Church needs better evolution education, says bishops' official

Catholic News Service ^ | 2-1-2005

[mike182d]

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Catholic educators need better teaching programs about evolution "to correct the anti-evolution biases that Catholics pick up" from the general society, according to a U.S. bishops' official involved in dialogue with scientists for 20 years.

Without a church view of human creation that is consistent with currently accepted scientific knowledge, "Catholicism may begin to seem less and less 'realistic' to more and more thoughtful people," said David Byers, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Science and Human Values from 1984 to 2003.

"That dynamic is a far greater obstacle to religious assent than evolution," he said in a bylined article in the Feb. 7 issue of America, a weekly magazine published in New York by the Jesuits. The article discussed the value of the dialogues with scientists organized by the bishops' committee.

"Denying that humans evolved seems by this point a waste of time," he said without mentioning specific controversies in the United States.

[orionblamblam]

> Unlike the case of me throwing the rock, we cannot see the cause, but only the effect.

Incorrect. The causes of evolution are apparent. Mutations are observed, as are natural selection pressures. These are adequate to explain the causes of evolution.

> You cannot believe that God randomnly creates things

Ah. So you put limits on God, then. "I know what God cannot do."

[Modernman]

When did evolution start?

Once life existed.

Per Ockham's Razor: if its looks designed, it probably is.

For a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent being, the creator is a poor designer.

[orionblamblam]

> St. Thomas Aquinas proved God's existence

Ummm... no. He made numerous illogical leaps. While the assumption of an Uncaused Cause might be reasonable, jumping to the conclusion that this UC is, in fact, the Christian God (or in fact *any* God) is unsubstantiated.

[RadioAstronomer]

I completely disagree with you on this.

Creationism can be tested using the fossil record and geological studies just the same as evolution in scientifically supporting their claims of a "young Earth".

Show me the evidence. Ever hear of SN1987A?

When we are dealing with evolution we are not talking about the entire universe. We are talking about the development of life on Earth.

Bingo!

I would agree that the idea that intelligent design was responsible for the creation of life and the universe is a belief system.

Then it is not science.

However, the methodology used in this creation (either evolution or direct creation of each species) is subject to arguement.

Not in science. In theology? Yes.

The fact is, both theories have a lot of support for their explanations of the development of life on Earth.

Creationsism is not a theory. You said so yourself.

[HamiltonJay]

Just as you have made no effort to prove his lack of existence or to address issues pointedly directly to you. Simply ingore the reply, reply with some sound bite and then attempt to use that as your debunking.

They are more proof than any Atheist has ever given to the proof of the non existence. When you debunk them let me know.

[HamiltonJay]

When Science comes up with a way to explain something from nothing (the UC) you can say that arguing that is evidence of God is unwarranted.

Since the Scientific realm cannot, in fact dictates without any question that something from nothing CAN NEVER OCCUR, the very nature of the UC.. which logically must exist is indeed only explained by God.

[GarySpFc]

The Myth of the Flat Earth
Summary by Jeffrey Burton Russell, Ph.D.

for the American Scientific Affiliation Conference

August 4, 1997 at Westmont College

How does investigating the myth of the flat earth help teachers of the history of science?

First, as a historian, I have to admit that it tells us something about the precariousness of history. History is precarious for three reasons: the good reason that it is extraordinarily difficult to determine "what really happened" in any series of events; the bad reason that historical scholarship is often sloppy; and the appalling reason that far too much historical scholarship consists of contorting the evidence to fit ideological models. The worst examples of such contortions are the Nazi and Communist histories of the early- and mid-twentieth century.

Contortions that are common today, if not widely recognized, are produced by the incessant attacks on Christianity and religion in general by secular writers during the past century and a half, attacks that are largely responsible for the academic and journalistic sneers at Christianity today.

A curious example of this mistreatment of the past for the purpose of slandering Christians is a widespread historical error, an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to believe that the earth was flat--especially medieval Christians.

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat.

A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.

Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few--at least two and at most five--early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.

Historians of science have been proving this point for at least 70 years (most recently Edward Grant, David Lindberg, Daniel Woodward, and Robert S. Westman), without making notable headway against the error. Schoolchildren in the US, Europe, and Japan are for the most part being taught the same old nonsense. How and why did this nonsense emerge?

In my research, I looked to see how old the idea was that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. I obviously did not find it among medieval Christians. Nor among anti-Catholic Protestant reformers. Nor in Copernicus or Galileo or their followers, who had to demonstrate the superiority of a heliocentric system, but not of a spherical earth. I was sure I would find it among the eighteenth-century philosophies, among all their vitriolic sneers at Christianity, but not a word. I am still amazed at where it first appears.

No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat.

The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American, between whom I have not been able to establish a connection, though they were both in Paris at the same time. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834). The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history. His misrepresentations of the history of early New York City and of the life of Washington were topped by his history of Christopher Columbus (1828). It was he who invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a "simple mariner," appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed, according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate. Well, yes, there was a meeting at Salamanca in 1491, but Irving's version of it, to quote a distinguished modern historian of Columbus, was "pure moonshine. Washington Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene," created a fictitious account of this "nonexistent university council" and "let his imagination go completely...the whole story is misleading and mischievous nonsense."

But now, why did the false accounts of Letronne and Irving become melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in schools and in schoolbooks as the solemn truth?

The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library.

The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress. These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?"

But that is not the truth.

[stormer]

"Who has the Church persecuted because of science?"


Well, here's one: http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/bruno.html

[-YYZ-]

"When did evolution start?"

With the first self-reproducing organism, which evolution does not address. It might have happened by chance, it might have been designed, who knows?

"Its an argument from design that, despite trying prove the existence of God originally, works quite well against evolution. Per Ockham's Razor: if its looks designed, it probably is."

But that's the problem. We know that a designer, another human, is behind things we know are designed. We don't know that living systems are the result of design, nor do we know enough about them to presuppose that they must have been designed.

[mike182d]

Once life existed.

What is substantially different on the atomic level, about life and inanimate matter? Per Ockham's Razor: if its looks designed, it probably is. For a supposedly omniscient, omnipotent being, the creator is a poor designer.

Really? How so?

[WildTurkey]

Tell me please, why you believe that the "flood" covered the earth when you do NOT believe the Bible when it makes reference to it's "flat earth" parameters.

[HamiltonJay]

The proof of the non-existence of God is the fact that there is no proof of his existence. In what other way could it be done?

Not remotely true, that argument does defy logic 101. Arguing that you cannot find proof of something, does not prove that something does not exist. By that reasoning, infrared light didn't exist until a human discovered it. You are now definately failing horribly at any sense of logic on that one.

If God does not exist, please explain in scientific terms how you exist.. since your existence depends on prior existence.. and it depends on prior to that.. taking this back you eventually get something from nothing. Please explain in scientific terms how you get something from nothing.

Science cannot, and in fact requires as a fundamental construct that you can never have something from nothing. Therefore science itself could indeed prove the failure of a God, by proving that something could come from nothing without the need of a UC... of course to do that you have to defy every rule and law of science.. so therefor science could, but being as it is the wrong conclusion, cannot prove the non existence of God.

The fact you exist is evidence of God's existence, you can choose to not accept that, but until you can scientifically explain the UC... (something science cannot do) you don't have a leg to stand on.

[WildTurkey]

If God does not exist, please explain in scientific terms how you exis

If man did not exist, would God exist?

[mike182d]

And why is the first cause argument any good at proving god? Who created him?

I think you need to analyze the argument a little better. No one created God, nor does the argument suppose that everything created has a creator. The foundational premise is that there are two modes of existence: contigent or necessary. The existence of everything in the universe is contingent. The whole of all contingent matter cannot account for its own existence for the sum is never greater than the whole. Thus, there exists a necessary being necessarily.

The argument never says that everything has a creator. That would be absurd.

[mike182d]

...as are natural selection pressures.

And what exactly is a natural selection pressure?

Ah. So you put limits on God, then. "I know what God cannot do."

Of course there are "limits" on God. God cannot be evil, God cannot know something that is false, et cetera. There are logical inconsistencies and not limitation on God's power. "Random" creation is no different. Randomness is the absence of sufficient predicability and you cannot suppose that an omniscient, omnipotent God cannot predict the path of his own creation. Its nonsense.

[mike182d]

Giordano Bruno

He was an ordained Benedictine who criticized His own Church's theology, not science, and you're wondering why he was labelled a heretic?