My apology. My tone is not dismissive. It is realistic. However, you may consider me dismissive because I can go no further than my previous explanations.
“Realistic” about what? My point is that I quoted the present pope and the prior pope, not just lower-level Catholic theologians, and your reply is that those are just individual matters of opinion among Catholics. It’s not often that Catholics speak of the writings of a pope in such a way–thus my surprise.My apology. My tone is not dismissive. It is realistic. However, you may consider me dismissive because I can go no further than my previous explanations.
Again, my apology. But calling the last two Popes leaders of the infallible RCC doctrine is too funny to deal with seriously…
ed?
Pardon me. You forgot to put the word scientific in front of the word opinion. “Among Catholics” should really be among scientists or interested persons of any or no religion.
Whenever I see science using religious authority to justify what is separate from religion, an alarm goes off. If this were only about science then there would be no need for an endless series of threads like this one. Catholic doctrine is very selective about scientific information. We have a Deposit of Faith that contradicts science at certain points. It is very rare to see any commentary here about the fixed points Pope John Paul II referred to.
finally…
It is very sad that you choose to continue in this vein by assigning to me something I did not say. You purposely miss the point that Catholics are allowed to believe in thousands instead of billions of years.
This following is the reference for the C-14 dating of two dinosaur femur bones. In both instances collagen and and calcium carbonate fraction of the bioapatite were purified and C-14 dated. I gave this reference before on this thread but am happy to do again.
Reference please and full quote.
Hindsight is always 20/20, isn’t it? Remember, Jesus is watching.
I’ll just quote the relevant passage from your link:
Honestly, this sounds like the CC is gently but firmly suggesting that Catholics not deny sound science if it does not controvert moral teachings. Which a 4.5 billion year old earth sure does not.
I’m not sure from a scientific point of view if 6000 years or many 1000’s of years. All that can be said right now is to show that those billions and billion and billions of years are fraught with a lot of assumptions which are now falling apart scientifically. In other words it appears that those long ages are on the order of 2000 to 1000,000 times TOO OLD.
My apologies for assuming too much. In a scientific discussion a request for a reference is a request for a reference to the original article which gives the detailed description of the dating of the particular fossil. A book is not a peer reviewed article. Can I ask you for the original article from which the book quote is taken. It will be listed in the bibliography of the book from which you took the quotation.
Scientific article reference please.
The Patterson quote is a notorious creationist quotemine, and I suspect that you do not have the original source in front of you. What “major” museum was Dr Patterson working in? Could it be that your copy of a copy of a copy of the quote left out that detail?
I suspect that itinerant1 meant this passage:Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, “although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” [1 Timothy 1.7]
What percent or degree of certainty would be enough for you if we could quantify it? For example, what percent or degree of certainty do you have that your feet will be pulled down each day by gravity when you get out of bed? (This can be for a matter of comparison)
You still haven’t shown any research or studies which dates the earth to 6,000 years old, 275 trillion years old, or any other age. All you’ve done is reject one estimate. You need to tell us exactly how you arrived at your estimate.
