Transitional Fossils and the Theory of Evolution in relation to Genesis Accounts

[Pattylt]

NSmith:

In short, DNA is a huge problem for evolution, not a proof. The unanswered question being: Where is the new information coming from?

Okay, I’ve seen a lot of people use this conjecture but I don’t get it. Can someone explain to me why this matters at all?

I agree. What is your definition of “new information”?

 

[NSmith]

As a former Protestant I am extremely wary of anyone who attempts to dispense with a word in Scripture by saying it is only a metaphor or allegorical. Nowhere in my RCIA was either term used except in reference to the parables, and there are no corresponding literary devices in Genesis to make them comparable to the parables.

CCC 113 Read the Scripture within “the living Tradition of the whole Church.” According to a saying of the Fathers, Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church’s heart rather than in documents and records, for the Church carries in her Tradition the living memorial of God’s Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives her the spiritual interpretation of the Scripture (". . . according to the spiritual meaning which the Spirit grants to the Church").

CCC 116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: “All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.”

The majority of Saints and the Doctors of the Church for all of history have held that the accounts in Genesis mean what they say, ad by that I mean that the history presented there is factual. Part of the Tradition of the church are those things which are not explicitly stated in dogma or doctrine but which nonetheless are a part of the Church’s treasures because they have always been believed by many true Christians since the beginning. Prior to the dogmatic declaration, the Assumption was one of these things. Christ and the Apostles taught from Genesis and gave no indication that it was allegory. Only recently have people begun to dismiss the accounts, and even then there are many bishops and several Popes that have cautioned against hasty conclusions.
We have already discussed that the days in Genesis, following the literal sense of the text, which is that there were successive orders, ages, or “times,” in which God acted to accomplish Creation, do not have to imply 24-hour periods of time as we understand time, particularly because time also is a creation, and did not exist prior to God’s word breathing the universe into existence. This is a sound interpretation of Scripture, and I can accept it.
There is an admitted shift in tone after Genesis 11, and the language of Genesis 1 and 2 is, as St. John Chrysostom explains, condescending to the weakness of the human mind, but these facts do not invalidate the literal sense of the historical account given in Genesis 1-11, particularly in those places where the text appears to be giving information that had been carefully and meticulously passed on through the oral tradition, as is the case with the genealogies. For what reason did the Holy Spirit preserve inerrant that information, if it was not to be understood as it was written?
Science, defined as the empirical investigation into God’s creation, and Scripture, which is Divine Revelation, are both revelations of Truth, and there is only one Truth which is Christ. Thus, science and Scripture, if understood properly, cannot conflict. 1/2

 

[NSmith]

If they do conflict, then we are mistaken about our understanding of one or of the other. Therefore, unless it can be shown from the literal sense of the text that the authors of Genesis did not intend to convey a successive series of inheritances with the genealogies, we cannot simply, by wishful thinking, dismiss what the text reveals.
This is why it presents a conflict with evolution, and it is why I suspect evolution, as it pertains to the creation of novel species, is mistaken. Or my reading of Genesis is mistaken. But neither is more authoritative than the other, both of them being understandings of Truth, so the mountain of fossil articles that I am reading at the moment cannot demonstrate to me that Genesis is false, only a sound interpretation of Scripture can do that. Similarly, Scripture cannot demonstrate evolution to be false, only sound science can do that. What I can say, at this time, is that I cannot accept either my reading of Genesis or the theory of evolution as true until the matter is resolved. 2/2

 

[whatistrue]

so the mountain of fossil articles that I am reading at the moment cannot demonstrate to me that Genesis is false,

I don’t think that anyone here is claiming that Genesis is false. Only that a totally literalistic, each word can have only one meaning, no poetic license or allegory allowed, uber fundamentalist reading is perhaps not the best way to approach it.

 

[Pattylt]

Part of the issue with the early church fathers throughout the Middle Ages is that there wasn’t anything like current science that challenged their reading. They accepted what the Bible wrote because there wasn’t any other information. When science began showing its evidence for a different interpretation, scholars had to rethink Genesis. They knew Genesis was true. They still know it’s true. But they had to rethink HOW it was true. Many early fathers felt the earth was much older than the genealogies gave but had no other basis to know just how old the earth was.

Because many fathers of the church never had to confront alternate evidence, they also didn’t have to deal with it either. That’s not the case now. I understand some religious people wanting to hold onto what the fathers believed but today you can not ignore what science shows. (Not you specifically). I realize it’s a conundrum. I can’t solve the problem for you. All I can ask is to think about what the original writers were saying and what their knowledge base was and, perhaps, leave room to understand the message without being so literalistic about the words used. No one can accept all the science and the literal words. So one of them has to bend. If you try to bend the science then you aren’t being anti science per say but you aren’t really dealing with what it does say, either. I think the Bible was meant to be bent. If it’s truly written for all generations then it has to be bent. That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. That doesn’t mean they were wrong. It means it was written to be for all ages including a scientific world where the meaning is more important than the method(s).

 

[NSmith]

Only that a totally literalistic, each word can have only one meaning, no poetic license or allegory allowed, uber fundamentalist reading is perhaps not the best way to approach it.

I didn’t say this, I only said that the Church teaches all other meanings are founded on the literal sense. We can’t just disregard what the text’s author means to say unless the text itself gives us reasons to do so, and in much of Genesis there’s no indication from the author that the narratives are allegorical. I’ve already demonstrated that I’ve grown in understanding of Genesis 1 and 2 because of Sts. Augustine and Chrysostom. I have yet to see any such sound interpretation of the genealogies.

I understand some religious people wanting to hold onto what the fathers believed but today you can not ignore what science shows.

I think that there are extremes being resorted to in both directions. It is not necessary to ignore science in order to posit that the data is incomplete and the conclusions drawn from it are not necessarily true. Many of the fossils I’ve investigated so far aren’t even complete specimens, and several could reasonably be considered members of an already extant species. And on the opposite token I don’t think it’s necessary to resort to allegory for the Genesis accounts, but we can say that there are possible places where the language used is not quite exact in the sense that historians might desire it to be. Some people aren’t comfortable living in a space where they admit they don’t have answers to a question. But this is a safer approach than setting the historical veracity of Genesis to the side.
I don’t think the historicity of Genesis on its own is an issue that results in a sin against Faith, no matter your opinion. But there are many central doctrines connected to Genesis, as I’ve pointed out before, and I am less concerned about offending science than offending God.

 

[Freddy]

Only that a totally literalistic, each word can have only one meaning, no poetic license or allegory allowed, uber fundamentalist reading is perhaps not the best way to approach it.

If the bible had been written a hundred years ago, do you think it would say that the earth is 6,000 years old?

If yes, then you’d need to explain why. Because the only reason people hold to a young earth is because of the bible.

If no, then I think you’d realise that it would be written in the light of current knowledge and we would interpret it in the same light. If a hundred year old bible suggested that everything was created in six days then nobody would take it literally.

 

[NSmith]

It isn’t true that the only reason people hold to young earth is because of the Bible. There are some scientific facts that seem to imply a young earth, they just aren’t as compelling as the evidence in favor of the old earth.
A good summary: https://www.letu.edu/academics/arts-and-sciences/files/age-of-earth.pdf
Also, I am not trying to determine the age of the earth but rather the length of human history, which are distinct issues.

 

[Freddy]

It isn’t true that the only reason people hold to young earth is because of the Bible. There are some scientific facts that seem to imply a young earth, they just aren’t as compelling as the evidence in favor of the old earth.
A good summary: https://www.letu.edu/academics/arts-and-sciences/files/age-of-earth.pdf
Also, I am not trying to determine the age of the earth but rather the length of human history, which are distinct issues.

The only reason people hold to a young earth is because of their Christian beliefs. The link you gave is specifically that: A Christian’s interpretation of the bible which he believes shows it to be 6,000 years old. And he looks for evidence to support that belief. But he starts with that belief because he reads the bible literally.

And I think that if you claim that the planet is 6,000 years old then it may narrow down the length of human history somewhat.

So the only reason to claim a 6,000 year old planet is the bible. But if it was written a hundred years ago, why would it claim that? It would be written in light of the current knowledge.

 

[NSmith]

In case you are insisting on a quick and easy answer, then I won’t beat around the bush
concerning my conclusions. As a Christian physicist, I’ve been blessed with the freedom and
opportunity to examine the scientific evidence for the age of the Earth in some detail, and have
concluded that it emphatically points to an age of around 4.6 billion years.

You didn’t read the article’s introduction, since he actually doesn’t believe that the earth is 6000 years old, but presents evidence to the contrary after summarizing the young earth position.

 

[Freddy]

You didn’t read the article’s introduction, since he actually doesn’t believe that the earth is 6000 years old, but presents evidence to the contrary after summarizing the young earth position.

No, he states that the reason people hold to a 6,000 year old earth is because of the bible. He directly contradicts what you implied - that there are other reasons for that belief. How he squares the literalist view with the science (which you are right in that he holds to the scientific evidence) I don’t know. I didn’t read that far.

So yet again, if the only reason to believe it to be 6,000 years old is scripture from thousands of years ago, an account written a hundred years ago would be written, as the original was, in the light of contemporary scientific understanding. Hence no young earth.

 

[NSmith]

You’re being intentionally obtuse. The reason that people want to believe it is because of Scripture, but there are other reasons, or the theory would be outright dismissed by anyone with two brain cells to rub together. The fact of the matter is that the modern understanding of the age of the Earth is not very straightforward, and is based on a variety of assumptions. The biggest assumption being that radiological decay is a constant. A second assumption being that the geological features of the Earth were formed through the processes that are most likely, such as glaciers, and that those processes progressed at the rate we expect them to, instead of being accelerated for one reason or another. These assumptions are necessary to the methods used for the scientific conjectures, and are probably reasonable things to assume, but they aren’t indisputable fact. And before you get annoyed that I’ve dispensed with the primary evidences for the old earth, which are radiological dating and geology, remember that people do the same thing with all of the facts put forward in support of the young earth as well, as evidenced by the article, which mentions short period comets, thickness of lunar dust, projected decay of Earth’s magnetic field, and so on.
To answer your point more directly, however, I don’t believe that the Biblical account would be substantially different in meaning if it were written by someone inspired by the same Holy Spirit in modern times. How could I? I know that what was revealed there is true, and it is equally true today as it was a hundred years ago, or two hundred years ago, or three hundred years ago, and so on.

 

[NSmith]

Did he say to reject evidence of the Earth’s age or of human history?

 

[NSmith]

I don’t know enough to say with certainty, but it seems like the kinds of evidence are different. In Augustine’s time, there were pagan traditions and poems attributing such timelines to historical peoples, but in our time there are observations of the rock beneath our feet that seem to support a very long time frame, following the assumptions I pointed out in my response to Freddy. The debate between catastrophism and uniformitarians already took place in geology, and the modern science falls on the side of the uniformitarians. But even the catasrophists of the 18th and 19th century had stretched earth’s age past 6000.
This is yet another indication, however, that the respected Doctors of the Church have not interpreted the Genesis genealogies to have gaps of any significant length. I wonder why Augustine would argue in favor of epochs instead of days only to turn around and say that only 6000 years have passed. It is certainly consistent with his penchant for millennial interpretation. I still think that I will consider human history to have probably started 6000 years ago, unless I receive a sound interpretation of Genesis that implies otherwise, and I think that the age of the Earth prior to that time is really known to God alone, and that it is likely both older and exactly as old as He revealed it to be, we only are too primitive to understand the primordial currents of time that existed before Man.
As for the evolution question, I am still doing research, but it does seem to resemble a whole lot of “reconstructions,” “inference,” and “incomplete records.” Even the strongest sources I have found concede that the fossil record is incomplete, and many specimens are in bad condition. The genetic innovation is also something that I only ever see asserted and never demonstrated in the literature.

 

[NSmith]

The issue with genetic information is summarized by the fish. They don’t have lungs. Their DNA doesn’t include information about lung tissue or any of the parts included in the function of a lung. In order for a fish to become a land-dwelling animal, it needs lungs.
If we believe that fish grew legs, they must have also grown lungs. But where did the information necessary for the body to produce and regulate lungs come from? For that matter, where did the information necessary for the production and regulation of legs come from?
Believing that this happened through congenital mutations is nonsense. I think of it like if every generation I hit a few random keys on a keyboard or delete a couple characters in a code editor that has Hello World! and expect the result after 10,000 generations to be a running version of Windows 10.

 

[NSmith]

They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed. And, not to spend many words in exposing the baselessness of these documents, in which so many thousands of years are accounted for, nor in proving that their authorities are totally inadequate, let me cite only that letter which Alexander the Great wrote to his mother Olympias, giving her the narrative he had from an Egyptian priest, which he had extracted from their sacred archives, and which gave an account of kingdoms mentioned also by the Greek historians. In this letter of Alexander’s a term of upwards of 5000 years is assigned to the kingdom of Assyria; while in the Greek history only 1300 years are reckoned from the reign of Bel himself, whom both Greek and Egyptian agree in counting the first king of Assyria. Then to the empire of the Persians and Macedonians this Egyptian assigned more than 8000 years, counting to the time of Alexander, to whom he was speaking; while among the Greeks, 485 years are assigned to the Macedonians down to the death of Alexander, and to the Persians 233 years, reckoning to the termination of his conquests. Thus these give a much smaller number of years than the Egyptians; and indeed, though multiplied three times, the Greek chronology would still be shorter. For the Egyptians are said to have formerly reckoned only four months to their year; so that one year, according to the fuller and truer computation now in use among them as well as among ourselves, would comprehend three of their old years. But not even thus, as I said, does the Greek history correspond with the Egyptian in its chronology. And therefore the former must receive the greater credit, because it does not exceed the true account of the duration of the world as it is given by our documents, which are truly sacred. Further, if this letter of Alexander, which has become so famous, differs widely in this matter of chronology from the probable credible account, how much less can we believe these documents which, though full of fabulous and fictitious antiquities, they would fain oppose to the authority of our well-known and divine books, which predicted that the whole world would believe them, and which the whole world accordingly has believed; which proved, too, that it had truly narrated past events by its prediction of future events, which have so exactly come to pass!

Yes, it seems as though he is arguing that humans have only existed for 6000 years due to the records we have in the sacred books, in contrast to the Greeks and other Asian people, that proposed humans to be eternal in the same way as the Earth.

 

[NSmith]

There is a lot of merit in this view from a theological perspective, but I fear scientist and much of the people that we hopefully seek to reach with the Gospel would consider this view rather obscurantist.
I did remark to a friend of mine that it seems strange for so many to take a stand on the age of the earth as the final straw when as Christians were are indisputably required to believe in the resurrection of the dead, the existence of demons, the existence of angels, the incarnation of God as a man in the first century, the immaculate conception, virgin birth, and other things that are much more difficult than the Flood and Creation. It seems to me, as you say, that God really couldn’t care less about what science has to say about what is possible or impossible.

 

[Dan_Defender]

Darwin died believing that the fossil record would prove his theory. If changes happen over millions of years, there should be lots of transitional forms everywhere. Instead, the record is very sparse, few transitionals have been found and it is debated whether or not they truly represent a transition (take the transitional fossils from dinosaurs to birds for instance). This is why currently the prevailing theory is that of change by mutations, where one species becomes another fast enough that it doesn’t leave a fossil record to look at.

 

[NSmith]

I am starting to think that the attempt to explain Creation through natural science is doomed to always be uncertain, because the processes at work on the first six days of creation are not the same as the seventh. It says in Genesis 2 that God rested from his work, and that all of creation was finished. No matter your view of the account, as being primarily allegorical or literal, the text clearly implies that God is not currently acting in the same way that he was acting on the first six days. Therefore, studying the world as it currently exists, which is the seventh day, tells us nothing about what God was doing before, in creation.
This is why, as I am reading, the Church Fathers, Doctors, and Council Fathers seem to overwhelmingly treat Creation as a matter of theology and not of science. Science by nature can only be concerned with things that currently exist and which can be somehow observed, either directly or by effect.
So, I think that it is possible to admit that what we observe in our time implies an age of some billions of years but at the same time affirm that God revealed it to be some thousands of years since the start of the “seventh day.”

 

[Hume]

This thread is based on a discussion in the following thread: Dinosaurs and the Flood - #701

In order to ascertain if the fossil record supports the neo-Darwinian theory of speciation as a result of mutation and natural selection I am looking for the strongest possible case in the affirmative.

I would like the most important examples of transitional fossils, a brief explanation about why they are significant to the field, and if possible a link to a relevant article. If you don’t have a link just the name of the fossil will do; I am searching myself as well. Thanks in advance!

The reason this is relevant to Sacred Scripture is that I wish to know if it is necessary for me to attempt to interpret the accounts in Genesis 1-11 to account for billions of years or not.

Timeline of human evolution - Wikipedia

Not a bad place to start if you want to go waaaay back in a general way.

Here is the tree since a few million years ago;

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)