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To: dsc
So what if God used a method that looks like evolution to create man? When you're God, you do things the way you want to.

The point is that this is associated with something that science simply can not ever fathom, and indeed, will outright deny - the creation of our immortal souls. Where does our immortal soul fit into the scheme of creation via evolution? Science will always overlook or deny eternity ~ isn't that the only reason God made us? - for eternity?

It seems to me that if one holds to the evolution of man from an omeba to a monkey, then a caveman to todays man, somewhere in there, man did not have a soul or did not posess the ability to accept grace - which denied him eternal salvation - and to me, that alone is enough grounds to negate creation via evolution. Don't you agree?

29 posted on 08/29/2004 7:59:41 AM PDT by Stubborn (It is the Mass that matters)
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To: Stubborn

"Don't you agree?"

No, I don't. Until man was ensouled, he was not man. He was merely one more creature.

As you point out, it is the soul that separates us from the animals more than anything else. Right up to the very last generation before ensoulment, man's ancestors would have been animals.


47 posted on 08/29/2004 8:57:56 AM PDT by dsc
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To: Stubborn; dsc; Salvation

The original meaning of "soul" was that which gives life to what is not living. From thence ("anima"), we get the words, "animal" and "animate."

St. Thomas believed that there were three types of souls, plant, animal, and rational. Each type of soul was built on the previous type of soul. Hence, organisms which are animals first had a plant soul. To St. Thomas, it was the gift of the rational soul which makes human beings in the divine image.

But note the formulation: Take dirt, add to it a vegetative soul, and you get a plant. Add to that plant an animal soul, and it is an animal. Add to that animal a rational soul, and it is human. (Aquinas argued that what was "natural" was the design of God!)

But did this all happen in six days? Depends if you insist that six days, by definition, last only 144 hours. I do not.


86 posted on 08/29/2004 10:55:05 AM PDT by dangus
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To: Stubborn
The point is that this is associated with something that science simply can not ever fathom, and indeed, will outright deny - the creation of our immortal souls.

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.

169 posted on 08/29/2004 7:58:30 PM PDT by RonF
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