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

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ID simply can’t “pass it by” as far as rationalists go.

They have to prove:
  1. The Intelligent Designer exists
  2. That it affected the development of life
They can’t even prove #1, which you must do before you can proceed to #2.
 
In a worldview that holds science above all, nothing can be proved. The Catholic knowledge of the world provides the complete answer.

“But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation. According to St. Thomas Aquinas: “The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow, but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore, whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the divine providence conceives to happen from contingency” ( Summa theologiae, I, 22,4 ad 1). In the Catholic perspective, neo-Darwinians who adduce random genetic variation and natural selection as evidence that the process of evolution is absolutely unguided are straying beyond what can be demonstrated by science. Divine causality can be active in a process that is both contingent and guided. Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” ( Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).”
 
edwest said:
In a worldview that holds science above all, nothing can be proved. The Catholic knowledge of the world provides the complete answer.
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That’s a silly exaggeration, Ed. Some would call it a straw-man.

“Catholic knowledge” doesn’t explain how to swap-out the exhaust manifold on my wife’s SUV. In order to explain that, I require knowledge from elsewhere. And there’s nothing un-Catholic about that.
 
buffalo said:
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Vonsalza:
Molecular Evolution is a field dedicated to explaining just that.
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Of course it is. It has to be for a “divine foot cannot be let in the door”.
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This doesn’t have anything to do with the divine. Just like my Ford repair manual doesn’t have anything to do with the divine.

Rationalists just don’t like answers that require supernatural poof-ing. They are, in themselves, irrational events.
 
Please stop the false comparisons. I can swap out car parts - What does that have to do with the topic?
 
Rationalists don’t recognize the supernatural? They just rely on their Ford repair manual?
 
My repair manual tells me how to swap my alternator. Evolution tells me how life arose. Neither disproves nor affirms God. Totally different lane.
 
No. Because if they accepted supernatural explanations they’d have to come up with some way to affirm that the Catholic explanation is somehow more demonstrably true than the Hindu one.

Since there’s no way to do that, they turn to non-religious explanations.
 
Vonsalza said:
Separate lane. It’s important to understand what evolution is trying to explain and also what it’s NOT trying to explain.
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Evolution does not answer the big question of how did I get here. The Big Bang is not a satisfactory answer, because we want to know what happened before. An infinite regress of causes is a lacking theory. Life from no life still needs an explanation, so the theory of evolution would explain very little by comparison.

The only satisfactory answer to the big question is God.
 
Vonsalza said:
No. Because if they accepted supernatural explanations they’d have to come up with some way to affirm that the Catholic explanation is somehow more demonstrably true than the Hindu one.
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The same God hears the prayers of Hindus, Catholics, Muslims and everyone else. There is only 'One God the creator of all that is seen and unseen. How can Catholics or Hindus own a god?
 
Vonsalza said:
However, the folks that adhere to the TOE not only think it can evolve, they’re also capable of identifying currently extant species that demonstrate different evolutionary spots in the development of sight.
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Whether the eye evolved through a thousand species or just one is kind of irrelevant. Nilsson and Pelger say that it might have taken 1829 incremental changes of a 1 % improvement. Random mutation has to work 1829 times and natural selection has to work 1829 times.

I have worn glasses for the last sixty years. There have been a number of occasions when the opticians said; your prescription has changed marginally, but there is no real need to get new glasses.

Likewise, natural selection would have to work with miniscule and almost undetectable improvements 1829 times. The brain would also have to evolve 1829 times to keep up with the eye evolution. The reaction of the limbs would also have to improve 1829 times for the benefits to be felt.

Evolution has no goals, yet the Nilsson and Pelger model clearly defines 8 separate goals for the eye to evolve. 176 steps to the first goal, then change direction slightly and a further 362 steps to the next goal, etc; hardly random.

If the ToE is to work, then it has to seem truthful.
 
When someone uses Behe as a source, there is no appropriate response except to just leave the person to believe whatever they want to believe. Behe’s actions that included out-and-out lies in the Dover case was so utterly bankrupt that the conservative judge himself took him to task.

So, believe in what you want to believe, I guess.
 
That’s simply untrue as the ToE is virtually silent when it comes to dealing with Divine creation, and a survey I saw several decades ago had it that a significant majority of Christian theologians have no trouble accepting the basic ToE as long as it is understood that God was behind it all.
 
ProdglArchitect said:
I agree, evolution is inconsequential to the question of salvation. It’s not important you embrace it, and embracing it or not embracing it won’t have any impact on your eternal outcome.

However, it does teach us about God, and how He chooses to operate.
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Survival of the fittest and random mutation. That’s the other side. Evolution is based on how this world works, where death is the final outcome. Think love, the natural beauty and wonder, the creativity in the diversity all planned, designed and corrupted by sin. Where is Eden in your philosophy, where is the New Jerusalem? Look squarely at evolution, follow it to its foundations and end, and one will either drop it, understanding it to be merely an illusion or drift further from the truth.
 
Eric_Hyom said:
Evolution does not answer the big question of how did I get here.
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Actually, that’s exactly the question it answers. Now, it does not address in any way your metaphysical telos. That’s beyond the realm of the sciences and very suitably explained by a divine creator.
The Big Bang is not a satisfactory answer, because we want to know what happened before.
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That’s being studied as we type. But the current theory is that the Big Bang simply popped out of the void. I think this is a great place to identify a divine role.
An infinite regress of causes is a lacking theory.
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Who says it’s infinite regress? As it currently stands, the Big Bang is the origin. There is no meaningful “before” that occurred prior to that.
Life from no life still needs an explanation, so the theory of evolution would explain very little by comparison.
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A substantial part of the field of biology is actually dedicated to addressing that very thing. In keeping with the theory, life may have likely evolved from primitive RNA molecules that aren’t unlike viruses that appeared in naturally occurring lipid bubbles.

That’s just one theory among many, but point being we’re a long ways away from saying “Gosh Golly! We just don’t have any idea how that could have happened!”
The only satisfactory answer to the big question is God.
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These answers are not exclusive of God.
Eric_Hyom said:
The same God hears the prayers of Hindus, Catholics, Muslims and everyone else.
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The creation mythos is different between those religions, which was the point.
Eric_Hyom said:
Whether the eye evolved through a thousand species or just one is kind of irrelevant. Nilsson and Pelger say that it might have taken 1829 incremental changes of a 1 % improvement. Random mutation has to work 1829 times and natural selection has to work 1829 times.
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Given the absolutely tremendous selective advantage sight would grant in some species, there’s certainly enormous positive pressure for that evolution to occur.

If life’s been around for 3.5 billion years, 1829 evolutionary changes means 1 change every 2 million years.

No sweat there. But it’s even faster than that. All the different types of genus “homo” (like people and neanderthals) popped up in just the last 2-3 million years.

Ya gotta admit, it’s a pretty tight theory.
 
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