Question for Catholics who accept Evolution

[Evoken]

“Every individual human being as well as the whole human community are created in the image of God. In its original unity – of which Adam is the symbol – the human race is made in the image of the divine Trinity.”

This is from a document by the ITC, the Communion and Stewardship: Human Persons Created in the Image of God, headed by Cardinal Ratzinger.

I have read that document, to be honest I don’t think you are giving it the right interpretation. Adam being the symbol of the unity of humanity does not means that he was not a real person. Pope Pius XII in his Encyclical Humani Generis when touching on the issue of evolution, affirms the reality of Adam (and Eve) and prohibits denying it or even positing several descendants (polygenism).

Evo

 

[captaincoog]

Just because an event in the Divinely revealed scriptures has a very significant, symbolic meaning, it does not negate the historicity of the same event.

For example, after the Resurection, the apostles went out fishing and, at the Lord’s command threw their net out of the boat to catch exactly one hundred and fifty-three fish. At that time in history, there were one hundred and fifty-three nations in the world.

It is easy to see some significance in this symbolic number of fish in light of the Great Commission and the Universal Church’s mission. But at the same time the number of fish in the net was still exactly one hundred and fifty-three, really and historically.

God has arranged significant moments in His-tory to reveal something He wants us to know and believe. It is no different with creation and all the other events reported in the Bible as history.

Yes, Moses was not at the Creation of the world, but the Scriptures are God-breathed and Moses wrote down exactly what the Holy Spirit wanted written.

 

[captaincoog]

At some point, God added a soul to the animals that would eventually become us. When, I don’t know.

Before that point, we were animals. After, we were God’s People.

Also, the church does not require a literal belief in Genesis 1:1 -10:xx as Literal History, but as divinely inspired writings limited by the mind of the writer.

Welcome back!

So, we are descendants of animals? If you go back far enough, our parents were apes or something similar? Christ shared in our humanity, so if you draw this out, God is a descendant of an ape, or further, bacteria. Never.

 

[Evoken]

So, we are descendants of animals? If you go back far enough, our parents were apes or something similar? Christ shared in our humanity, so if you draw this out, God is a descendant of an ape, or further, bacteria. Never.

“Therefore the death of man, and of beasts is one, and the condition of them both is equal: as man dieth, so they also die: all things breathe alike, and man hath nothing more than beast: all things are subject to vanity. And all things go to one place: of earth they were made, and into earth they return together.” (Ecclesiastes 3:19-20)

Other than the soul, humans truly have no biological advantage over animals. Being made in God image does not means that our bodies are God’s image, for God is not a body but a spirit, it means that our souls are made in God’s image.

Evo

 

[trentonzero]

I don’t see any contradiction between the two, because I think the first two chapters of Genesis are being told from God’s point of view.

It says God made the animals in a day. And it may very well have been a day, for God. God’s days and our days are not going to be the same thing. It would be a disproof of Catholicism if God’s days are the same as days on earth (because modern science shows the rate at which time passes to be relative to various physical properties of the observer).

The Bible doesn’t say that. The Bible says 1000 years are to God a day, and a day is to God a thousand years. It expresses the heart of a relative time 1800 years before it occured to any scientist.

 

[gell]

I have read that document, to be honest I don’t think you are giving it the right interpretation. Adam being the symbol of the unity of humanity does not means that he was not a real person. Pope Pius XII in his Encyclical Humani Generis when touching on the issue of evolution, affirms the reality of Adam (and Eve) and prohibits denying it or even positing several descendants (polygenism).

Evo

Encyclicals are not infallible, especially when the pope is writing in regards to a theory that was not as sturdy as it is today. Remember that Pope John Paul II said, “Science can purify religion, and religion can stop false absolutes in science” or something along those lines…

Evolution is enough to get many people to think that the 7 day Creation is incorrect. Why is it not enough to make people think that a Adam and Eve are merely symbols?

 

[trentonzero]

“Therefore the death of man, and of beasts is one, and the condition of them both is equal: as man dieth, so they also die: all things breathe alike, and man hath nothing more than beast: all things are subject to vanity. And all things go to one place: of earth they were made, and into earth they return together.” (Ecclesiastes 3:19-20)

Other than the soul, humans truly have no biological advantage over animals. Being made in God image does not means that our bodies are God’s image, for God is not a body but a spirit, it means that our souls are made in God’s image.

Evo

Thanks. I thought captaincoog sounded almost Jewish.

I don’t need evolutionary theory to tell me that the leap down from God to Man is unthinkably larger than the leap down from Man to Animal.

To say “I believe God would dirty himself by becoming Man, but would never dirty himself by becoming anything related to animals” is a little silly I think.

 

[Evoken]

Encyclicals are not infallible, especially when the pope is writing in regards to a theory that was not as sturdy as it is today. Remember that Pope John Paul II said, “Science can purify religion, and religion can stop false absolutes in science” or something along those lines…

Encyclicals are first and foremost authoritative as they are written by the highest authority of the Church: the Pope. And only on those ground demand religious obedience. Second, encyclicals can be infallible if the Pope speaks Ex-Cathedra in them and proposes some belief to be held by all faithful.

It can be argued that Pope Pius XII did this in Humani Generis in regards to monogenism, namely that we are all descended from Adam and Eve, a single human couple.

Evolution is enough to get many people to think that the 7 day Creation is incorrect. Why is it not enough to make people think that a Adam and Eve are merely symbols?

Church doctrine is not determined by what many people think but by what The Church actually teaches. The Church is not a democracy. If the Church declares that Adam and Eve were real persons (and it has), then all Catholics are bound to believe that. Same would be if The Church had declared that creation took only six days (it hasn’t been declared).

Evo

 

[Abbi]

I’m not Catholic, and I believe in creation. I was pretty astounded when I went to my Catholic RE class and the teacher started talking about evolution. Isn’t it true that the word “day” in its original context literally meant 24 hours? And don’t you have to plonk Noah’s flood right inbetween the verses? Now that’s a little weird…

I’ve talked to a lot of evolutionists before, and you know what? They don’t have all the answers. You don’t have to believe in evolution, nor commit intellectual suicide. There is actually a law in science that is completely contradictory to the idea of evolution - based up around the 2nd law of thermodynamics (if you wanna get fancy) - which applies to both open and closed systems. Put simply, think about it, does something holding a certain amount of information ever gain MORE information by itself? Um, no. Just rearrangements in information (which can be seen in variations of species today). Creationists aern’t totally stupid. Altogether, I don’t think it matters too much. What it comes down to is evolutionists have to have faith in science, but we have faith in God

 

[Church_Militant]

Neither do the young earthers, though they’d like everyone to believe that they do.

I’ve read some of their books that a buddy gave me and they are heavy on the rhetoric and really light on the science. Their proofs are often based on pictures and stories that are about the same level of credibility as Nessie.

Frankly, I don’t care either way, since none of that makes the least difference in my faith in Christ or in the way I treat my neighbor.

 

[trentonzero]

I’m not Catholic, and I believe in creation. I was pretty astounded when I went to my Catholic RE class and the teacher started talking about evolution. Isn’t it true that the word “day” in its original context literally meant 24 hours? And don’t you have to plonk Noah’s flood right inbetween the verses? Now that’s a little weird…

I think it was 24 hours…for God. And a few billion years for here.

I’ve talked to a lot of evolutionists before, and you know what? They don’t have all the answers. You don’t have to believe in evolution, nor commit intellectual suicide. There is actually a law in science that is completely contradictory to the idea of evolution - based up around the 2nd law of thermodynamics (if you wanna get fancy) - which applies to both open and closed systems. Put simply, think about it, does something holding a certain amount of information ever gain MORE information by itself? Um, no. Just rearrangements in information (which can be seen in variations of species today). Creationists aern’t totally stupid. Altogether, I don’t think it matters too much. What it comes down to is evolutionists have to have faith in science, but we have faith in God

It can’t apply to both open and closed systems. If I could not add information to an open system, then computers are impossible and the Catholic Answers forum doesn’t exist (as, by posting, I am causing the open system of switches that exist inside the CatholicAnswers server to go from a series of random ups and downs to an ordered series of ups and downs).

Other things are impossible to…if open systems can’t have information added to them, I can’t take a deck of randomly shuffled cards and order them by number and suit, because by doing so I would be adding information to the system.

I wouldn’t be able to write letters, because by doing so I would taking a fluid and random distribution of ink and distributing it in a nonrandom way, to make the word “Hello.” I would be adding information to the system.

Do I need to give more examples of adding information to open systems? What exactly did the book you read say to make you believe you couldn’t add information to an open system?!? The very definition of “open system” is “a system to which we can add information”.

 

[betsygrace]

Hi Evo,
I am not a Catholic, but I am a Christian who has recently come to accept the plausibility of evolution (at great surprise to myself I might add!) One book that I read not long ago that you might find interesting is called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief by Francis Collins. Collins, and evolutionary biologist, was the lead scientist in charge of mapping the human genome (good science credentials) and is also a devout (Protestant) Christian. Another writer you might find helpful is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was a Catholic priest/archeologist who believed in evolution and was writing about the relationship between evolution and belief back in the first half of the 20th century. I haven’t actually read him yet (just been meaning to), so I can’t give you a good review of his stuff, but from skimming a couple of his books, he seems to have theories about just the kind of things you’re dealing with. Also, as a non-Catholic, I am not really qualified to speak to his orthodoxy. I think his writings were not published until after his death.

I’m afraid I personally don’t have the perfect answer for reconciling evolution and the Fall. It hasn’t really troubled me that much. I think that may be because I have already gone through times of fairly intense confusion in trying to reconcile the character of God as I know Him from relationship with Him with troubling things like evil and suffering in the world, some of the troubling passages in the Old Testament, etc. I eventually came to the conclusion that God sorrows more over suffering and evil than I ever will, so I just had to have faith in His goodness, even though sometimes I couldn’t clearly see how it manifests itself. I figure the lack of understanding lies with me, not with God It’s hard, but sometimes we just have to have patience about understanding what we so desperately wish to, and trust that God will reveal to us what we need to know every step of the way. I know that sometimes there seems to be a frustratingly fine line between faith and inconsistency! I would recommend praying to God about it. Don’t worry about offending Him. He knows the struggles of your heart and has compassion for them. Hebrews 11:6 says, “And without faith, it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Even the tiniest bit of faith He accepts. How many times are we all like the father of the sick child in Mark 9, who told Jesus, “I do believe; help my unbelief.”? (see v.20-29)

In conclusion, I’ll leave you with a George McDonald quote that I have found comforting in confusing times.
“Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be understood…Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.”

 

[Milliardo]

Evolution involves a great deal of death, suffering, creatures killing each other, species going extinct, the strong killing the weak, etc. All of this contradicts the nature of the God of Catholicism, who is a God that chooses the weak to shame the strong, the innocent to shame the wise, who told Noah to bring each of the species to the ark, who makes sure that all of the animals receive their food, who watches and cares over his creation, etc. I think that evolution is the very opposite of this, so it seems like it is not a method God would use to create the diversity of life on earth.

Evolution has nothing to do with humility, or how God wants us humans to live according to His will; in simplest terms, evolution is the ordering of nature according to His design. It has little to do with His will on how man should live his life. The two are separate issues. Please do not confuse one for the other.

 

[Robin]

Adam and Eve were never animals. Animals haven’t souls. However, God could have watched the progression of a group of intellgent beings until he thought they had progressed in time enough to be
human. Just as He planned from the beginning. He then Chose 2 of these beings and “breathed” a human soul into them. ( I Don’t believe that he formed clay dolls and then brought them to life. ) These 2 beings - now with eternal souls (unlike animals whos souls are finite - were our first parents. Adam and Eve. Simple.I don’t see the problem.

Genesis is a simple story for simple people who had just barely discovered agriculture-When a great city was a few thousand people.

St. Augustine (around 4oo years after Christ lived), said "Leave science to scientists even if they are pagans. We Religous might end up looking like fools. " [paraphrased]

Catholics learned that lesson the hard way many years later. Capurnicus? Galilio? Creationists -who missed those times- will learn it too.

 

[Abbi]

trentonzero: read this: answersingenesis.org/docs/370.asp - this explains exactly what I was trying to say. I’m not saying that ALL open systems are not able to gain information - but in this instance, as raw energy from the sun etc does not do any good at all to help out evolution. Anyway, I said “does something holding a certain amount of information ever gain MORE information by itself?” - notice “by itself.” In each example you gave, you were using a human being as the instrument.

 

[outfctrl]

I found this to be interesting. I still struggle with Creationism and Evolution.

Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical—The following three quotations clarify Pope Pius XII’s 1950 statement which, for the first time, officially endorsed evolutionary thought and research by Catholics, on all levels (biological, geological, etc.), as long as it was assumed that God directly created mankind without any prior evolutionary development:

“For those reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter. Some, however, rashly transgress this liberty of discussion, when they act as if the origin of the human body from pre-existing and living matter were already completely certain and proved by the facts discovered up to now, and by reasoning on these facts, and as if there were nothing in the sources of divine revelation which demands the greatest moderation and caution in this question.”—Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, paragraph 36, August 1950.

“The teaching of the Church leaves the doctrine of evolution an open question.”—Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, 1950, quoted in Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations, p. 92.

“The evolution of man from lower forms, as Darwin and Wallace agreed, does not at all imply that man is a mere animal.”—New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 4 (1967 ed.), article: “Creation of Man,” p. 428.

Pope John Paul II’s 1996 encyclical—In late October, Pope John Paul II released an important statement through the Pontifical Academy in Rome, which was publicized around the world. This message by the Pope, issued on October 23, supported the usefulness and worth of “several theories of evolution” while criticizing attempts to apply evolution to the human spirit. Pope Pius XII’s similar statement (Humani Generis, referred to above) did not approve of evolution as broadly as did this new one by John Paul II. (Vatican observers recognize that all of John Paul’s official papers were written by Cardinal Ratzinger, the present Pope Benedict XVI; so the approval granted to most evolutionary processes would have been penned by him.)

LINK

 

[Greg27]

A proper answer to this question requires a very detailed knowledge of the scientific theories of evolution, as well as a fairly detailed knowledge of theology.

Evolution does have a massive amount of empirical evidence to support it. One of the major problems I had when I was a Protestant was many hated science and biology in particular because of the theory of evolution, and were converting rapidly to ‘scientific’ creationism. I have read several books by scientists who thoroughly refute creationism, so creationism is not a viable alternative to evolution.

On the other hand, the metaphysical naturalism which underpins the arguments of some evolutionists, particularly when they attack religious belief and the existence of God, means many people equate the theory of evolution with the grander metaphysical premises of metaphysical naturalism, which says basically in a Spinozan sense the cosmos is all there is. No doubt this is what makes many (especially when people like Dawkins get involved) think evolution is simply another form of atheism and the idea is to be rejected.

It is a similar problem to what faced Christian belief with the rise of science in the time of Galileo. Galileo showed the falsity of the Aristotlian-Scholastic synthesis, at least in its predictions in terms of astronomy. What had to replace it was a system of deterministic natural laws described perfectly by mathematics. Science has leaped forward in this approach to nature, verifying the old Pythagoran belief that numbers and mathematics somehow capture the true nature of reality.

In my view Christian theology has failed generally to give an appropriate intellectual response to the scientific revolution as a whole, and has also failed a lot in responding to the challenges of modernity and the industrial revolution, and the globalisation of the world. The onus lies then in my view on the theologians rather than the scientists, to give a convincing case for the Christian God and the Gospel in a world of conflicting ideas and beliefs. Catholic theologians must also respond in an appropriate way to this challenge.

 

[trentonzero]

trentonzero: read this: answersingenesis.org/docs/370.asp - this explains exactly what I was trying to say. I’m not saying that ALL open systems are not able to gain information - but in this instance, as raw energy from the sun etc does not do any good at all to help out evolution. Anyway, I said “does something holding a certain amount of information ever gain MORE information by itself?” - notice “by itself.” In each example you gave, you were using a human being as the instrument.

Okay, will read it…but before I do, I’m going to tell you : Do not read the AnswersInGenesis website. They lie. There is nothign else to say about the matter. They lie through their teeth. Whatever else you read, AnswersInGenesis lies.

When I was an atheist, I read AnswersInGenesis for laughs.

Now that I am Christian, I don’t read them at all. I want them to go away.

Now, on to what they say…

I’m not getting involved with the details of evolution and DNA. Some of it may have the basis of a real objection in it. I am not a biologist. I hated biology in school.

We’ll just stick to the part about entropy and open and closed systems.

There are special cases where local order can increase at the expense of greater disorder elsewhere. One case is crystallization, covered in Question 2 below. The other case is programmed machinery, that directs energy into maintaining and increasing complexity, at the expense of increased disorder elsewhere. Living things have such energy-converting machinery to make the complex structures of life.

So local order can increase. This much of what AiG is saying is fine.

The open systems argument does not help evolution. Raw energy cannot generate the specified complex information in living things. Undirected energy just speeds up destruction.

Bear in mind what was just said. Raw energy cannot generate complex information. (The bit about specification is misleading…think about flipping a coin…if you tell me: you only win with 6 heads in a row, if you gave me a very, very specified result in other words, and then you give me a few billion years of flipping over and over again to get that result…I’d bet my life savings that I could get it. And it would be a good bet.)

I’m about to show you that this statement is false. I’m not concerned to do anything more. I don’t know biology, even on a well educated laymen level.

I’m just going to show you that AiG says something is impossible that is not impossible. That is in fact an every day occurance.

Let’s take a rain cloud. The raincloud is disordered, its a bunch of water molecules suspended in air in a more or less localized place, but very diffusely.

There is a change in air pressure, the molecules collect until they are too heavy and fall to the ground. On the ground, they flow downhill until they collect at the lowest point. There is no intelligence standing around saying “Go downhill.” It’s just written in the rules of things.

In the end, the water molecules are collected again in one, very compact location (a lake). They are more ordered and more densely packed into one location.

The water molecules, without resorting to intelligence, went from a relatively disordered state (a cloud) to a relatively ordered state (a lake). They needed nothing to achieve it except for the very unintelligently directed force of gravity.

Now, if it is possible, and normal, for undirected energy to result in localized decreases in entropy…then it is not impossible for this to happen in evolution. If it can happen to a rain cloud, it can happen in a living cell. It might NOT actually happen in the cell, but you cannot point to the 2nd Law to claim that there is your proof that it doesn’t. You have to get into the nitty gritty biological issues (the stuff I don’t know).

 

[trentonzero]

Incidently, you make a point of saying that you said “by itself”.

You can’t say “by itself” about an open system. An open system is not by itself, by definition.

Even AiG gets taht right:

An isolated system exchanges neither matter nor energy with its surroundings. The total entropy of an isolated system never decreases. The universe is an isolated system, so is running down— see If God created the universe, then who Created God? for what this implies.

A closed system exchanges energy but not matter with its surroundings. In this case, the 2nd Law is stated such that the total entropy of the system and surroundings never decreases.

**An open system exchanges both matter and energy with its surroundings. **

A system that is “by itself” is called an isolated system.

 

[VociMike]

Yes, evolution depends on survival and reproduction, but I don’t think it’s nearly as “bloody” as you think. It might just involve a particular adaptation giving an organism a 5% better chance at survival and reproduction, which multiplied through many generations causes it to spread throughout the population.

But in more general terms, the fact is that the natural world is a very bloody one, whether or not evolution is true. Believing in a literal Genesis doesn’t change that fact one bit.

I sit at my window every day and watch birds and lizards eat insects. I see snakes and hawks (sometimes the hawks gather in a group of 100 or more), and they are only alive because they have been eating lots and lots of other creatures. It’s probably the fate of 99% of all animals to die by getting eaten. Evolution or no evolution, we live in a fallen world, and the constant violent death of beautiful and amazing creatures of God is one of the results of that fall. So why all the death and destruction? Because we asked for it. We demanded to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So now God allows his creation to be destroyed and corrupted to answer our demand. But also remember that Christ will make all things new. All of creation has be redeemed, not just humanity.