Why do so many Catholics accept evolution as fact?

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So only God knows ?
Can you see the future? I cannot. In some instances scientists can identify trends, recent changes, ongoing processes, etc. But if you are asking if anyone can peer 1 million years into the future and definitively see the results, I don’t think so.
 
You are right in that it doesn’t really matter who is right on the details.

But it does matter in the same sense as respect for any other line of scientific inquiry.
We are called to be people of integrated faith and reason. Science speaks about who we are and contributes to the advancement of human beings. To reject legitimate science detracts from the very faith we would like to protect. The two should be integrated.

Science’s sphere of competence and influence needs to be respected, as the Church does respect it.
Explicitly.
In the words of Popes.

We needn’t be terrified of science as if it contradicts scripture. Scientists might contradict scripture, but scientific discovery, per se, cannot threaten scripture.
 
They’ve changed a great deal already over a short span of a few thousand years due to domestication. Look at what has happened with canines in just a few thousand years (hundreds, in some cases), though it has not been long enough for reproductive isolation.

And we’re not talking about this cow or that cow changing. We’re simply taking about allele drift and selection pressures on living populations, not individuals, working over millions of years. Speciation has no one cut off point. Populations will diverge and converge again. But eventually with enough separation you’ll have two groups isolated from reproducing by any number of factors, including geographical and behavioral, and perhaps eventually due to genetic incompatibility.

It’s not like any one offspring pops out as an “evolved” form of its parents and a new species. The traits present within a given population change over time, while the given population at any one moment will look very similar among itself, but perhaps different than the ancestral population it diverged from hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of years ago.

Nor are things actively evolving. It’s simply selective pressures. If selective pressures remain constant, a species might very well remain the same for millions of years. And typically the entire population does not undergo trait drift together. It’s more common for a group of a population to become isolated in some way and then experience different selective pressures over hundreds of thousands or millions of years than other parts of the ancestral whole population, which may lead to a divergence as different traits are more advantageous to the new situation resulting in increased dispersion of certain traits due to it being a reproductive boon. Or perhaps a non-advantageous trait becomes advantageous in different circumstances, or a neutral trait which had very small minority representation only in one small subpopulation becomes a common trait for that subpopulation after it becomes isolated from the main population, has a more limited reproductive pool, and has trait divergences in other areas.

This is only the how of part of our history. Certainly in the divine intellect all of this and the results are known and intended, and God remains the ontological cause. And neither do we need to say that simple allele drift over millions of years can account for the rational soul of man.
Listen to Wesrock. If you are going to argue against evolution, at least argue against what is actually being claimed. It’s no different than what we ask of non-Catholics when it comes to arguing against Catholic teaching.
 
Can you see the future? I cannot. In some instances scientists can identify trends, recent changes, ongoing processes, etc. But if you are asking if anyone can peer 1 million years into the future and definitively see the results, I don’t think so.
We are in the future now… billions of years have already pass for something to happen. 🤷
 
No, but I’m still a Human, and a shark will always produce another shark.
Yes. That is what the hierarchy of common descent means. You are human, hominid, primate, mammal, synapsid, tetrapod, vertebrate, deuterostome and animalia, all at the same time.

You still belong to all the same classifications that your ancestors once belonged to. Evolution produces diversity within existing groups. It does not produce animals with characteristics from different groups. A pegasus cannot evolve since it combines features from mammals and birds, as well as being a hexapod, with six limbs.

rossum
 
Two Great white sharks mate together and you still get Great white sharks , same with Dogs.
To.expound on the dogs, they all.came.from a common.ancestor but would you not agree a chihuahua is different than a great dane? Human selections of which features we liked.rapidly increaed the rate at which those changes became apparent.

And as all of us agree that we’re descended from Adam and Eve we can look at races as an example of those differences over a period of time too. A White person has some minor differences compared to.a Black person. For one there’s the skin color and hair type. Plus we each are more prone to.certain genetic disorders. Imagine you then cut off.a group of White people and a group of Black people for 1,000,000 years. Those slight differences grow.more.pronounced over time. I recall reading some articles where some.isolated tribes end up having some features unique to their tribe.

And like Wesrock mentioned, it’s not like a totally new.species comes up one day. To invoke the old question of the chicken and the egg, I’d answer the egg. And when asked what couod’ve laid the first chicekn.egg without being a chicken I’d answer: something extremly close to being what we’d call a chicken but not quite a chicken.
 
Listen to Wesrock. If you are going to argue against evolution, at least argue against what is actually being claimed. It’s no different than what we ask of non-Catholics when it comes to arguing against Catholic teaching.
If you’re going to chastise me for the content of my post, please make sure to read the content of my post more carefully. 😉
 
They’ve (cattle) changed a great deal already over a short span of a few thousand years due to domestication.
Indeed. It is worth going to a museum and looking for an Auroch skull, as well as a mockup of a full-size Auroch. They were very different from modern domesticated cattle.

rossum
 
Yes. That is what the hierarchy of common descent means. You are human, hominid, primate, mammal, synapsid, tetrapod, vertebrate, deuterostome and animalia, all at the same time.

You still belong to all the same classifications that your ancestors once belonged to. Evolution produces diversity within existing groups. It does not produce animals with characteristics from different groups. A pegasus cannot evolve since it combines features from mammals and birds, as well as being a hexapod, with six limbs.

rossum
Are you talking about the Greek mythology Pegasus ?
 
We are in the future now… billions of years have already pass for something to happen. 🤷
And a great many evolutionary changes have already happened in that time.

Modern humans have hardly been around for billions of years. Neither have dogs or even sharks (though sharks seem to be fairly stable in an evolutionary sense and have been around in recognizable form for a long time).
 
But a chihuahua and a great dane are still Dogs.
But humans and dogs are still Mammals. It just depends on where you draw the boundary of the classification you are using.

There are similarities and differences between a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. There are similarities and differences between a human and a dog.

rossum
 
Are you talking about the Greek mythology Pegasus ?
Yes. A pegasus is a designed animal – humans designed it. However is is not an animal which can evolve. The non-existence of Pegasi is a small part of the scientific evidence supporting evolution. Every single observed animal and plant falls into the nested hierarchy. No exceptions. Since evolution predicts a nested hierarchy with no exceptions, that is good evidence for evolution.

rossum
 
But humans and dogs are still Mammals. It just depends on where you draw the boundary of the classification you are using.

There are similarities and differences between a Chihuahua and a Great Dane. There are similarities and differences between a human and a dog.

rossum
There are similarities between the Sun and the Moon also.
 
FWIW, my personal take is that we are the product of both evolution and divine creation.

There is plenty of scientific evidence to suggest than man, in some form, goes back long before Genesis which supposedly took place 6000 years ago or so. Going back countless millennia, I believe that God created the first life form.

Adam and Eve as biographed in Genesis, may have been the first *recorded *man and woman, but who is to say they were the *first *man and woman? According to Genesis, Eve bore two sons; one of who was murdered by the other. How did the next generation come about? If there were no other humans around one can only concluded that the next generation was the product of an incestuous relationship between Eve and Cain. There *must *have been other people around.

My :twocents:
 
Like what ?
I can’t look into the future but I can look into the past to see how far they’ve come. Dogs originated from wolves, A chihuahua for example is significantly smaller than a wolf and has a larger eye size to body size ratio. A dachsund has shorter legs and again is smaller. The head shape of a yorkie is different compared to a wolf. Bull dogs again has different head shapes. (Fun fact: They need to be delivered via C-section.) And wolves of today even have some.differences compared to.Stone Age wolves. Kind of like how sloths of today are much smaller than sloths of the past or elephants are much less hairy than a wooly mammoth.
 
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