Posted on 08/28/2004 9:10:46 PM PDT by AskStPhilomena
In what appears to be its latest capitulation to worldly wisdom, the Vatican apparatus now assumes (contrary to the teaching of Pius XII in Humanae Generis) that the evolution of men from animals is a proven fact.
On June 24, 2004 Zenit.org reported that "Vatican Observatory has convoked a range of experts to reflect on a question that at times seems to be forgotten in scientific research: Is there purpose in evolution?" That is, evolution is now assumed to have occurred, and the only debate is over whether it has a purpose. The Vatican called a symposium of experts to meet on June 24-26 to discuss whether evolution has a "purpose."
The Vatican Observatory’s announcement of the symposium states that "in scientific circles, there is a very deep-seated distrust of teleological language, even though researchers may occasionally use the word ‘design’ in an attempt to grapple with the often astonishing adaptive complexes they study … Put crudely, the widely accepted scientific worldview is that human beings or any other product of evolutionary diversification is accidental and, by implication, incidental."
Well, that’s right, of course. And what is the Vatican’s response to this worldview? Read it for yourself, if you can believe it: "The purpose of this symposium is not to dispute this worldview, but to inquire whether it is sufficient and, if it is not, to consider what we need to know and ultimately how we might discover the requisite information with one or more research programs." So, the Vatican does not dispute the view that the emergence of human life is merely incidental to the process of "evolution," whose truth is now apparently assumed.
The symposium (whose results have not yet been published) was asked to address five questions:
-- Can we speak of a universal biochemistry?
-- How do levels of complexity emerge, and are they inevitable?
-- Can we properly define evolutionary constraints?
-- What does convergence [different species displaying the same traits] tell us about evolution?
-- What do we mean by intelligence? Is intelligence an inevitable product of evolution?
Notice that every question presumes that evolution has, in fact, occurred, even though there is abundant evidence showing no gradual transition from one form of life to another (as evolution supposes), but rather the sudden appearance of every basic form in the fossil record, which is precisely what one would expect to see if God directly and specially created each kind, as the Book of Genesis recounts.
In Humani Generis Pope Pius XII warned that "the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own."
Moreover, Pope Leo XIII taught in his encyclical letter Arcane Divinae Sapientiae (Christian Marriage) that Adam and Eve, and they only, are our first parents and that Eve was created from Adam's body:
We record what is to all known, and cannot be doubted by any, that God, on the sixth day of creation, having made man from the slime of the earth, and having breathed into his face the breath of life, gave him a companion, whom He miraculously took from the side of Adam when he was locked in sleep. God thus, in His most far-reaching foresight, decreed that this husband and wife should be the natural beginning of the human race, from whom it might be propagated, and preserved by an unfailing fruitfulness throughout all futurity of time.
The Church says that no one may doubt these things. Yet how can these things be reconciled with the view that Adam and Eve (and who knows how many other humans) "evolved" from apes and that Eve was not formed from the body of Adam, as the Vatican now seems to suppose, in calling for a symposium to discuss the "purpose" of evolution.
So the question must be asked: Do those who are in charge of the Vatican’s approach to "modern science" still believe in what the Church teaches concerning the origin of the human race? Or are we witnessing yet another sign of the great apostasy in the Catholic Church beginning at the top, which was predicted by the Third Secret of Fatima?
"You ~know~ this?"
No, I don't. We're discussing philosophical objections to a possibility, that's all.
Those inside and outside the Vatican should be concerned with saving souls. What does it matter if we started out by walking on all fours.
We will all find out when God decides to tell us.
"And people think he needed to use evolution? I don't think so."
It's not a case of "needing" to use evolution.
Maybe He just wanted to do it that way. Maybe it was more fun that way. Maybe there were reasons we couldn't possibly understand.
When you're not bound by time, a billion years means nothing.
"If you cast aside the notion that God created the world"
Dude, to say that God made something happen that looks to us like evolution is *not* to cast aside the notion that God created the world.
Did He create it this way, or did He create it that way?
I don't even really see that it's an important question.
Heaven forbid that I assert such a thing. But did Jesus have the same omniscience that God the Father has, while he was walking on Earth? Would that make Jesus only God in a human suit, pretending to be human, instead of actually being human? The creeds teach us that Jesus was fully human and fully God. If anyone had asked Jesus a mathematical question, would he have known the answer? E.g., would he have known the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis (the most famous math problem yet to be solved)? If anyone asked Jesus a technical question about biology or chemistry, would he have known the correct answer? Really? There's a name for the heresy that Jesus was only God pretending to be human: docetism.
I should also mention that rather than falling in the Catholic camp or the Evangelical camp (everyone here seems to be in one or the other), I am in the Anglican camp (I belong to a conservative Episcopal parish).
The idea that science can never explain the concept of a soul is no condemnation of science; that's simply not within it's scope. And to say that science will outright deny the creation of immortal souls is ridiculous. Science does not deny what it cannot disprove.
Why does this follow? Couldn't the very first entities to evolve into man hvae been "ensouled"?
Nonsense. Evolution theory was developed to explain certain observations on the origin of species, and has been modified since that time to account for further observations. God's role in this or any other natural process has nothing to do with science, and science has nothing to say about God.
and that humans are just a meaningless, accidental by-product of a soulless, purposeless universe.
Again, nonsense. Science is about mechanism. The Divine purpose in either a process or it's result is again a subject on which science is silent. This silence is to be taken as neither confirming nor denying God, but is simply a limitation of the scope of science. Any scientist who speaks about God is not giving a scientific statement, but simply his or her own personal opinion.
The very basis and foundation of evolution is that there is no God in control, and that humans are just a machine, with no soul or eternal identity separate from the physical body.
More nonsense. Evolution speaks of a process. Who developed that process, when, etc., and Who uses it and why is not addressed by science.
And when science proves there can not be an all knowing, and all loving God, ...
And when science proves that God is simply pure energy, and it would be impossible for energy to produce a human Son, ....
Small worries on this, then, since science cannot and will not ever comment on any of these subjects. Nor would anyone who knew anything about science ever expect that it would.
What? Please!
As a Christian, I have NEVER seen this as an important question. EVER.
Forest for the trees thing.
What Darwin wrote or believed in is one thing, and obviously I'm out of my depth as far as strict Darwinism. *But* as far as evolution is taught to the general lay public - which includes schoolchildren - I consider my assertions true. The general public is under the impression that the theory of evolution is not a theory, but a more or less proven fact, and that is not guided by Divinity, but by accident.
"Darwin died a believing Catholic, IIRC."
Here's some of what Darwin said in his autobiography about his religious beliefs: (I know it's rather long, but his own words clearly dispel any ideas that Darwin believed in God.)
"I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many false religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight on me."
"...Thus disbelief crept over me at very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished."
"And this is a damnable doctrine[2]"
"Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws."
"...That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentinent beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to supose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the suffering of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection."
"Formely I was led by feelings such as those just referred to, (although I do not think that the religious sentiment was ever strongly developed in me), to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, 'it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.' I well remember by conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind, and the universal belief by men of the existence of redness makes my present loss of perception of not the least value as evidence. This argument would be a valid one if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists. The state of mind which grand scenes formerly excited in me, and which was intimately connected with a belief in God, did not essentially differ from that which is often called the sence of sublimity; and however difficult it may be to explain the genesis of this sence, it can hardly be advanced as an argument for the existence of God, any more than the powerful though vague and similar feelings excited by music."
"Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentinent beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful."
This conclusion[6] was strong in my mind about the time, as far I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt -- can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as the possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such a grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.[7]"
"I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."
"Nothing[8] is more remarkable than the spread of scepticism or rationalism during the latter half of my life. Before I was engaged to be married, my father advised me to conceal carefully my doubts, for he said that he had known extreme misery thus caused with married persons. Things went on pretty well until the wife or husband became out of health, and then some women suffered miserably by doubting about the salvation of their husbands, thus making them likewise to suffer. My father added that he had known during his whole long life only three women who were sceptics; and it should be remembered that he knew well a mutitude of persons and possessed extraordinary power of winning confidence. When I asked him who the three women were, he had to own with respect to one of them, his sister-in-law Kitty Wedgwood, that he had no good evidence, only the vaguest hints, aided by the conviction that so clear-sighted a woman could not be a believer...."
"A survey of all 517 NAS members in biological and physical sciences resulted in just over half responding. 72.2 % were overtly atheistic, 20.8 % agnostic, and only 7.0 % believed in a personal God. Belief in God and immortality was lowest among biologists."
If scientists as a general rule are atheists, then they are biased against God, that souls exist, or that there is divine purpose in individual lives or the universe itself. It's self evident.
One problem is science, as the general population understands it, condemns the soul by denying it exists.
Anythings possible - if you believe there are one celled omebas, ape men and ape woman in heaven.
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