The earth is only 6000 years old (II)

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edwest2 said:
Hi Hugh,

I used to enjoy science until it became politicized. That’s why Tim Matthews decided to grill a Republican politician about evolution.

You must admit, evolution has the most flexible explanatory filter in the universe. As a writer, it could be useful but as the explanations become less plausible, I can’t find a use for it.

God bless,
Ed
Choose Jesus.
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But it doesn’t bother you that YEC explains nothing and makes no contribution to our understanding of God’s creation.
 
grannymh said:
I have lost track of the “misinformation” I originally referred to. Here is a current example. I consider it misinformation to say or imply that the writings of the subcommission presented in post 641 is the same as a valid quote from a pope.

Actually, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was not directly quoted in the science excerpts presented in post 641. There are no citations indicating this.

As the President of the International Theological Commission, the then Cardinal Ratzinger give his permission for the publication of the document COMMUNION AND STEWARDSHIP: Human Persons Created in the Image of God.
In Catholic circles permission for publication is not necessarily the same as personal “formal approval” of all the “scientific” speculations contained in the document.

Blessings,
granny

Spring is God’s message of faith in the future.
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Your attempts to downplay the significance of “Communion and Stewardship” are because you do not agree with it, but you have you shown that you even correctly understand everything it says.

Furthermore, your comments about Ratzinger, and the pope, are totally off the mark. Pope Benedict XVI supports a version of theistic evolution. I have quoted statements of his from "Creation and Evolution’ to that effect. Hence, the Pope’s views are consistent with “Communion and Stewardship”, a fact that makes your argument moot.

Get the facts first…you can distort them later. 😛
 
itinerant1 said:
Your attempts to downplay the significance of “Communion and Stewardship” are because you do not agree with it, but you have you shown that you even correctly understand everything it says.

Furthermore, your comments about Ratzinger, and the pope, are totally off the mark. Pope Benedict XVI supports a version of theistic evolution. I have quoted statements of his from "Creation and Evolution’ to that effect. Hence, the Pope’s views are consistent with “Communion and Stewardship”, a fact that makes your argument moot.

Get the facts first…you can distort them later. 😛
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Correction:

Granny,

Your attempts to downplay the significance of “Communion and Stewardship” are because you do not agree with it, but you have not shown that you even correctly understand everything it says.

Furthermore, your comments about Ratzinger, and the pope issue, are totally off the mark. Pope Benedict XVI supports a version of theistic evolution. I have quoted statements of his from "Creation and Evolution’ to that effect. Hence, the Pope’s views are consistent with “Communion and Stewardship”, a fact that makes your argument moot.

Get the facts first…you can distort them later. 😛
 
edwest2 said:
“the fact”? Of a provisional science? A limited science? There is also the fact that Eve was formed by God from Adam’s side. This fact cannot be overlooked by Catholics. The Fall as taught by the Church describes an actual event in time.

There are no peer reviewed, scientific papers analyzing Genesis, so where do these facts come from and do they actually apply to the work of God? It seems that man wants some sort of answer to God’s work that suits his present understanding. But is such an answer possible? And on what basis? There are no textbooks titled: Scientific Interpretation of the Book of Genesis. So where do these conclusions come from? How are they generated?

It appears that what is always ignored is the work of God as performed by Jesus Christ. A modern scientist standing next to Him would have nothing to report back to his colleagues in the future. Jesus used no technology and no science to perform His work. Telling a man to stretch forth his withered arm and it instantly becomes whole. This is what God can do. Calming the sea and the storm – again, no instrumentation was used.

Or, there is the tendency for humans to isolate parts of the Bible into, yes, we will allow God to do this, and no, we will not allow God to do that. We have a better explanation, an explanation that suits us. The explanation that is often overlooked is that God can create everything from nothing. He can also be crucified and rise bodily on the third day. Of course, this is allowed by those seeking a ‘natural’ explanation for Genesis.

God bless,
Ed
Choose Jesus.
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I have made no statement that is inconsistent with or contradicts Church doctrine.
You will be at a loss to prove otherwise. I can’t help you with anything you willfully refuse to understand.

Your rambling and not to the point remarks are a best a strawman fallacy.

My advice to you also is, get the facts first…you can distort them later.
 
grannymh said:
Fact?

Don’t you mean "some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution. " Please see post 641

Apparently, some theory will account for the diversification of life instead of identical cloning of that first organism mentioned in post 641.

Apparently, what the members of the subcommission preparing the study did (see link in post 641 for names and the procedure) was to review current scientific research in order to come up with a timely summary. This is acceptable. This is why paragraph 63 begins with “According to the widely accepted scientific account…”
The difficulty with the summary format is that it is wide open for all kinds of interpretations especially when there are no cited references.

The beginning of Paragraph 69 is “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.”
In my humble opinion, the real misunderstanding is that of the nature of science and the different ways it deals with rational and non-rational living organisms. One cannot apply the assumptions regarding non-rational beings to rational human beings.

One does need to check the rest of the paper if one is interested in learning about human nature. Here is an interesting out-of-context quote: “But more significant among the factors undermining the theology of the imago Dei was the conception of man as a self-constituting autonomous subject, apart from any relationship to God.”
This sentence serves as a reminder that when one is reading summaries of scientific opinions, one must take into account that science, by definition, is limited to the material/physical realm.

Easter Blessings,
granny

The quest for knowledge is worthy of the adventures of the journey.
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Just what point you are trying to make is not easily discernible. It sounds like you have your own argument going with yourself and are trying to relate it to something I have said, even though I am making a very different point than what you appear to be arguing against, however vaguely you state matters…
 
“Science is provisional” serves as a rallying cry for creationists who never stop to think that their own blind biblical literalism is itself a provisional hermeneutics, but one which has proven to be as unreliable as it is inconsistent. Such a hermeneutics is merely démodé or quaint at best, if not blasphemous by its separation of the God of Creation from the God who ordered everything by “measure, weight, and number.”

Keeping alive a dead hermeneutics is comparable to maintaining that the Earth is a flat disc floating on water, and covered by a hardened bowl (rakia) above, known as the firmament.
 
edwest2 said:
Hi Hugh,

I used to enjoy science until it became politicized. That’s why Tim Matthews decided to grill a Republican politician about evolution.

You must admit, evolution has the most flexible explanatory filter in the universe. As a writer, it could be useful but as the explanations become less plausible, I can’t find a use for it.

God bless,
Ed
Choose Jesus.
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Science does get abused and misused, and you call it being “politicized”, while not seeing in the mirror a “creation science” that is just as much a politicized science (though I do not consider it science at all), and a politicized biblical literalism that goes along with.

Is this not an instance of the pot calling the kettle black?
 
grannymh said:
I have lost track of the “misinformation” I originally referred to. Here is a current example. I consider it misinformation to say or imply that the writings of the subcommission presented in post 641 is the same as a valid quote from a pope.

Actually, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was not directly quoted in the science excerpts presented in post 641. There are no citations indicating this.
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Catholic Online quotes this as the text of a speach that Ratzinger gave, and was later included in a book:

Here are all the relevant passages (not sure that people here will open and read the link):
…Thus the Christian idea of God is necessarily regarded as unscientific. There is no longer any “theologia physica” that corresponds to it: in this view, the doctrine of evolution is the only “theologia naturalis,” and that knows of no God, either a creator in the Christian (or Jewish or Islamic) sense or a world-soul or moving spirit in the Stoic sense. One could, at any rate, regard this whole world as mere appearance and nothingness as the true reality and, thus, justify some forms of mystical religion, which are at least not in direct competition with enlightenment.
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Has the last word been spoken? Have Christianity and reason permanently parted company? There is at any rate no getting around the dispute about the extent of the claims of the doctrine of evolution as a fundamental philosophy and about the exclusive validity of the positive method as the sole indicator of systematic knowledge and of rationality. This dispute has therefore to be approached objectively and with a willingness to listen, by both sides – something that has hitherto been undertaken only to a limited extent. No one will be able to cast serious doubt upon the scientific evidence for micro-evolutionary processes. R. Junker and S. Scherer, in their “critical reader” on evolution, have this to say: “Many examples of such developmental steps [microevolutionary processes] are known to us from natural processes of variation and development. The research done on them by evolutionary biologists produced significant knowledge of the adaptive capacity of living systems, which seems marvelous.”
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They tell us, accordingly, that one would therefore be quite justified in describing the research of early development as the reigning monarch among biological disciplines. It is not toward that point, therefore, that a believer will direct the questions he puts to modern rationality but rather toward the development of evolutionary theory into a generalized “philosophia universalis,” which claims to constitute a universal explanation of reality and is unwilling to allow the continuing existence of any other level of thinking. Within the teaching about evolution itself, the problem emerges at the point of transition from micro to macro-evolution, on which point Szathmary and Maynard Smith, both convinced supporters of an all-embracing theory of evolution, nonetheless declare that: “There is no theoretical basis for believing that evolutionary lines become more complex with time; and there is also no empirical evidence that this happens.”
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The question that has now to be put certainly delves deeper: it is whether the theory of evolution can be presented as a universal theory concerning all reality, beyond which further questions about the origin and the nature of things are no longer admissible and indeed no longer necessary, or whether such ultimate questions do not after all go beyond the realm of what can be entirely the object of research and knowledge by natural science. I should like to put the question in still more concrete form. Has everything been said with the kind of answer that we find thus formulated by Popper: “Life as we know it consists of physical ‘bodies’ (more precisely, structures) which are problem solving. This the various species have ‘learned’ by natural selection, that is to say by the method of reproduction plus variation, which itself has been learned by the same method. This regress is not necessarily infinite.” I do not think so. In the end this concerns a choice that can no longer be made on purely scientific grounds or basically on philosophical grounds.
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The question is whether reason, or rationality, stands at the beginning of all things and is grounded in the basis of all things or not. The question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and necessity (or, as Popper says, in agreement with Butler, on the basis of luck and cunning) and, thus, from what is irrational; that is, whether reason, being a chance by-product of irrationality and floating in an ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless; or whether the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and of its philosophy remains true: “In principio erat Verbum” – at the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason. Now as then, Christian faith represents the choice in favor of the priority of reason and of rationality. This ultimate question, as we have already said, can no longer be decided by arguments from natural science, and even philosophical thought reaches its limits here. In that sense, there is no ultimate demonstration that the basic choice involved in Christianity is correct. Yet, can reason really renounce its claim to the priority of what is rational over the irrational, the claim that the Logos is at the ultimate origin of things, without abolishing itself?
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from here: catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=2509&page=2
 
larkin31 said:
Catholic Online quotes this as the text of a speach that Ratzinger gave, and was later included in a book:

Here are all the relevant passages (not sure that people here will open and read the link):

from here: catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=2509&page=2
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The text concerns a materialist version of evolution, a theory in which materialist ideology has been grafted on to evolution science. However, there is not one theory of evolution, so the critique of philosophical materialism has no relevance to what is being discussed here recently, though I have criticized materialist evolution many times in previous posts.

Furthermore, it is a decades-old creationist trick, when discussing science or theistic evolution, to change the subject to materialist evolution. This is just one example of creationists being unable to maintain logical discussion.
 
StAnastasia said:
I suppose for a TEC education equals brainwashing. No wonder YECs make no significant contributions to society, or learning, or the Church.
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Uhm! why is it that evos almost always lose debates with so-called Creationists to a point that evos have now quit debating?? So who is making the real contributions?😃
 
itinerant1 said:
“Science is provisional” serves as a rallying cry…snip
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There is a point you may be missing with regard to use of this phrase. Frankly, I don’t know if YEC’s use “Science is provisional” as a rallying cry. I’ve seen it often used in defense where evidence is presented which is contrary to the current scientific explanation. “We change the theory all the time because Science is provisional.” or something similar.

I’ve also seen that phrase used to point out to those who have Absolute Faith in Scientific Truth that if it were really Truth, it wouldn’t be provisional. I’ve used the phrase myself in that regard. And despite the picture you try to paint, not everybody who disagrees with you is a YEC.
 
Philipp said:
Uhm! why is it that evos almost always lose debates with so-called Creationists to a point that evos have now quit debating?? So who is making the real contributions?😃
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Interesting fantasy.
 
Philipp said:
Uhm! why is it that evos almost always lose debates with so-called Creationists to a point that evos have now quit debating?? So who is making the real contributions?😃
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Evos don’t lose debates to creos. My colleagues refuse to debate creos for the same reason we refuse to debate white supremacists, Nazis, or Holocaust deniers. All these groups have nothing worthwhile to add to the discussion, so debating them would only give them a credibility they don’t deserve.

You would have to argue fairly strenuously to justify your claim that the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, or the Institute for Creation Research have added a single ounce to humanity’s store of knowledge.

StAnastasia
 
itinerant1 said:
Correction:

Granny,

Get the facts first…you can distort them later. 😛
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Guess what, young man…I’m still standing. 😃 Ready to deal with all the facts you can give me. How about some neo-Thomistic comments on our earth age and workings of nature?
 
ricmat said:
And despite the picture you try to paint, not everybody who disagrees with you is a YEC.
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When I am addressing YEC I am addressing YEC’s and not everybody else who disagrees with me. Not sure how you can misinterpret that…
 
itinerant1 said:
Just what point you are trying to make is not easily discernible. It sounds like you have your own argument going with yourself and are trying to relate it to something I have said, even though I am making a very different point than what you appear to be arguing against, however vaguely you state matters…
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Maybe the whole problem on this thread is that those promoting evolutionism from a common ancestor are extrapolating what happens by variation within species into what is called macro evolution. That’s what Darwin tried to claim happened with the beaks of finches or in modern times with black and white moths. What deception!

Now it has gotten so out of hand that they are proposing dinosaurs evolved into birds.
What’s next in their little stacked deck of cards? Hey it’s all in the genes of the creted kinds. I think that Buffalo will bring that out iln his book Divolution;)
 
I think the Church has a different view from those presented in the Biology textbook.

Chance or Purpose, page 63.

“This passage is talking about the famous ‘missing links.’ The intermediate forms that are missing. If it is true that everything developed from one first seed, then there ought to be innumerable transitional stages, but noone [sic] has yet discovered any of them.”

God bless,
Ed
Choose Jesus.
 
Philipp said:
Maybe the whole problem on this thread is that those promoting evolutionism from a common ancestor are extrapolating what happens by variation within species into what is called macro evolution. That’s what Darwin tried to claim happened with the beaks of finches or in modern times with black and white moths. What deception!

Now it has gotten so out of hand that they are proposing dinosaurs evolved into birds.
What’s next in their little stacked deck of cards? Hey it’s all in the genes of the creted kinds. I think that Buffalo will bring that out iln his book Divolution;)
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Remind people not to consult you in matters having anything to do with science.
 
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