Why you should think that the Natural-Evolution of species is true

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I’ve run across your positions many times over, plus I grew up, as I mentioned before, with such an opinion. My experience on such matters with all too many “creationists” is that they simply play games, know relatively little about scientific techniques, so I have no desire to play their games.

After abandoning the anti-science position of my Protestant church, I went on to get a graduate degree in anthropology, and then taught the subject for about 30 years. But what you are doing is pushing pseudo-science while trying to pretend it’s actually science, and your misused of the scientific term “theory” demonstrates that fact.

Hey, as far as I’m concerned, if you say that Earth s just a big marshmallow, that’s clearly your choice, but I think others here need to realize what actually the scientific community has long concluded and why. If the Catholic Church had stayed with your position, I never would have converted because it would be like sticking my head in the ground while loudly saying “la la la…” to block out the reality.
 
rossum said:
Erm… “specie” is money in metallic form, as coins. For biological “species” see Biological species concept

What does this have to do with your rejection of my two examples of speciation? My earlier definition was sufficient since I was talking about metazoa.
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Why can you not post a straight answer? Your avoidance to do so betrays a lack of faith in your beliefs.
 
o_mlly said:
Why can you not post a straight answer? Your avoidance to do so betrays a lack of faith in your beliefs.
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Why can you not post a straight answer to my question asking what your problem with my two examples of speciation is? Your avoidance to do so betrays a lack of faith in your beliefs.

rossum
 
Aloysium said:
Obviously, “man” did not actively develop a conscience. He would have been a passive recipient of a “conscience”.
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Agreed. The conscience could only come from God. I consider it as the embarkation point of when man was given a human soul.
Aloysium said:
Let’s assume that animals were given spiritual souls … , where he creates that world giving speech and reason to pairs of animals. This would involve a transformation of a primitive purely material soul into an eternal one. As the core reality of what anything is, I don’t see how it is possible for one soul to become another. It would be like you becoming me.
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I disagree. I believe that animals do have souls & we will them find in heaven. I know that is not the Church’s position even though Scripture does support it (Isiah 11:6-9). I came to believe it when I had an incredible experience that convinced me otherwise. I do not think it is His plan that one soul to become another but rather one type of soul becoming another… animistic to human… anything is possible with God. The physical qualities of the brain have nothing to do with our souls.
Aloysium said:
the desire of greater intellectual capacity may have driven ape-like creatures to instinctively prefer mates with characteristics that approximated that eventual ideal.
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I believe that it is the conscience which drove man’s larger brain size. I see it as the basis of ALL of man’s achievements. It creates the constant search for something better, whether that be a greater good or a greater evil. It drove man from the trees to caves, to huts, to houses to skyscrapers and from stones to spears to arrows to guns to thermonuclear weapons. It is what creates in us the search for the GREATEST good which is God.
Aloysium said:
The bottom line is that it boils down to a belief, which if true, would have been stated in Genesis.
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Genesis did speak about it. The so-called “punishments” given to man for his sin were toil, pain and suffering, and death were not punishments at all; they were realizations. It is man realizing that there is something better than those and he no longer has to live by the status quo.
Aloysium said:
I don’t understand what exactly the Pope was talking about stating that mankind could have been created using living matter. It sounds like he is trying to reach a compromise, accepting that it is not necessarily idolatry, worshipping the world as creator of mankind, to believe in evolution.
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Once again read Genesis because it IS stated there. Genesis 1 does not say that God zapped plants and animals into existence. Instead it twice said that He charged the EARTH to produce them. Time is meaningless to God so He would not have cared how long it took. And it was the Earth that produced them under the direction of God. If you look at the order of appearance of plants, fish, “great sea monsters”, mammals and man then you will see that it corresponds nicely to an evolutionary development.
 
WileyC1949 said:
If you look at the order of appearance of plants, fish, “great sea monsters”, mammals and man then you will see that it corresponds nicely to an evolutionary development.
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Not precisely. Birds are on day 5 while land animals are on day 6. Taken literally that is contrary to the scientific evidence; birds evolved from earlier land animals.

rossum
 
WileyC1949 said:
I do not think it is His plan that one soul to become another but rather one type of soul becoming another… animistic to human… anything is possible with God.
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I need clarification there as to what your position on this is. What would you say is the difference between a soul becoming another but a type of soul necoming another? I’m not understanding the difference.

Me, as one who accepts evolution, my view is that you’ve got our pre-true human ancestors with animals souls and then they had offspring with true human souls. (I simplify the order of physical events of course to deal only with the spiritual.) So if Martha (random name) was Adam’s pre-true human mother, she’d have had am animal soul and God would’ve given Adam a human soul from his conception. Is that in line with what you’re saying?
 
WileyC1949 said:
It creates the constant search for something better, whether that be a greater good or a greater evil. It drove man from the trees to caves, to huts, to houses to skyscrapers and from stones to spears to arrows to guns to thermonuclear weapons. It is what creates in us the search for the GREATEST good which is God.
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So, you believe Adam and Eve came from soulless apelike creatures ?
 
Is that any less believable than Adam coming from a soulless lump of clay, and Eve coming from a soulless rib?
 
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Techno2000 said:
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LeafByNiggle:
Is that any less believable than Adam coming from a soulless lump of clay, and Eve coming from a soulless rib?
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I agree , but would go with the clay scenario, because it lines up with the Bible better.
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Both stories are equally consistent with Catholic teaching. So we are free to use science to decide between them without any problem with contradicting our faith.
 
mVitus said:
So if Martha (random name) was Adam’s pre-true human mother, she’d have had am animal soul and God would’ve given Adam a human soul from his conception. Is that in line with what you’re saying?
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Yes and no. What you say is what I believe did happen. But according to my look at the Genesis story (which I know cannot be taken literally) it would have been the animistic soul of the pre-human “Adam” became a human soul of the human Adam when he “ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” or developed a conscience as a result of the new human soul given him by God.

I firmly believe that the reason for the physical realm is for us to learn true selfless love so as to be one with Him who IS love. Because love cannot be forced to learn it we had to be set free from Him and given the complete freedom to choose between good and evil. It could actually be that Satan is not in conflict with God but is in fact doing His will of offering us the free choice to do any and all evil without which we could never reject evil and do the good that leads towards love and God.
 
WileyC1949 said:
But according to my look at the Genesis story (which I know cannot be taken literally) it would have been the animistic soul of the pre-human “Adam” became a human soul of the human Adam when he “ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” or developed a conscience as a result of the new human soul given him by God.
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The difference between pre and post Fall Adam wouldn’t have been his soul. He would have needed the rational soul to choose sin in the first place. The diferrence would be the loss of the preturnatural gifts (physical immortality, ect.) and the severing of the pre-Fall direct relationship with God.
WileyC1949 said:
It could actually be that Satan is not in conflict with God
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That would be wrong. Satan is against God. To name one example, when Peter tries keeping Christ from His Passion,He says “Get behind me Satan.” It’s not a statement of “We’re on the same team, give me some support from behind” but “You’re going against what I need to do and are against me.” (Weak example for the moment, but reading such a statement was like reading someone say the world is flat where you know the person is wrong, but don’t have all the apologetics at hand because it’s so rare.)

The only case I could see is if you take into account God’s permissive will, but that’s not the same as doing God’s will.
 
rossum said:
Not precisely. Birds are on day 5 while land animals are on day 6. Taken literally that is contrary to the scientific evidence; birds evolved from earlier land animals.
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True, but I believe that birds did evolve before the mammals that are mentioned. Not all species are mentioned in Genesis. I have to wonder if the “great sea monsters” mentioned could be seen as a reference to dinosaurs.
 
mVitus said:
The difference between pre and post Fall Adam wouldn’t have been his soul. He would have needed the rational soul to choose sin in the first place. The diferrence would be the loss of the preturnatural gifts (physical immortality, ect.) and the severing of the pre-Fall direct relationship with God.

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WileyC1949:
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But was Adam’s disobedience truly the first sin? I would say no… the first sin came later. Sin must be done with the conscience knowledge that you are doing wrong. According to the story Adam would not have had knowledge until AFTER he at from the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil”. According to the story his first sin was when he tried to blame Eve for his own action, but not the action itself.

This has been one of the contradictions which we have been taught from day one. The other being that we all know that the sins of our fathers were not our sins and we are only responsible for our own choices. But the we have also been taught that we inherited the sin of Adam, the Original Sin. When I was a kid that was taught as a “black mark on the soul” and that “we were born evil and in need of salvation.” Today, and I think rightly so, it is taught that we are born good but from the start we can be led to evil. That is far more in line with my thinking. We did not inherit Adam’s sin. What we inherited was the conscience which gave us the ability to sin!
mVitus said:
Satan is against God. To name one example, when Peter tries keeping Christ from His Passion,He says “Get behind me Satan.” It’s not a statement of “We’re on the same team, give me some support from behind” but “You’re going against what I need to do and are against me.” (Weak example for the moment, but reading such a statement was like reading someone say the world is flat where you know the person is wrong, but don’t have all the apologetics at hand because it’s so rare.)

The only case I could see is if you take into account God’s permissive will, but that’s not the same as doing God’s will.
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True, Satan is against God, but is he OPPOSED to God? God is all good so He could not be the one to offer us the free choice to do evil. Yet in order to be able to do good we had to have the free choice to do evil. I can see where that might be the task assigned to Satan. I don’t accept any sort of conflict in heaven or anything like that. With an all-powerful God how could there be such a thing? I think the relationship between God and Satan is more like that found in Job than elsewhere. In the example you cited about Peter, Peter was in fact acting for Satan in trying to suggest that Christ should not fulfill His destiny.

You are correct in pointing out that it is not God’s will that we do evil. He has given Satan permission to offer us evil so we do have the ability to do good.
 
I did explain this somewhat in my conversation with mVitus. An extremely real personal experience has led me to believe that the Church is incorrect when it says that animals do not have souls and cannot be saved. The Bible does agree with me on this one:

_Isiah 11:6-9 _
6 The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them.
7 The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8 The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
9 They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

Aristotle believed in four types of Earth-bound souls, the top two being the animistic or animal soul and the human soul which is capable of intelligent thought. My experience has taught me to believe that any creature which as learned to love within its own limitations we will find in heaven. For example there have been several cases of dogs who instead of running away from fire have run into it to try to save their masters.
 
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