhaps you enjoy boxing God in and limiting his abilities, but I do not.

We aren’t talking about Godless evolution, we are talking about God setting a course of events. God treating biology like physics with laws and cause and effect.

Why God can’t be intimately involved in that is beyond me. He of course can. It displays his majesty.

I would argue that to have such detailed and complex life as we have is proof of Gods intimate involvement with the evolutionary process
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He then is creating.
 
estesbob said:
That’s what I don’t understand-why people of Faith would feel threatened by Evolution. If God chose to use evolution in the creation process why is that a problem?
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Some have a very simple faith, and I am not putting them down, but they don’t see a need for evolution to explain anything in their world view.

So they just go with the basics as they understand them.
 
Jon_S said:
Your characterization of evolution as solely atheistic shoes both your contempt and ignorance of the issue and is unproductive.
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Not blind? Purpose
Guided? God participates to an end
No Chance - designed

No evo would allow this for it is ID.

Top Evo Richard Lewontin

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. "
 
buffalo said:
By humans.

Polygenism does contradict the Catholic faith and is the issue with theistic evolution. It is also a problem for original sin.
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The biological theory of evolution does not touch biogenesis if properly taught.

How God has made everything is not defined in the Bible and Original Sin is not undermined as there very likely was and Adam and Ever, IMO, who were (just guessing) the patriarch and matriarch of the humans that survived the Toba eruption.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
 
pepipop said:
In relation to apes, how could humans have evolved from them when they are still present on earth today, as a separate species. Why didn’t ‘some’ of the apes not evolve into humans. :rolleyes:

The evolution theory of all other species, horses, etc… all their earlier templates died out millions of years ago - hence why would apes still be here alongside man.
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Because genetics doesn’t work like that. At all in fact.

Also, humans didn’t evolve from apes, they simply share a common ancestor. So there was some hominid species a long time ago (I can’t remember dates. Look them up) branched into our modern hominids (including humans as one of those branches).
 
buffalo said:
No. It is the scientific position they hold.
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And so you say that I as a Catholic who firmly believes in God and that he created us by evolutionary means am what?

You seem to say I don’t exist…
 
Jon_S said:
And so you say that I as a Catholic who firmly believes in God and that he created us by evolutionary means am what?

You seem to say I don’t exist…
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I am willing to listen to your view on how He did it.

First, answer this question - Did God know what Adam would look like?
 
buffalo said:
Your claim is the Church supports blind unguided chance? :nope:
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I will gladly repeat:

From the Church document Communion and Stewardship (emphases added):
  1. 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).
 
Al_Moritz said:
I will gladly repeat:

From the Church document Communion and Stewardship (emphases added):
  1. 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).
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Evolution has to be guided. Would that be designed? creation?

Atheist evo’s understand the issues with theistic evolution very well. They know it is either blind unguided chance or creation. They see no middle ground.
 
buffalo said:
Neandertals are us. They were human.
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It’s pretty well established that they weren’t human. Recent genetic testing shows they interbred with humans about 50,000 years ago. So we do, or some of us do carry tiny bits of Neanderthal DNA in us, but we and Neanderthals are distinct species
 
buffalo said:
Evolution has to be guided. Would that be designed? creation?

Atheist evo’s understand the issues with theistic evolution very well. They know it is either blind unguided chance or creation. They see no middle ground.
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Stephen Barr, The Design of Evolution (Communion and Stewardship is the document that I just cited in my post above):

"But Communion and Stewardship also explicitly warns that the word “random” as used by biologists, chemists, physicists, and mathematicians in their technical work does not have the same meaning as the words “unguided” and “unplanned” as used in doctrinal statements of the Church. In common speech, “random” is often used to mean “uncaused,” “meaningless,” “inexplicable,” or “pointless.” And there is no question that some biologists, when they explain evolution to the public or to hapless students, do argue from the “randomness” of genetic mutations to the philosophical conclusion that the history of life is “unguided” and “unplanned.” Some do this because of an anti-religious animus, while others are simply careless.

"When scientists are actually doing science, however, they do not use the words “unguided” and “unplanned.” The Institute for Scientific Information’s well-known Science Citation Index reveals that only 48 papers exist in the scientific literature with the word “unguided” in the title, most having to do with missiles. Only 467 have the word “unplanned,” almost all referring to pregnancies or medical procedures. By contrast there are 52,633 papers with “random” in the title, from all fields of scientific research. The word “random” is a basic technical term in most branches of science. It is used to discuss the motions of molecules in a gas, the fluctuations of quantum fields, noise in electronic devices, and the statistical errors in a data set, to give but a few examples. So if the word “random” necessarily entails the idea that some events are “unguided” in the sense of falling “outside of the bounds of divine providence,” we should have to condemn as incompatible with Christian faith a great deal of modern physics, chemistry, geology, and astronomy, as well as biology.

“This is absurd, of course. The word “random” as used in science does not mean uncaused, unplanned, or inexplicable; it means uncorrelated. My children like to observe the license plates of the cars that pass us on the highway, to see which states they are from. The sequence of states exhibits a degree of randomness: a car from Kentucky, then New Jersey, then Florida, and so on”because the cars are uncorrelated: Knowing where one car comes from tells us nothing about where the next one comes from. And yet, each car comes to that place at that time for a reason. Each trip is planned, each guided by some map and schedule. Each driver’s trip fits into the story of his life in some intelligible way, though the story of these drivers’ lives are not usually closely correlated with the other drivers’ lives.”
 
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