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StAnastasia
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I’m not talking about Dawkins or Coyne or the “new atheists.”
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inocente
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In the sense it uses a few of the same words and doesn’t mention Adam or Eve.
Zwanaa and Tenneh surely. More African.
I’ve not noticed any hesitancy. Here’s an experiment for you. See how many lost souls, aka atheists, you can get into your church by telling them all this great stuff about creationism, evolution, Zwanaa and Tenneh, adam-and-eve. Then take another group and tell them about Christ, being careful to never once mention adam-and-eve. Probably need to do a follow up after twelve months to make it a bit more scientific. Let the results speak for themselves about which defends Catholic doctrine.
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StAnastasia
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Tonrey, that is an interesting question. My children’s growth in moral awareness was a gradual process that took place over a period of years. I cannot p(name removed by moderator)oint a single moment where they suddenly “grasped the distinction between good and evil for the first time.” Similarly, I suspect that humans entered into moral awareness over a long period of time, perhaps after anatomical modernity was reached 200,000 years ago. But then again, animals have their own morality – check out Dale Peterson’s The Moral Lives of Animals. (2011).
I think so – my children certainly exhibited intermediate stages in their own moral and psychosocial development over four or five years.
Scientific discovery is all over the map on this one. Thomas Kuhn would argue that a revolution in science is not something that happens overnight; rather, a long and gradual accumulation of instances counter to the dominant model builds up, and then someone (or some group) insightfully puts them together and reverses or modifies the paradigm (e.g., Galileo, Boyle, Newton, Darwin, Wegener).
Why would you think any such moments are illusions?
No more than creation itself. In creation, God used the powers of the cosmos to bring forth a universe, expressed in Genesis 1 as “Let there be light.” Although cosmology cannot detect the “hand” of God behind the Big Bang, the Big Bang is entirely comaptible with the mysterious workings of God. The same applies to the emergence of the human soul, called forth by God from the very biology God created!
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guanophore
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This position is inconsistent with the teaching of the Church, and therefore, false. Since all creation sings forth the praise of God, the study of it naturally reveals what He intended to express of Himself through it.
Science, properly pursued, is faith seeking understanding. Therefore, there are a great many important things that can be learned in the pursuit of science. For example, science has confirmed what the Church has always taught, that human life begins when the sperm penetrates the egg.
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StAnastasia
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Quite true - I agree with this!
Quite true.
Completely false. Don’t put words in my mouth!
A completely false and uncharitable assertion.
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StAnastasia
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Who has argued for the “simultaneous grasping of the distinction between good and evil”?
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StAnastasia
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Science does tell us about some of these things. Check out David Rothenberg’s Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution (2011). Likewise, there is a lot of interesting scientific work on love, and on concepts such as truth, goodness, freedom, justice, and equality. I have a doctoral student who has chosen to work on the scientific study of the foundations of morality.
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inocente
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Original sin has never been mentioned in churches I’ve attended, and I’ve sat through a lot of sermons, some less interminable than others. Jewish friends have told me the concept is alien to them (they say we are born with original purity), and for example wikipedia has “The doctrine is not found in Judaism and its scriptural foundation is in the New Testament teaching of Paul the Apostle. (Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:22). It began to be developed by the 2nd-century Bishop of Lyon Irenaeus in his controversy with the dualist Gnostics.”
However, I will not argue with a Forum Master. :curtsey:
Thanks for the agreement, and perhaps I am given to overstating the case. Here in Spain, and other countries too, people are deserting the Church, and in the absence of any other established faith that means they’re deserting Christianity, one reason being its perceived irrelevance. On a thread which could discuss the relationship of science to the teaching of Christ, and a thousand other things, it seems Christians can’t extract themselves from the first few pages of the bible. Irrelevance is as irrelevance does?
PS: Since I started writing this, I notice some recent postings not about adam-and-eve, who says prayer doesn’t work?
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StAnastasia
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Quite true.
True, although this “moment” of reception of the sperm by the egg can take up to 36 hours. The egg creates structures to grasp the chosen sperm, and that is not instantaneous.
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tonyrey
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tonyrey
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guanophore
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Again this But that is less interesting to me than the shift in your worldview (whether goes back to how “soul” is defined. Clearly evolutionary theory can explain a gradual development of mental, social, and other functions that are also shared with animals. The primates share 96% of our DNA, and many aspects of “soul” such as emotion and language with homo sapiens. I think the critical aspect is the point at which “God breathed into man the breath of life”.
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grannymh
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This is an example of how some, not all, “modern” theologians have lost the basic concept of Catholicism in regard to its Deposit of Faith and in regard to the role of theologians.
The first sentence “Saint Thomas Aquinas would be the first to acknowledge that our interpretation of theology changes as our scientific world view changes.” cleverly omits, or perhaps denies, the fact that “interpretation of theology” is not the same as Catholic doctrine duly defined and proclaimed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
While theology is a dialogue between humans, it does not, in itself, have the power to change Divine Revelation.
In other words, theological dialogue with whomever and whenever is separate from a stated, universally taught Catholic doctrine. This is why theologians can disagree among themselves. It is also why that when a thinking person is interested in Catholic doctrine, she or he, goes to the officially established truth contained in Catholic doctrine. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition is the catechesis.
The sentence “His [Aquinas] articulation of theology – constructed in light of the Aristotelian philosophical corpus (recently rediscovered in the twelfth century --” is only half the story conveniently used to mislead ordinary folk. What is ignored is the philosophical process or reasoning process which Aquinas used in determining what was valid in terms of Divine Revelation. This was a painstaking process and not simply constructing or copying a “proposition” in the light of Aristelian thought. “Writings on the ‘Sentences’ of Peter Lombard 2.1.1.” can serve as an example.
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tonyrey
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- On this planet only human beings can grasp the distinction between good and evil.
- If many human beings originated simultaneously they all grasped the distinction between good and evil simultaneously - unless some were more human than others!
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If good and evil are like ragtime music and hand guns, human concepts, then only humans would grasp them. You’d have to show that good and evil have an independent, objective existence.
It might be hard for you to demonstrate that all cultures from earliest times held with the distinction. Perhaps it originated from one later dominant culture. It could be just an artifact that grew like topsy.
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grannymh
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A more complete teaching of the ways of coming to know God is found in the Catechsim of the Catholic Church, Second Edition. Start reading at “paragraph 26” putting it in the search bar in this link scborromeo.org/ccc.htm
Take your time. Enjoy!
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Elizabeth502
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Why are you arguing with me in this post? I’m not the one who has a shift in my worldview. You seem to be confused about just whom you are quoting. Perhaps you don’t understand my previous posts? Or got confused about whom you were addressing?
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StAnastasia
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Tonrey, what is your evidence to support this claim?
Humans evolved as a group from their hominid ancestry. I’m not sure what you mean by “grasped the distinction simultaneously” – do you mean in a matter of seconds, or hours, or days? Or could this have come about more slowly, over hundreds or thousands of years?
There is a lot of interesting work being done today on the evolution of morality, including the question of whether altruism would have had survival value. It is possible that groups of tribes of humans developed at different rates, and that ones that evolved morality at an earlier date survived better. Here’s an interesting book: Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology, 2007)
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buffalo
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Hey StA - I have an idea… Send one of your doctoral candidates over to IDvolution.org. See what they make of it. Maybe we all can learn something.
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StAnastasia
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Tonrey, what is your justification for this blanket claim? Non-human Animals perceive beauty; animals revel in freedom; animals can exhibit a sense of fairness. These are legitimate areas of scientific inquiry.
And yet the very act of engaging in scientific inquiry presupposes an implicit faith in the intelligibility of the world!
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