Posted on 10/29/2014 2:22:07 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
.... Pope Francis, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, said that Darwinian evolution is real, and so is the Big Bang....
...the new Pope's quasi-heretical claim isn't anywhere near the first of its kind. The church first brought evolution into the fold in 1950 with the work of Pope Pius XII, writes io9. “At the same time, Catholics take no issue with the Big Bang theory, along with cosmological, geological, and biological axioms touted by science.”
(Excerpt) Read more at smithsonianmag.com ...
I will take this one. Yes, God COULD have created Adam via evolution. But we don't have to wonder if this is how it happened, because in His Word, he lays it out. Adam was created from dust.
All the creatures were created with all the necessary ability to adapt and form all the variations we see today.
This is nothing new. I went to Catholic school in the 1950s. They taught evolution and creation even back then. The Church does not have a problem with evolution. Only those Christians who believe in the 'young earth' interpretation of the Bible have a problem with it.
As much as atheists want people to think so, evolution does not disprove Creation, nor does Creation disprove evolution.
It's plausible to deny it as well. Because "evolution" usually refers to some naturalistic process by which man arose without any supernatural act. So to say 'God could create Adam via evolution' is like saying 'God could create Adam without God.' Which is a contradiction.
So, you are saying that God could not have known the result of His own creation if He utilized the Big Bang mechanism as described by science? I thought He was omnipotent. Also, Vatican I’s condemnation of deism does not imply that this idea is incorrect.
Further, I never stated that deism must hold universally or that everything in the universe is deterministic. Human free will throws a monkey wrench into things, and it is in the realm of human interaction that God would intervene. Why could He not have created the physical universe via a process where He set it all up and let it run? Why is there ANY spiritual significance to the method of creation of the physical universe anyway?
A fact contradicted by scripture, the words of Christ himself, and 1900 years of Catholic doctrine.
Do you deny that God could have produced Adam’s body via evolution?
No, I deny that he used a natural process. He Created Adam from dust. He did not endow a monkey with humanity.
Unless Adam was a special creation MADE, (not evolved) in the image of God, then Christianity is nothing more than a cruel joke and a devilish fraud.
No, those are your views.
Also, Vatican I’s condemnation of deism does not imply that this idea is incorrect.
It does if you are Catholic.
Human free will throws a monkey wrench into things, and it is in the realm of human interaction that God would intervene.
God has free will too.
-— . Adam was created from dust. -—
It’s not a detailed explanation of the process, leaving a lot of room for speculation.
Darwin didn’t invent evolutionary theory. St. Augustine believed something similar. Darwin’s novel theory was “survival of the fittest” as a mechanism of evolution. St. Thomas Aquinas believed in Special Creation in separate ages. That’s where I’m leaning these days.
God is the Author of Scripture and Creation. They must conform to each other, since God is Truth Itself. We are far from an obvious synthesis.
You are looking at it too simplistically. Suppose life arose from non-living matter, ie. dust. This first simple life then evolved into more complex life, eventually leading to the physical body of humans. Suppose God created the conditions that would inevitably lead to this occurrence. Would it not then be correct to state that He created humans from dust? The Bible states simply that God created humans from dust. It does not say that there were no intermediate steps.
Remember, the Bible was written to give moral guidance to a pre-industrial tribe with little scientific knowledge. Any knowledge of the world that the Hebrews had came from observation and common sense. Modern science shows that common sense is not always an accurate guide to the way the universe works. Essentially, from the viewpoint of scientific knowledge, the Hebrews were children. When you explain things to your children, do you do so using the complete modern scientific understanding, or do you find a simpler way to explain things that your children can understand? Why would God not do the same for the Hebrews? The Bible explains what the Hebrews needed to know, namely that God created everything. They lacked the scientific understanding to grasp the full details.
If you invent a machine that produces a useful product, are you not the one who made that product? Must you really credit the machine with making the product? Similarly, if God used natural process, which He created, to produce humans, would we not still state that God created humans? Why does it really matter how He did so? Why must Christianity be a fraud if God utilized natural processes to make human bodies? Nothing in Christianity is dependent on how human bodies were originally produced. The only thing that is relevant is that once humans existed, the first humans sinned. Because of this Jesus’ sacrifice was required to redeem us from our sin. Where is there a requirement that our physical bodies must have been supernaturally created?
The Biblical and scientific accounts are easily reconcilable, and the Pope is a bum.
Oh, and BXVI is also an evolutionist. Every pope since Pius XII has been an evolutionist, and maybe before then.
My apologies, but I don’t really get what you’re saying then. You claim that there’s no evidence that the universe is deterministic. Why would that matter unless you are using that to make the claim that it would not be possible for God to set up the universe with the full knowledge that it would lead to humanity? Further, I don’t understand why you bring God’s free will into it. I point to human free will as a reason for the necessity of divine intervention into a physical world which would need no such intervention. God is omnipotent, so why would He not have set up the universe in a way that it would produce His desired result without having to tinker with it? He could certainly do this, right? Sure, maybe He just likes to tinker, but I’m not the one claiming that your view is definitively wrong. I’m just claiming that my own view is reasonable and not contradicted by either Scripture or science.
(BTW: I’m not Catholic, so Vatican I’s condemnation means nothing to me. Further, as I have tried to explain, perhaps poorly, I am not claiming deism, so the condemnation of deism is irrelevant anyway.)
Because you said: "why could an omnipotent and omniscient being get everything started (ie Big Bang), set up initial condition (laws of science), and let it all work out", as if the universe was a big pile of differential equations and all one needs to do is put in some initial conditions and it will all "work out".
I don’t understand why you bring God’s free will into it
God has free will--he can choose to do works of divine power or miracles, like parting the Red Sea, if He wants to.
I’m not Catholic, so Vatican I’s condemnation means nothing to me.
Yes, but you are asking others, so others are telling you why.
Excerpt from Augustine's "On 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."
Because Deism is false, and this is not the 18th century or the 17th, so there's no reason for such views, and furthermore it is not fitting to describe acts of God's free will as "tinkering".
So then, God cannot create the universe, get it started and have it inevitably produce the result He wants? You stated earlier that this is not what you are claiming, but your last response certainly seems to imply that God could not have done so.
As for God’s free will, I certainly don’t deny that God can miraculously intervene whenever He wishes. That’s irrelevant to the point. The point is whether or not He actually did so, especially regarding the physical universe. My contention was simply that God could have set things up so that they ended up the way He wanted them to. Since that’s the case, there would have been no need for Him to tinker with His creation. That would be true until humans with their free will developed. Once that occurs, tinkering might well be necessary because we haven’t behaved in the way God wants us to.
As to Vatican I, again I find it irrelevant both because Vatican I is a human construct, and therefore prone to error, and because it’s condemning something that I am not claiming anyway.
This is deism, or deterministic mechanism (as Cardinal Mercier calls it) and it is a false view of God and nature.
51. But if the angelic mind can grasp simultaneously all that the sacred text sets down separately in an ordered arrangement according to causal connection, were not all these things also made simultaneously, the firmament itself, the waters gathered together and the bare land that appeared, the plants and trees that sprang forth, the lights and stars that were established, the living creatures in the water and on the earth? Or were they rather created at different times on appointed days?As anyone can see from the above quote, Augustine's "accommodation theory" is grounded in the idea that God spoke of days because we would not be able to comprehend the instant formation of everything all at once with built-in principles of orderly growth and development for each species. As for the actual age of the earth, he's one of us backwoods types, a true young earther. From his City of God, Book 12:
Perhaps we ought not to think of these creatures at the moment they were produced as subject to the processes of nature which we now observe in them, but rather as under the wonderful and unutterable power of the Wisdom of God, which reaches from end to end mightily and governs all graciously.[66] For this power of Divine Wisdom does not reach by stages or arrive by steps. It was just as easy, then, for God to create everything as it is for Wisdom to exercise this mighty power. For through Wisdom all things were made, and the motion we now see in creatures, measured by the lapse of time, as each one fulfills its proper function, comes to creatures from those causal reasons[67] implanted in them, which God scattered as seeds at the moment of creation when He spoke and they were made, He commanded and they were created.[68]
52. Creation, therefore, did not take place slowly in order that a slow development might be implanted in those things that are slow by nature; nor were the ages established at the plodding pace at which they now pass. Time brings about the development of these creatures according to the laws of their numbers, but there was no passage of time when they received these laws at creation. Otherwise, if we think that, when they were first created by the Word of God, there were the processes of nature with the normal duration of days that we know, those creatures that shoot forth roots and clothe the earth would need not one day but many to germinate beneath the ground, and then a certain number of days, according to their natures, to come forth from the ground; and the creation of vegetation, which Scripture places on one day, namely the third, would have been a gradual process.
And then how many days were necessary for birds to fly, if they proceeded from the earliest stages through the periods of natural growth to the sprouting of feathers and wings? Or perhaps were eggs only created, when on the fifth day, according to the scriptural narrative, the waters brought forth every winged bird according to its kind? If this can be maintained on the ground that in the liquid substance of the eggs there already existed all that grows and develops in the required course of days, because there were already present the numerous reason-principles implanted in an incorporeal manner within corporeal creatures, why could not the same thing have been said before the appearance of eggs, when in the humid element these same reason-principles were produced, from which winged creatures might be born and develop in the time required for the growth of each species?
In this narrative of creation Holy Scripture has said of the Creator that He completed His works in six days; and elsewhere, without contradicting this, it has been written of the same Creator that He created all things together.[69] It follows, therefore, that He, who created all things together, simultaneously created these six days, or seven, or rather the one day six or seven times repeated. Why, then, was there any need for six distinct days to be set forth in the narrative one after the other? The reason is that those who cannot understand the meaning of the text, He created all things together, cannot arrive at the meaning of Scripture unless the narrative proceeds slowly step by step.
Available here: http://www.andrsib.com/ch/litgen.htm
Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. For some hold the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, that they have always been. Thus Apuleius says when he is describing our race, Individually they are mortal, but collectively, and as a race, they are immortal. And when they are asked, how, if the human race has always been, they vindicate the truth of their history, which narrates who were the inventors, and what they invented, and who first instituted the liberal studies and the other arts, and who first inhabited this or that region, and this or that island? They reply, that most, if not all lands, were so desolated at intervals by fire and flood, that men were greatly reduced in numbers, and from these, again, the population was restored to its former numbers, and that thus there was at intervals a new beginning made, and though those things which had been interrupted and checked by the severe devastations were only renewed, yet they seemed to be originated then; but that man could not exist at all save as produced by man. But they say what they think, not what they know.
They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed. And, not to spend many words in exposing the baselessness of these documents, in which so many thousands of years are accounted for, nor in proving that their authorities are totally inadequate, let me cite only that letter which Alexander the Great wrote to his mother Olympias, giving her the narrative he had from an Egyptian priest, which he had extracted from their sacred archives, and which gave an account of kingdoms mentioned also by the Greek historians.
Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120112.htm
So while we may be impressed with the idea of "accommodation" (I personally am not) as a way to reconcile the fleeting theories of mortal men with the eternally true revelation of God, it is an ill fit to use Augustine as a support for such compromise (a better term), when the whole of his argument was that God has sufficient power to perform creation of all things instantaneously, and does not need "stages" or "steps," but imbues His creations with internal laws, the same sort of laws that set boundaries on the Genesis kinds, but allow those same "kinds" to grow and thrive in the environment for which He created them.
As for Augustine being a proto-Protestant? Sure, why not. Much of what he has written would be welcome in many a Baptist pulpit (or Presbyterian, Reformed, Lutheran, etc). Not everything, to be sure. If he were alive today and a nearby neighbor, we'd invite him over to a one of our pot-luck picnics and have a friendly chat about some problem areas, but also rejoice in the many important things we held in common, not the least of which was his keen desire to harmonize his teaching on Genesis with Scripture, not with fad pseudo-science:
Whoever, then, does not accept the meaning that my limited powers have been able to discover or conjecture but seeks in the enumeration of the days of creation a different meaning, which might be understood not in prophetical or figurative sense, but literally and more aptly, in interpreting the works of creation, let him search and find a solution with God's help. I myself may possibly discover some other meaning more in harmony with the words of Scripture.Peace,
Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis 4.28.45, as quoted in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 32/4 (December 1989) p 464, available here: http://www.etsjets.org/files/JETS-PDFs/32/32-4/32-4-pp457-464_JETS.pdf
(BTW, interested readers are recommend to download rather than open the pdf directly, as it was hanging my browser until I just gave up and downloaded it. I'd have used a more direct citation, but couldn't find a complete copy of "Literal Meaning of Genesis" anywhere.)
“After all, Church doctrine is a flexible document that needs to change with the times.”
Yes, for instance, I think we would all agree that it is no longer fashionable to burn heretics at the stake.
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