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

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Metis1 said:
Maybe tell the Catholic theologians that. And maybe you think that the symbolism used in much of the Psalms, for example, is “baloney” as well? How about the symbolism in Revelation-- is that “baloney” as well?
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It is well understood that Scripture has many genres.

The senses of Scripture

115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

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."83

The spiritual sense . Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.
  1. The allegorical sense . We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ’s victory and also of Christian Baptism.84
  2. The moral sense . The events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written “for our instruction”.85
  3. The anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge , “leading”). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.86
118 A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses:

The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith;
The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.87

"It is the task of exegetes to work, according to these rules, towards a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture in order that their research may help the Church to form a firmer judgment. For, of course, all that has been said about the manner of interpreting Scripture is ultimately subject to the judgment of the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God."88

But I would not believe in the Gospel, had not the authority of the Catholic Church already moved me.89
 
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So, your point was…?

From what I can tell, what you posted actually supports what I and a couple of others here have been saying, namely that a literalistic interpretation is often not at all essential, thus an allegorical one often better fits certain narratives. The Creation accounts, if taken literally, do not fit known science, but allegorically they can, and they do imo.
 
Metis1 said:
From what I can tell, what you posted actually supports what I and a couple of others here have been saying, namely that a literalistic interpretation is often not at all essential, thus an allegorical one often better fits certain narratives. The Creation accounts, if taken literally, do not fit known science, but allegorically they can, and they do imo.
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Once again we come down to this. The constant teaching and tradition regarding Genesis. What magisterial document positively REVERSED this long held understanding? Where was the Holy Spirit all this time and why did God allow us to be deceived for so very long?
 
This is the problem. The secular materialist narrative is superior to Divine Revelation? Definitely not.
 
buffalo said:
Scientists are now the authorities on how Scripture is to be understood?
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No, the world is the authority. The world that comes directly from God’s hand. The world in which hills do not sing and trees do not clap their hands. The world which tells us that passage from Isaiah is allegorical.

It is the world which tells us this planet is 4.5 billion years old. It is the world which tells the universe is 13.5 billion years old. It is the world which tells that Genesis is an allegory.
 
Science is missing vital information about who human beings are. The world can only see so much. Science is limited.
 
rossum said:
No, the world is the authority. The world that comes directly from God’s hand. The world in which hills do not sing and trees do not clap their hands. The world which tells us that passage from Isaiah is allegorical.

It is the world which tells us this planet is 4.5 billion years old. It is the world which tells the universe is 13.5 billion years old. It is the world which tells that Genesis is an allegory.
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How disappointing that God allowed us to be misled for so very long. Suddenly, human reasoning found out the real truth.
 
edwest211 said:
Science can only supply partial information. People need to realize that.
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Scripture can only supply partial information. People need to realize that. Information on Australia and the planet Neptune are distinctly lacking and incomplete.
 
buffalo said:
How disappointing that God allowed us to be misled for so very long. Suddenly, human reasoning found out the real truth.
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How disappointing that God allowed the serpent to mislead Eve and has allowed Lucifer to mislead us ever since. How disappointing that God has allowed so many different denominations to argue about their different interpretation of scripture, despite the great majority of them being wrong.

God allows a lot of people to be misled a lot of the time.
 
rossum said:
How disappointing that God allowed the serpent to mislead Eve and has allowed Lucifer to mislead us ever since. How disappointing that God has allowed so many different denominations to argue about their different interpretation of scripture, despite the great majority of them being wrong.

God allows a lot of people to be misled a lot of the time.
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God could have made them robots programmed never to be able to choose. That is not love. Or this could be heaven. Justice would not be served if everyone entered heaven even if they outright rejected God and turned their back on Him.

The Holy Spirit makes sure the deposit of faith is truthfully transmitted, and it has. Humans think they know better.
 
buffalo said:
God could have made them robots programmed never to be able to choose. That is not love. Or this could be heaven.
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So, when you said above:
buffalo said:
How disappointing that God allowed us to be misled for so very long. Suddenly, human reasoning found out the real truth.
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That misleading was exactly what God planned and allowed, for the reasons you say. Given that, then why were you disappointed?

Your arguments are not always self-consistent, buffalo.
 
It was not “reversed” but was added to.

Also, there’s such a thing in Catholic theology called “ongoing revelation”, which should be logical if one accepts Jesus’ promise that he would guide his Church through til the end of time through the power of the Holy Spirit. A church, or any other kind of organization, that never changes doesn’t need to be “guided”.
 
buffalo said:
God’s Revealed Truths where they intersect with science are both true. They have to be.
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I completely agree.

The creation accounts are not scientific statements but theological statements, and to confuse the two usually does not work out too well. Simply put, the creation accounts simply are not based on known science, therefore we should look at them as theological teachings about morals and values, and most Christian theologians today do just that, including Catholics.
 
rossum said:
We (the human race) do not yet have a complete theory of gravity.
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I thought it relevant to the discussion to share some considerations on how our understandings of the fact that things fall, differ from those that seek to explain how living things, in all their diversity and complexity, have come to be.

There are different ways to explain gravity. The Newtonian version of the universe speaks to the relationships that exist at our spatial level; General Relativity, describes those in the larger universe, and Quantum Theory tells us of what happens when we delve into the smallest of things. Each of them is useful in its own sphere, and each has its failings in terms of explaining what we observe. We have struggled to find some way to combine them in another ToE, the Theory of everything. But, there is no evidence to support any of the models that seek to explain how one of the earliest things we discover about this world, happens.

Gravity is a very specific aspect of our existence. Life, obviously a much larger field, is additionally a much more complex subject because it includes us, our sitting here discussing these matters.

We can look at living organisms in terms of their anatomical and physiological structure, the material interactions that constitute their physical form. We can seek to understand the relationships of the whole creature, as a participant in its environment. This larger, encompassing system is made up of a multitude of relationships that exist between the various constituent organisms, resting on the elements of the earth within our solar system. As we pull out from the realm of the subatomic to that of the individual organism, and onto that of the earth as a whole, we begin to describe what we see in very different terms, moving away from those that involve physics and chemistry, and more and more, behaviour. When we get to humankind, it opens up to the social sciences, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political sciences. Ultimately, all this is rests on an existential structure; things are what they are, comprised of things that are what they are, and constituent parts of some greater system.

All of this is made up of individual expressions of particular kinds of things. We are humankind, each of us, an individual person, broken within and among ourselves, journeying to a wholeness that comes about in love.

Although in physics the aim is to find a ToEverything, in traditional human fashion, there is only one theory allowed in the biological sciences, the ToEvolution. In the attempt to explain how life came to be focussing mainly on the material, only giving lip service to the psychological and totally omitting the spiritual, it cannot but be simplistic, vague, and basically wrong in its understanding.
 
Aloysium said:
Although in physics the aim is to find a ToEverything, in traditional human fashion, there is only one theory allowed in the biological sciences, the ToEvolution. In the attempt to explain how life came to be focussing mainly on the material, only giving lip service to the psychological and totally omitting the spiritual, it cannot but be simplistic, vague, and basically wrong in its understanding.
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If you want to replace the biological Theory of Evolution with a different theory, then it is possible. After all Einstein replaced Newton’s Theory of Gravity with his theory of General Relativity.

However, there is a lot of work to do to replace a well established theory. You need evidence, and a lot of evidence, to show that 1) the new theory explains everything that the old theory explains, and 2) that it can explain some of the things that the old theory could not explain.

For example, Einstein’s equations simplify to Newton’s equations in many ordinary circumstances. However, Einstein’s equations explained the precession of the orbit of Mercury and Eddington’s observations of the 1919 eclipse. The first was an error in Newton’s theory – it gave the wrong result. And Eddington’s observations were inexplicable under Newton.

All scientific theories can be replaced. Well established theories are more difficult to replace because of the volume of supporting evidence and the range of results that they do accurately predict.

Also, scientists will use Occam’s Razor to help decide if evidence and predictions are otherwise similar. Adding unnecessary complexity is not a good way to proceed. Necessary complexity is justified – Einstein’s equations are more complex than Newton’s – all unnecessary complexity needs to be removed.
 
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