When Science contradicts Religion

[Robyn_p]

Oh I don’t think protestants like the Anglicans will have any difficulty reconciling things like this with their teachings, after all they’ve never claimed inerrancy and have modified several of their practices when new developments in social justice, theology or the sciences have come to light. The Catholic church however will find some unease explaining this in relation to the Dogma of Papal Infalliability however.

Was it Pius XII who wrote regarding evolution? How it is acceptable to hold to “Theistic Evolution” so long as belief remained that Adam and Eve was the common source of all humanity (I honestly do not recall, but one of them did). To deny the literal parenthood of Adam and Eve of all humanity was clearly labelled a heretical proposition.

I don’t think most non-literalist Christians, or most Cafateria Catholics for that matter will care. It does pose a problem for those who say the Church cannot err in matters of faith, because in this case it clearly has.

I addressed this in my first post, post #19. I’d appreciate if you responded to it. The writers I linked to I think present a good argument on how the two are compatible.

Also, Pius XII never made it heretical, he specifically avoids using that language, as I explain in my post. So papal infallibility is not an issue here either.

 

[grannymh]

If Adam and Eve were the first humans with a rational soul, that means they spawned admist a larger selection of proto-humanoids without a Human Soul.

To achive this wider genetic diversity, this means Adam and Eve had to have interbred with these other creatures. Isn’t breeding with a non human bestiality? Why is Gods creation plan reliant upon both adultery and zoophilia, two mortal sins?

It’s here that the single pair source theory falls to pieces again.

I agree that it would have been sinful. (Though it wouldn’t have been bestiality, more like a drunken one-night stand, since these pre-human creatures were human in every respect except for the presence of an immortal, rational soul.)

But I don’t think we can say from the fact that Adam and Eve and their descendants sinned after the Fall that this was part of God’s original design for the human race.

Robyn P

You are correct. According to a well-known Catholic philosopher writing in a major Catholic publication, Homiletic & Pastoral Review, the current assumption of wide spread bestiality was not part of God’s original design for the human race. Based on correct permanent Catholic teaching, this link on the Genesis Story answers crucial questions.

hprweb.com/2014/07/time-to-abandon-the-genesis-story/

 

[ynotzap]

Because science as we know it won’t acknowledge the spiritual, it can’t experiment with it, feel it, control it, to a materialistic scientist it doesn’t exist. If I speak of :exorcizing a devil, in a simple exorcisim with witnesses from different walks of life, and education, my testimony is not received by many. It’s hysteria, illusion, imagination etc. I see so much ignorance in the world in many professions. Who believes that wars are caused by evil influence on humanity? Who would accept these statements about abortion:

Quote: According to the bible life begins at birth when a baby takes it’s first breadth, life is defined as breadth.
President Clinton was advised by his spiritual counselor the Rev. W.O.Vought that life is connected to the moment when one is born and takes it’s first breadth (Time 5/93 issue.)

Neither statement attributes life to that special immanent activity (coming from with-in) that manifests it’s real presence by the physical effects it is causing, for eg. the growth and development of the conceptus (fertilized ovum) Why is life being confused with one of it’s functions, breadthing? Why is the cause being confused with it’s effects? Humans beget humans is a self-evident truth and shouldn’t have to be rationalized. It should go without saying that a human is not all that he can be at one time, he is a creature of time and change because he has a becoming nature, he is not the “I Am”. Life perfects man’s existence by fulfilling his potential, life does not change his nature at any time. Any change is one of degree (maturity) it is not one of kind (nature) the principle of life activates the programing found in the DNA, the molecule of life that will determine all the physical properties of man. Self-evidence is not self-evident to some, common sense is not so common, and the Supreme court is not so supreme, and neither are scientists, science in itself is a beautiful thing, but not as presented by some. Some in their pride say that what science doesn’t currently know, we believers fill in with “The God of the Gaps” The pride and arrogance of those in society we call elite and those that swear by them. They are legions.

 

[ynotzap]

Hey, the guy asked for an example and he gave him one.

I wasn’t going to admit to this because I’d hate to have it tinge any future discussions I have on here…I’m a practicing psychiatrist, and I have been called in on patients who’s relatives claim have been suffering from demonic possession. I can tell you something, not one of them was, and the attempts at “exorcism” nine times out of ten made the problem worse by stressing the subject of it.

Epilepsy, Panic attacks and Schizophrenia are the most usual causes. There is a reason why the Vatican ordains very few exorcists these days and the few that remain operate almost exclusively in Africa; most westerners are educated enough to know it doesn’t happen.

I have in the presence of college students, priests, nuns, teacher of theology, and lay people performed a simple exorcism, which produced a real change in the attitudes present at the begining of the prayer meeting. They recognized what happened. They for the most part were well educated people, it was a college. I have done several of these simple exorcisms. There were some people present that didn’t understand, such as I find here in this forum, usually non-believers for one reason or another, especially if they don’t want to hear it, or admit they might be wrong in their own opinions. I have even gone public with dramatic results. There is much paranormal activity going on in our society. Some call it trickery. As I see it, yes, but I would call it " successful deception" on those that call it trickery, hysteria, imagination, ilusional, schizophrenia or just plain ignorance.

 

[buffalo]

I imagine the family of Anneliese Michel care. Rational people care. If exorcisms were demonstrated to be an effective treatment for otherwise intractable symptoms, the entire medical community would be perfectly willing to join the Catholic Church in the fight against demonic affliction/possession/allergies. Imagine if hospitals knew when to summon a priest for an exorcism; currently people who need an exorcism may go without thanks to ignorance on the part of medical professionals. On the other hand, imagine if the symptoms that the church identifies as possession were actually caused by a new disease unknown to science! Scientists could develop less dangerous treatments and lives could be saved. Evidently, though, the Church prefers to deliberately do things in an inefficient manner. They think its not worth risking a forced position change on exorcisms for the sake of preventing repeats of tragedies like the case of Anneliese Michel.

Peer review and data doesn’t make fraud impossible, a lack of peer review and data makes fraud trivial.

People argue over whether or not the Catholic Church is anti-science by arguing about whether or not the church has censored science in the past. I don’t think that is the right argument to have. I think that the church is anti-science in a more subtle way: it simply never crosses the church’s mind to do science. Exorcisms are a good example of this, people have been doing exorcisms longer than people have been doing science, but no one in the Catholic Church has yet bothered to do science to exorcisms. This is true of a great many other issues that the Catholic Church claims to care deeply about. For example, the Church claims to care a great deal about abortion, but nearly all the scholarly analysis of abortion statistics is funded by and comes from secular organizations. How can the Church say things like “Abortion is the greatest evil of our age” then turn around and not even bother to see how science can help them understand and solve the problem?

For 800 years the Church has been supporting science. Science cannot address the supernatural, the Church can.

you - How can the Church say things like “Abortion is the greatest evil of our age” then turn around and not even bother to see how science can help them understand and solve the problem?

??? How?

 

[buffalo]

You’re assuming that the Biblical account is meant to tell us how the world came to be. If God inspired the writer of Genesis for that purpose then yeah, that is strange. But like Pope Benedict XVI says, Genesis isn’t supposed to be about that. It’s about telling us what the world - and specifically the human race - IS, using symbolic and poetic language. We are made in the image and likeness of God, and mankind rejected God and that’s why there is evil in the world. That’s what it is about.

In that sense the Biblical account and science are complimentary, because they are telling us two different things.

One is walking down the beach and sees only left footprints. What should he conclude?

 

[JapaneseKappa]

For 800 years the Church has been supporting science. Science cannot address the supernatural, the Church can.

you - How can the Church say things like “Abortion is the greatest evil of our age” then turn around and not even bother to see how science can help them understand and solve the problem?

??? How?

“How do we most effectively reduce the number of abortions?” is not a supernatural question. It falls squarely in the category of “questions about the natural world” and science is therefore the best way to answer it.

Your attitude that “religion tells me everything I need to know about abortion: its evil” is precisely the sort of subtle anti-science bias I am talking about. I suspect that the pro-life movement’s complete inability to demonstrate any successes since Roe v. Wade is tied to this attitude.

I’m not going to teach you how to do science, even an eighth grade level of scientific understanding should let you come up with some ideas about how science could help and what variables would be important to measure.

 

[Ignatius]

When you say Science contradicts Religion, what religion do you mean; and which science?

 

[buffalo]

“How do we most effectively reduce the number of abortions?” is not a supernatural question. It falls squarely in the category of “questions about the natural world” and science is therefore the best way to answer it.

Your attitude that “religion tells me everything I need to know about abortion: its evil” is precisely the sort of subtle anti-science bias I am talking about. I suspect that the pro-life movement’s complete inability to demonstrate any successes since Roe v. Wade is tied to this attitude.

I’m not going to teach you how to do science, even an eighth grade level of scientific understanding should let you come up with some ideas about how science could help and what variables would be important to measure.

I asked a specific question, but you won’t answer.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

I asked a specific question, but you won’t answer.

Here is a simple example. If all the abortion clinic picketers stopped doing their thing, how much would the abortion rate change? If more people were to volunteer at Crisis Pregnancy Centers, how much would the abortion rate change? I don’t think anyone has bothered to collect data that would let us estimate either of those numbers.

Now, since you seem determined to make me do the thinking for you, I will explain why that information would be useful. If the increase in the abortion rate from a cessation of picketing is smaller than the decrease in the abortion rate from additional volunteers at CPS, then churches should stop telling people to picket abortion centers and instead encourage them to work at CPS centers. As it stands, the churches ignorance could mean that babies are dying that could be saved with a better abortion prevention strategy.

This is only one simple example, there are many others. We know that the economy has a big impact on abortion rates because many women feel they can not afford to raise a child. Are there any programs the church could implement that would make women in poor economic situations behave like women in better economic situations? I am not aware of any studies that investigate the potential effectiveness of such programs.

Does closing abortion centers actually impact the abortion rate? How much? How would a Finland-like baby box affect abortion rates? What if the pro-life lobbyists could have saved more babies by focusing their efforts on the latter?

 

[rom422]

St. Thomas recognized this back in the twelve hundreds. I’ll quote him here, I think you’d find him interesting:

Now God, who is the author of man, is all-powerful, wherefore when He first made man, He conferred on him the favour of being exempt from the necessity resulting from such a matter: which favor, however, was withdrawn through the sin of our first parents.
**
Accordingly death is both natural on account of a condition attaching to matter**, and penal on account of the loss of the divine favor preserving man from death [Summa Theologiae, II-II:164:1 ad 1; cf. I:97:1].

Also

In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals.

But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man’s sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon.

Nor does Bede’s gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some.

Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals [Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2].

The Church has never said that illness and aging and death were not present in the natural world. Only that man was supposed to be free from it originally. Some people certainly over the centuries and even may have thought that, but like Thomas, says, that’s just not the case.

But I’m not really sure we can argue that because things are this way now, and humans need pain to have a full emotional spectrum, that this is the only way it ever could be. We don’t have any other experience, but that’s hardly proof against the Catholic belief.

To me, the fact that pain has some good effect on us is an example of good being brought out of evil, not proof that it is absolutely necessary or that we were meant to experience it. There’s really no reason to say it had to be this way, we don’t have any other knowledge of things.

Great post! That is also how I understood Church teaching. Death existed in the natural world before the appearance of the first man. But when man was created, he was created in a state of innocence (or the state of original justice), which gave him the privilege of immortality. Now, that was only for man, not for the rest of the animal kingdom.

But where did the idea that Catholics are supposed to believe that death in the natural world came only as a consequence of Adam’s sin? I think it came from a text of St. Paul which said, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death, and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). Clearly, however, the “death” that St. Paul was referring to was not the death of all living creatures in general, but only the death of the human body, - or the loss of the privilege of immortality that was granted to the first humans.

There is a parallel text in 1 Corinthians where St. Paul also said, “For by a man came death, and by a man the resurrection of the dead. And as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:21-22). If St. Paul meant that with Adam’ sin all creatures without exception will one day die, then should we say that with Christ, all creatures without exception would one day rise from the dead? The Church never taught that, because that is not what St. Paul meant. St. Paul was talking only of the death and resurrection of the human body.

Valiente88’s second example of science contradicting religion is therefore a faulty one. Science teaches that all bodies are corruptible. That is correct. Even the body of Adam was corruptible, because corruptibility is a necessity of matter. However, although corruptibility is a necessity of matter, it is not a necessity of matter that a body should actually corrupt. Therefore, science does not contradict religion when our faith teaches that Adam’s body during the state of innocence was, by grace, free from corruption at the same time that it was, by nature, inherently corruptible.

After the fall of Adam, the privilege of immortality was withdrawn. Sickness and death follow. So, Valiente88’s Catholic husband was correct in saying (see Post#5) that death, diseases, and all ills that plague humanity are consequences of sins committed or original from Adam.