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To: Zionist Conspirator

And I might ask how you can lump all Catholics with Loisy just because they find nothing in evolution as a secondary cause that is incompatible with Scripture. The original meaning of evolution after all is “unfolding,” as in the unfolding of a flower, or, the process that leads from seed to fruit. What happened, of course, is that infidels like Huxley attached a biological theory to the cause of unbelief, and a century of demotion of the Bible from history to myth.


160 posted on 08/31/2009 11:02:21 AM PDT by RobbyS (ECCE HOMO!)
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To: RobbyS; Zionist Conspirator
And I might ask how you can lump all Catholics with Loisy just because they find nothing in evolution as a secondary cause that is incompatible with Scripture. The original meaning of evolution after all is “unfolding,” as in the unfolding of a flower, or, the process that leads from seed to fruit.

To wit

St. Augustine, on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Book II "Question of the phase in which the moon was made" 15, 30

"God, after all is the author and founder of things in their actual natures. Now whatever any single thing may in some way or other produce and unfold by its natural development through periods of time that are suited to it, it contained it beforehand as something hidden, if not in specific forms and bodily mass, at least by the force and reckoning of nature, unless of course a tree, void of fruit and stripped of its leaves throughout the winter, is then to be called imperfect, or unless again at its origins, when it had still not yet borne any fruit, its nature was also imperfect. It is not only about the tree, but about its seed also that this could not rightly be said; there everything that with the passage of time is somehow or other going to appear is already latent in invisible ways. Although, if God were to make anything imperfect, which he then would himself bring to perfection, what would be reprehensible about such an idea? But you would be quite within your rights to disapprove if what had been begun by him were said to be completed and perfected by another."

The philosophical underpinnings are there I think. Besides, Augustine postulated just such a process at work with flies and other creatures which he thought were created potentially and not actually during the hexamaeron.
164 posted on 08/31/2009 11:27:08 AM PDT by Claud
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To: RobbyS
And I might ask how you can lump all Catholics with Loisy just because they find nothing in evolution as a secondary cause that is incompatible with Scripture. The original meaning of evolution after all is “unfolding,” as in the unfolding of a flower, or, the process that leads from seed to fruit. What happened, of course, is that infidels like Huxley attached a biological theory to the cause of unbelief, and a century of demotion of the Bible from history to myth.

How about the fact that a vast majority of Catholics, both in the world at large and here at FR, are inordinately loud-mouthed evolutionists who are continually shooting off their bazoos about how their church, unlike "Billy Bob's Glory Barn," understands that the souls of scientists and intellectuals are far superior to the souls of simple people so that if someone is going to be alienated from the "universal religion" it is going to be the latter and not the former? And of course it doesn't help when the few inerrantist Catholics left in the world (I'm willing to grant that the other ancient churches were never inerrantist because their religion is purely mythological and symbolic and they have never canonized a Bible in the first place) never demonstrate any disagreement or discomfort with said loud-mouthed brethren?

And btw, you seem to misunderstand my objection to evolution. There are plenty of anti-evolutionists who interpret Genesis allegorically. I object to evolution because it conflicts with the Biblical narrative and because there is no ancient immemorial tradition that agrees with it.

190 posted on 08/31/2009 1:21:34 PM PDT by Zionist Conspirator ('Arammi 'oved 'Avi vayered Mitzraymah vayagor sham bimtei me`at; vayhi-sham legoy gadol `atzum varav)
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