Posted on 10/27/2014 1:47:14 PM PDT by RaceBannon
The Big Bang “doesn’t contradict the intervention of a divine Creator, but demands it,” Pope Francis said Monday morning, because the beginning of the world “is not the work of chaos.” The Pope was addressing the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, gathered in the Vatican to discuss “Evolving Concepts of Nature.” God is not some sort of wizard, said Francis, but rather “the Creator who brought all things into being.” The origin of the world derives directly “from a supreme Principle of creative love,” he added. “Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Indeed. And no competition between the species (the lion lays down with the lamb), thus no "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest" needed to occur.
I believe it is symbolic and provided a simple explanation for a relatvy primitive people. I doubt gods first humans could comprehend grAvity, mass, physics, etc. like much of the bible, stories convey gods message in a way that can be told and retold for generations.
False choice, and beside the point. However, just for fun, where did god come from? See, you don't really solve anything with that, you only kick it down the road one step.
Nope...real choice. Science cannot answer the question and apparently neither can you.
However, I will answer your questions.
God answers that Himself in John 1....In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.....
In the beginning indicates before time. In other words, God has always existed.
So we're back to my original questions. Which is more plausible?
Something comes from nothing,
or In the beginning, God created....
We have detected particles and anti-particles annihilating one another, and particle/anti-particle pairs spawned from nothing, so there’s that.
First of all, we find "something from nothing" in quantum mechanics -- no, don't ask me to explain it, but sub-atomic particles somehow appear "out of nothing".
That can only mean: "nothing" in space is not quite as "nothing" as it appears -- there must be "something" in (or behind) that "nothing".
Second, in Christian theology, God is said to have created the Universe ex nihilo meaning "out of nothing", so it appears that nothingness can be the ground of creation for much more than mere sub-atomic particles.
Third, nowhere does the Bible explain how God created the Universe, or life, or mankind.
Because of that, natural-science is free to investigate and speculate all it wishes, and so long as it remains within the realm of natural-science, it does not necessarily contradict the Bible's accounts.
All we have to do is remember that in God's plan for the Universe, nothing natural is "random", "accidental" or "unintended".
We can be certain of this because the Bible tells us that at the end of each day's creations, God pronounced his own works "good".
So, whatever science discovers about nature, so long as it is accurate and truthful, is what God intended, and is therefore good.
ealgeone: "Life comes from lifelessness."
Science today doesn't really know where life on Earth came from, and so has several unconfirmed hypotheses each attempting in a different way to explain life's origins.
Did life arrive from outer space on a comet, or in ET's starship?
Or did it grow by very slow progression over billions of years from relatively simple non-living organic chemicals to something complex enough that we can designate it as "living"?
Or maybe some combination of those possibilities?
Nobody knows for sure, but it is a most intriguing scientific question...
ealgeone: "Man has somehow, someway evolved from a low form of life to the complex form we are today though there are no examples of that transformation occuring in nature today."
Of course, mankind did not evolve over just a few years directly from some "low form of life" -- nobody ever said that.
The fossil record, and DNA analyses show that mankind's immediate ancestors were at least 99% the same as us, lacking only a few critical ingredients, such as IQ and soul.
However, the fossil record goes back not just millions and tens of millions of years, but in faint form, billions of years to the most basic and simple -- low life forms -- which can still be called "living".
And there is nothing in those records themselves to suggest that later-higher forms grew from anything other than the simpler forms which came before.
ealgeone: "Only the Bible has the correct answer....'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.....'. "
So far as I can tell, nobody here disagrees with that.
The question on the table is: how?
Answers from science seem to me pretty impressive.
That would be analogous to, and even more unlikely than, a glob of water spontaneously splitting into H2 & O2 gases...
I didn’t bother trying to argue the “strangeness” of my statement.
Either you get it, as many have commented on, or you dismiss it (with ridicule), as he did.
No species ever changed, overnight, into another species.
What happens instead is that two populations of the same species get separated by, say, a river or mountain, and can no longer interbreed.
Then conditions on one side of the mountain slowly change from the other side, and so the two populations each slowly, slowly change / adapt / evolve to their new environments.
At first, these changes amount to nothing more than new breeds of the same species, such as new breeds of dogs, or cats, still fully capable of interbreeding.
But over long periods of time -- hundreds of thousands of years -- different breeds become so different, we now classify them as sub-species.
And when, after millions of years, sub-species become unwilling to interbreed in the wild, we call them separate species.
Consider for example zebras, of which there are now breeds & sub-species which do readily interbreed, but also separate species which don't.
Among elephants, whose separations have lasted millions of years, different groups (Indian, African) are classified as not just "species" but whole "genera" -- meaning they cannot physically interbreed.
And the key point to remember here is that all these classifications -- breed, sub-species, genus, family, etc., all these are strictly human constructs intended to simplify our understandings of complex processes.
In summary: no species ever evolved directly into another without first adapting to become separate breeds & sub-species.
while Darwinism denies the creation of beings.
Actually, you and I have no idea whether that is true or not. All we can do is pontificate.
However, as you state it, your position ignores, first the point I made in my last post, that a hermeneutic tradition is needed in addition to the Holy Scriptures because they do not interpret themselves (yes, you assert they do, but I'll comment on that in a moment), second the role of the Holy Spirit, and lastly history.
As to the first point, the notion that "Scripture interprets Scripture" is the motto of a particular hermeneutic tradition given more full expression by the Anglicans in their Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion in Article XX (a statement of a mild version of a sola Scriptura position) which says of the Church, "neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another." This is, in fact, a statement of an important feature of the usual Christian approach to Scriptural interpretation, but that this approach is the correct one is not, itself, provable from the Scriptures.
Other, contrary, hermeneutic traditions exist. The heretic Marcion, for instance, approached the Scriptures very much in the spirit of the latter-developed Muslim notion of naskh -- later Scriptures abrogate earlier Scriptures when there is a contradiction -- so that for Marionites the New Testament blotted out the Old. Gnostic heretics took similar positions.
And even within the broad outline of "Scripture interprets Scripture" one does not arrive at a single authoritative truth without making judgements -- both those of us who believe in the reality of the Eucharist as Christ's very Body and Blood and those who regard it as merely a symbolic memorial point to passages of Scripture and argue that their interpretation is the one which correctly expounds Scripture (without expounding any point in a manner repugnant to another). This, of course, brings us to the next point, the role of the Holy Spirit.
Saying, "The church (believers) is not in authority over God's word - just the opposite," with its reduced notion of the church, is quite true. But the Church, the dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit, does have authority over the Scriptures: it was the Church which decided which of the numerous writings prophesying of and testifying to the earthly ministry of Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ constituted the Canon of Scripture -- not by the authority of believers, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. We Orthodox Christians in our hymnography speak of the Fathers of the Holy Ecumenical Councils as the "harps of the Spirit", attributing their infallible judgement of doctrinal truth (seen only in retrospect by the whole of the Spirit-bearing Faithful assenting to their judgements), not to them as believers, but to the Holy Spirit, who (as the Creed says) spake by the prophets, and who Our Lord promised us would lead us into all truth.
We know that the "Gospel of Thomas" is not Divinely inspired Scripture not because an analysis by discursive reason applying a "Scripture interprets Scripture" hermeneutic tells us it contradicts the canonical Scriptures, but because the Church, led by the Holy Spirit, recognized it was not Divinely inspired and left it out of the canon of Scripture. Had the Church judged otherwise, your hermeneutic principle would be obliged to find variant interpretations of both it and the canonical Scriptures to remove the apparent contradictions, and would not discover its lack of Divine inspiration.
It is the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, not the text of the Scriptures themselves, which provides the correct interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. I recall Fr. Chad Hatfield telling me about discussions he had with a group of Lutheran pastors contemplating embracing the Holy Orthodox Faith. They pressed him on whether the Orthodox Church agreed with the notion that the Scriptures was the complete and sufficient rule of Faith. He agreed, with the proviso: provided they are interpreted as the Holy Orthodox Church has interpreted them.
Nor is it the case that the Holy Apostles proved their doctrine solely by appeal to Scripture, they also proved it by the power of the Holy Spirit -- Peter's shadow healing the sick, for instance. And, to the extent they did prove doctrine by Holy Scripture, it was by providing argumentation that the prophecies of the Old Testament, the Scriptures accepted by their Jewish and God-fearing hearers, pointed to events, as yet not recorded in Scriptures, in the earthly ministry of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Holy Scriptures are the Church's books, some inherited from Israel, the Church of the Old Covenant, some authored under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit within the context of the life of the Church of the New Covenant -- the Gospel was preached by the Holy Apostles before there were written Gospels to record it, the letters of the Holy Apostles were mostly reminders of things said face to face before they were set down in Scripture. The notion that the Holy Spirit stopped leading us into all truth when the books of the canon were fixed cannot be proved from Scripture (which contains no notion of what the bounds of the canon are), and in the Church's experience is simply not true. The doctrines of the Seven Holy Ecumenical Councils and even the canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council that fixed the canon of Scripture are all Divine-inspired truth. The anaphoras of St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great (look them up and read them) are Divinely-inspired truth. Do any of these contradict Scripture? No, but Jesus's promise concerning the Holy Spirit is still active today, and has been all through the long history of the Church since the day of Pentecost in year of His Saving Death and Glorious Resurrection.
Finally history -- the only Scriptures Jesus, the Apostles and the earl(iest) Christian had were the Old Testament, which, by the looks of how it's quoted in the New, they read in Greek in the Septuagint. The Four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the various Apostolic letters, and finally (and controversially) the Apocalypse of St. John the Theologian, circulated, were copied, read, and (again thanks to the Holy Spirit) generally accepted as true testimonies to Our Lord Jesus Christ, from their authoring until they were finally listed by St. Athanasius of Alexandria in a letter in the mid-fourth century and included in a canon of the Council of Carthage in 419, along with the entire Septuagint, in reaction to the Marcionite heresy, which canon was finally given universal force by the disciplinary session of the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 692.
So, a little question: do you accept as canonical Scripture The Third Book of Esdras, The rest of the Book of Esther, The Fourth Book of Esdras, The Book of Wisdom, The Book of Tobias, Jesus the Son of Sirach, The Book of Judith, Baruch the Prophet, The Song of the Three Children, The Prayer of Manasses, The Story of Susanna, The First Book of Maccabees, Of Bel and the Dragon, and The Second Book of Maccabees?
And if not, by what authority? They were good enough for Jesus, His Apostles and the early Christians.
>>In summary: no species ever evolved directly into another without first adapting to become separate breeds & sub-species.<<
The process is called stochasticism FWIIW. Many confuse “random” with “stochastic” although they are quite different.
Not for your benefit: I figure you already know this. More for participants and lurkers. Extending the lesson, the categorization process, as you know, is called “taxonomy.”
Although we can be talking millions of years, we have seen evolution in subway flies in NY which cannot breed with outdoor flies and thus become a sub-species or arguably a different species altogether. This become a matter of categorization using specific criteria, which is why I pointed out that words like “form” or even “species” (don’t get me started on “kind”) are not scientific without proper context.
(/Schoolhouse rock)
The Pontiff said that the Big Bang was not God’s creation? The article did seem to be primarily absorbed with Evolution (the theory).
Perhaps that is to what you refer?
The Pontiff denies “creation ex nihilo”?
Speaking the Universe “into existence” is not an act of creation?
>>The Pontiff said that the Big Bang was not God’s creation? The article did seem to be primarily absorbed with Evolution (the theory).
Perhaps that is to what you refer?<<
On re-read I think I misunderstood your post. I thought you were saying the Pope “created God” as in his argument is humanistic.
I think we agree that, mechanism notwithstanding, God exists outside and inside the Universe, Is, and created everything.
Yes, we do.
Of course it is. Thats the point.
"....nature is not static, but dynamic, it occasionally undergoes changes. This has been revealed both for cosmic evolution and for the evolution of life. This situation can render the identification of universal laws of nature difficult. For example, recent investigations on biological evolution have revealed that nature actively cares for a slow, but steady progress of evolution towards a richer and more sustainable biodiversity."
Either the Pontiff is woefully ignorant or he embraces cosmic evolution which describes an incremental evolutionary ascent from matter to conscious life over vast periods of time.
Creation ex nihilo bespeaks a fall from the Triune God's good creation making cosmic evolution the antithesis (for that and many other reasons) of creation ex nihilo.
John 1:3 identifies our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Holy Trinity as Creator:
“All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” “He was in the world, and the world was made by him” (v. 10). “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (v. 14).
Foremost of His miracles is creation out of nothing—six instantaneous acts or days of creation rather than the billions of years of evolutionary ascent as the wisdom of fallen man holds.
On the miraculous creation of the first man Church Father John Chrysostom writes:
“And God formed man of dust from the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul….the inbreathing communicated to the one created out of earth the power of life, and thus the nature of the soul was formed. What does a living soul mean? An active soul, which has the members of the body as the implements of its activities, submissive to its will.” (Genesis, Creation, and Early Man, Seraphim Rose, p.215)
Gregory of Nyssa adds:
“The body and the soul were formed at the same time—not one before and the other afterwards…” (ibid, p. 218)
Early Church Fathers make the point that the whole of creation---angels, time, matter, fire, wind, water, herbs, trees, all life and conscious life---was brought into existence from non-existence (ex nihilo), not from anything already in existence as a result of Cosmic Eggs (Big Bang)or from the Essence or Nature of God. Therefore creation does not have the same essence as God and is not a part of God as most ancient and modern mystical pantheists (i.e., Teilhard & his followers such as Leonard Sweet, an Evangelical Protestant) believe.
On July 24, 2009 Pope Benedict XVI delivered a homily in northern Italy’s Cathedral of Aosta before Vespers. Toward the end of his homily he praised the mystical pantheist French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as a model for priests, attributing to him the idea of a cosmic liturgy, which he said was something they should aim to achieve:
“So our address to God becomes an address to ourselves: God invites us to join with him, to leave behind the ocean of evil, hatred, violence and selfishness and to make ourselves known, to enter into the river of his love….”Let Your Church offer herself to You as a living and holy sacrifice. This request, addressed to God, is made also to ourselves. It is a reference to two passages from the Letter to the Romans. We ourselves, with our whole being, must be adoration and sacrifice and, by transforming our world, give it back to God.” (Benedict XVI Praises Cosmic Liturgy of Teilhard de Chardin; traditioninaction.org)
Teilhard (1881-1955) was a heretic, an evolutionary scientist, New Age Hindu-style mystical pantheist whose Omega conception bears a striking resemblance to Brahman, an anthropomorphized energy field known from ancient times as the Abyss, Void, One Substance, Universal Mind and with Leonard Sweet, Quantum Void.
In our time neo-pagan and mystical pantheist evolutionary cosmologies are embraced and advanced within the whole body of the Christian Church.
Thanks for an interesting argument.
IIRC, in 331 AD, after the council of Nicea, a certain recognized historian, working from a great library of materials -- Bishop Eusebius of Caersaria (lived circa 260 to 340 AD) -- was ordered by Emperor Constantine to produce 50 copies of the Christian Bible, which he did, and though apparently none of those survive, they form the basis of today's canon.
This is important for a number of reasons, not least that Eusebius himself was not an ardent Nicean, and so we can believe, would not have gone out of his way to insert pro-Nicean language into his Bible-texts.
Instead, transmitted the texts as he received them, and as they were acknowledged at that time to be complete and accurate.
I think we can take from this not only that the scholar Eusebius was an honest man, but also that the New Testament canon was well known and recognized at the time.
So all those other books you listed, had already been evaluated and found unorthodox, and all this long before the Church at Rome (or any centralized church) got involved with the canon.
My point here is that the Roman Church did not create the Bible and so has no special authority over it's interpretation.
So who exactly does have authority?
Well, seems to me that tradition should carry a lot of weight -- Church fathers, Augustine, Aquinas, etc. -- except where they can be shown by superior scholarship to have been weak.
Beyond that each Church must decide which traditions provide it the greatest inspirations.
As for the Holy Spirit's concerns about the fine points & iotas of human theology... well we must suppose the Lord has a great sense of humor, watching our efforts the same way a parent watches a toddler learning to walk & talk... :-)
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