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

[buffalo]

This article is by Jeffrey Tomkins. I have been asking buffalo to discuss his work since my post #234. Would *you *care to refute Dr. Miller’s remarks on chromosome 2 fusion?

That is what Tomkins is arguing against. His claim is it contains a transcription factor binding site. It is read backwards, not forwards, as in claims for evidence of fusion sites. It encodes a key regulatory switch. It seems it is genome wide. We will see what future research shows.

 

[ManOnFire]

Correct, just as “Nothing plus God” = “something”. That was my point. Both sides start from more than pure “nothing”.

rossum

No. Starting with God and no multiverse is a start. Starting with an already existing multiverse is no start at all. We already live in a multiverse. “Now” and every other point in the time/space continuum could also be a start by that same definition.

 

[ManOnFire]

I am not sure if I have atheists see become fundamentalist believers. Yet I agree with him on the other way around: fundamentalist believers, when they become atheists, usually become atheists of the fundamentalist kind.

Unfortunately, the humans who believe we humans are owed a definitive answer for the origins of the cosmos are the most lost and wrong despite our passionate desires for an end to our collective ignorance. We can’t know a scientific answer just because our egos will it. There are only 2 options: either Faith in the supernatural creation of the cosmos, or belief in the illogical and unscientific idea that a godless cosmos could have magically popped into existence by itself. From a scientific standpoint, the joke is on us, ALL of us.

 

[ManOnFire]

No. I was merely pointing out that the original question was skewed. Theists were allowed a head start, with nothing and God. Atheists were expected to start with pure nothing. In order to remedy the imbalance, I added the multiverse to the atheist side. That makes for a much fairer discussion.
rossum

But you refuse to see that your argument is flawed. Logic allowed theists to start with God. Claiming that the multiverse started with the multiverse is circular and illogical.

 

[rossum]

No. Starting with God and no multiverse is a start. Starting with an already existing multiverse is no start at all. We already live in a multiverse. “Now” and every other point in the time/space continuum could also be a start by that same definition.

I disagree. Nothing is nothing. If your side wants to start from more than nothing, then the other side gets to start from more than nothing as well.

Alternatively, you could start with nothing and explain how God develpos from nothing. Then the other side would have to explain how the multiverse developed from nothing.

Your mention of the “space/time continuum” is irrelevant, since the four dimensional space-time manifold we inhabit originated at the Big Bang. The multiverse is ‘outside’ our space-time.

rossum

 

[rossum]

But you refuse to see that your argument is flawed. Logic allowed theists to start with God. Claiming that the multiverse started with the multiverse is circular and illogical.

I am not claiming that the multiverse started from the multiverse. I claim that the material STEM universe started with the Big Bang, which itself originated in the multiverse. I provide exactly as much information about the origin of the multiverse as you do about the origin of God.

Using the different definition of ‘universe’: “all that exists”, then both God and the multiverse are included in the ATE universe and the answers to many questions are different. For one thing, the ATE universe is eternal, which the scientific STEM universe is not.

rossum

 

[aicirt]

Define “talk”. Parrots and Mynah birds can make the appropriate sounds. Chimps have been taught to use simple sign-language. Many other animals, for example birds, use simple vocal signals to warn others in their group of predators.

There are many different variations of simple use of language in animals.

We have it in a far greater degree, but it is not entirely absent in other mammals and birds.

rossum

Sure, they have vocal cords…or I assume that is what they have. But according to the article, humans are the only ones to have a gene for speech in their DNA.

 

[ManOnFire]

I am not claiming that the multiverse started from the multiverse. I claim that the material STEM universe started with the Big Bang, which itself originated in the multiverse. I provide exactly as much information about the origin of the multiverse as you do about the origin of God.

Using the different definition of ‘universe’: “all that exists”, then both God and the multiverse are included in the ATE universe and the answers to many questions are different. For one thing, the ATE universe is eternal, which the scientific STEM universe is not.

rossum

The origin of God is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that any claim of a godless beginning must have involved the supernatural because there will never be a natural law to explain a godless magical birth of a multiverse, cosmos, universe, or any other non-God entity.

 

[edwest2]

I humbly disagree Ed. Science is just one way we come to know God. God set the big bang into action which means whatever developed from it is all his. And science is how we learn about his great gift to us, our world, our universe. God and the intellectual development of his children are intertwined and can not be separated.

I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by biology texts. Science cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created life. No scientist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the Biology textbook. He’s not there.

Only the Church can tell us how things happened in this case. It is not the business of science to do so.

“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).”

From Communion and Stewardship.

From the Catechism:

“295 We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom.141 It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance.”

That is where the conflict lies.

Peace,
Ed

 

[rossum]

The origin of God is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that any claim of a godless beginning must have involved the supernatural because there will never be a natural law to explain a godless magical birth of a multiverse, cosmos, universe, or any other non-God entity.

There is no need to explain the “birth” of the multiverse because there was never a time when the multiverse did not exist.

You are trying to make special rules for God. I merely apply those same rules to the multiverse. There was never a time when God did not exist. There was never a time when the multiverse did not exist. Same rules.

rossum

 

[rossum]

I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by biology texts. Science cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created life. No scientist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the Biology textbook. He’s not there.

Let’s look at that in a different key:

I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by chemistry texts. Science cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created chemistry. No scientist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the Chemistry textbook. He’s not there.

and again

I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by mathematics texts. Science cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created mathematics. No scientist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the Mathematics textbook. He’s not there.

Your point applies to all the sciences. Lets try something else:

I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by French texts. Language cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created language. No linguist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the French textbook. He’s not there.

Yup. Looks like your point applies to a great many subjects. School textbooks are deliberately limited to cover the subject at hand. You will find God in religion textbooks and in theology textbooks. You will not find Him in woodworking or cookery textbooks. The problem is not with the textbooks, but that you are looking in the wrong place.

rossum

 

[hzcummi]

The Papacy Refuses To Teach the Truth of Genesis

Back in 2011, I wrote to the then Pope, and the Vatican, concerning the Truth of Genesis. Look for the article “The Truth of Genesis: A Challenge to the Pope!”. One place where you can find it is:

thyblackman.com/2011/05/02/the-truth-of-genesis-a-challenge-to-the-pope/.

The Pope and the “Holy” See refused to respond, and correct their false statements. Now I know why.

The Jesuit Order of the Catholic church takes an oath to destroy Protestantism. Part of the Jesuit oath is the following: “That I will go to any part of the world, whatsoever, without murmuring, and I will be submissive in all things whatsoever communicated to me”.

Also, “I do further promise and declare, that I will, when the opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly or openly, against all heretics, Protestants and Liberals (free thinkers), as I am directed to do to extirpate and exterminate them from the face of the whole earth, and that I will spare neither sex, age nor condition, and that I will hang, waste, boil, flay, strangle and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women and crush their infants’ heads against the wall, in order to annihilate their execrable race”. Does this sound like followers of the Lord Jesus Christ?

I would think that most Roman Catholics would be shocked if they knew what Catholicism really teaches. Much of their outward, and all of their inner doctrine, contradict the Bible.

For example, on page 129, the book Catechism of the Catholic Church, it teaches: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods”. Notice that they did not capitalize the pronouns which are referring to Jesus. That book was published by Image Books, 1995. Why would anyone want to remain in the Catholic religion, after reading such heresy?

Instead of blindly following a religion, dig into the history of the belief system,
so that you won’t be caught in disappointment come Judgment Day, let alone the Rapture.

The Catholic Civilization is a periodical published by the Jesuits in Rome, since 1850. Before WWII, it was written “For today Rome considers the Fascist regime (to be) the nearest to its dogmas and interest. We have not merely the Reverend [Jesuit] Father Coughlin praising Mussolini’s Italy as ‘a Christian democracy’, but Catholic Civilization, house organ of the Jesuits, says quite frankly…’Fascism is the regime that corresponds most closely to the concepts of the Church of Rome.”, Days of Our Years, (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1939), p. 465. So if the Catholic (Jesuit) Church ever rules the world, they will take away your liberties and freedoms, kill Protestants and non-Catholics, and make you subject to the will of the (black) Pope.

Wake up Catholic laity! Catholicism always was a religion of the occult. That is
why Constantine, a worshiper of Mithra, wouldn’t allow Christians and Jews to the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

Anything that the Pope and Catholicism says about Genesis, and the Bible, should be considered false, because they believe in God and the Bible, as much as President Obama believes in Christianity and traditional marriage.

Herman Cummings
ephraim7@aol.com

 

[buffalo]

Let’s look at that in a different key:
I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by chemistry texts. Science cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created chemistry. No scientist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the Chemistry textbook. He’s not there.and again
I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by mathematics texts. Science cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created mathematics. No scientist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the Mathematics textbook. He’s not there.Your point applies to all the sciences. Lets try something else:
I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by French texts. Language cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created language. No linguist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the French textbook. He’s not there.Yup. Looks like your point applies to a great many subjects. School textbooks are deliberately limited to cover the subject at hand. You will find God in religion textbooks and in theology textbooks. You will not find Him in woodworking or cookery textbooks. The problem is not with the textbooks, but that you are looking in the wrong place.

rossum

Could science find God?

 

[Al_Moritz]

Let’s look at that in a different key:

I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by chemistry texts. Science cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created chemistry. No scientist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the Chemistry textbook. He’s not there.

and again

I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by mathematics texts. Science cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created mathematics. No scientist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the Mathematics textbook. He’s not there.

Your point applies to all the sciences. Lets try something else:

I am saddened by the constant promotion of something that is not connected to God at all by French texts. Language cannot give God any credit. So, the obvious conclusion is that “natural” Non-God forces created language. No linguist is going to going to go to a Catholic school and argue God from the French textbook. He’s not there.

Yup. Looks like your point applies to a great many subjects. School textbooks are deliberately limited to cover the subject at hand. You will find God in religion textbooks and in theology textbooks. You will not find Him in woodworking or cookery textbooks. The problem is not with the textbooks, but that you are looking in the wrong place.

rossum

Brilliant.

 

[edwest2]

What conclusion can the average public school student make about not just the origin but the development of life? Science should be about factual information and observation, but Biology texts can and do go beyond the well-defined limits. Such textbooks have to be carefully examined by people who are competent to assess the contents prior to publication.

We can see this in current biology textbooks:

“[E]volution works without either plan or purpose — Evolution is random and undirected.”
(Biology, by Kenneth R. Miller & Joseph S. Levine (1st ed., Prentice Hall, 1991), pg. 658; (3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 1995), pg. 658; (4th ed., Prentice Hall, 1998), pg. 658; emphasis in original.)

“Humans represent just one tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life.”
(Stephen J Gould quoted in Biology, by Peter H Raven & George B Johnson (5th ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pg 15; (6th ed., McGraw Hill, 2000), pg. 16.)

“By coupling **undirected, purposeless **variation to the **blind, uncaring **process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.”
(Evolutionary Biology, by Douglas J. Futuyma (3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc., 1998), p. 5.)

“Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that **matter is the stuff of all existence **and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless–a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.”
(Biology: Discovering Life by Joseph S. Levine & Kenneth R. Miller (1st ed., D.C. Heath and Co., 1992), pg. 152; (2nd ed… D.C. Heath and Co., 1994), p. 161; emphases in original.)

“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.)

“The ‘blind’ watchmaker is natural selection. **Natural selection is totally blind **to the future. “**Humans are fundamentally not exceptional **because we came from the same evolutionary source as every other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes that has given us our bodies and brains “Natural selection is a bewilderingly simple idea. And yet what it explains is the whole of life, the diversity of life, the apparent design of life.”
(Richard Dawkins quoted in *Biology *by Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reese. & Lawrence G. Mitchell (5th ed., Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), pgs. 412-413.)

“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.)

“It is difficult to avoid the speculation that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront. “The real difficulty in accepting Darwins theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance. Earlier, astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the solar universe, or even of our own solar system. Now the new biology asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.”
(Invitation to Biology, by Helena Curtis & N. Sue Barnes(3rd ed., Worth, 1981), pgs. 474-475.)

Peace,
Ed

 

[ManOnFire]

There is no need to explain the “birth” of the multiverse because there was never a time when the multiverse did not exist.

You are trying to make special rules for God. I merely apply those same rules to the multiverse. There was never a time when God did not exist. There was never a time when the multiverse did not exist. Same rules.

rossum

So since you are saying that the multiverse has always existed with no beginning and no god, then there is forever no first mover or causer of the multiverse by definition, because you have defined it as such.

 

[NeedsMercy]

Could science find God?

That is not the job of science. As I stated in an earlier post science is “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment”. Science does not study the supernatural or paranormal.

 

[rossum]

Could science find God?

No. Science deliberately limits itself to the study of the material. Within its limits it is very successful. That does not mean that there are other fields of study outside the material: philosophy, art, theology, music, literature etc.

Since God is supernatural, and so outside the material, science has little to say on the subject. If a supernatural God is believed to intersect with the material world, then science can examine the purely material part. For example: “thunderbolts are caused by Zeus”. Science can examine the thunderbolts, but it cannot examine Zeus.

rossum

 

[rossum]

So since you are saying that the multiverse has always existed with no beginning and no god, then there is forever no first mover or causer of the multiverse by definition, because you have defined it as such.

Lets rephrase that a little:

So since you are saying that God has always existed with no beginning and no multiverse, then there is forever no first mover or causer of God by definition, because you have defined Him as such.

You are right. Both God and the multiverse are defined in such a way as to deflect the “what caused God/multiverse?” questions. As I pointed out, I am merely looking for a level playing field. Both sides get one uncaused eternal entity for free.

rossum

 

[ManOnFire]

Lets rephrase that a little:

So since you are saying that God has always existed with no beginning and no multiverse, then there is forever no first mover or causer of God by definition, because you have defined Him as such.

You are right. Both God and the multiverse are defined in such a way as to deflect the “what caused God/multiverse?” questions. As I pointed out, I am merely looking for a level playing field. Both sides get one uncaused eternal entity for free.

rossum

Except a supernatural first beginning would not need to adhere to logic and science whereas a natural first beginning would need to adhere to logic and science…