Wow. Just .... wow. Wonder if this is "official"...

[Strong Atheist]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5705331.ece

http://www.daylife.com/words/Archbishop_Gianfranco_Ravasi

[Deep13]

1. Still trying to square the circle.

Conservative Christians deny evolution exists. Liberal ones refuse to admit that the process of evolution precludes divine intervention. So what does god do? Is it the random mutation or the environment-driven natural selection?

[dcsmart]

9. Thanks for the info....great post N/T

[Strong Atheist]

13. Belated Welcome to DU! nt.

[struggle4progress]

17. By definition, scientific work cannot appeal to non-naturalistic supernaturalities

so it is simply tautological that no scientific approach to human experience could ever reveal aspects that cannot be adequately discussed in terms of naturalistic materialism. That is simply a logical matter, however one answers the question Can all aspects of our experience be adequately discussed in terms of naturalistic materialism?

As a theological liberal, I therefore concur in part and dissent in part from your claim that the process of evolution precludes divine intervention. I concur in the sense, that "process of evolution" (in the scientific sense) necessarily admits no divine aspect, since it is by definition an investigation involving only naturalistic materialism. I dissent in the sense, that the "world" (as we actually encounter it) has no obligation to conform to our preconceptions of it

[Deep13]

19. That is a factual assertion that is completely unjustified.

There is no reason to suppose supernature exists. That is just a made-up word you are using to justify indefensible beliefs.

The very fact that something is within our experience means it can be investigated using scientific methods. To put it another way, if we are able to experience supernature or its effect, then it interacts with our senses and the matter becomes a scientific question. If one cannot experience it, then it is an ad hoc explanation to avoid the obvious conclusion that there is no god and there cannot be a god.

Observation is what matters, not logical gymnastics.

The evidence is that mutations in genetic code occur randomly. Randomly means there is no purposeful directing influence. Most of those changes are killed off because they are incompatible with physical reality. The physical environment does it and not any sort of master plan. So what is there left for a god to do?

[struggle4progress]

21. You're confusing two different questions: the first is whether all aspects

of our experience can be described by naturalistic and materialistic methods; the second is whether science could shed any light on any aspects of our experience, that were not describable by naturalistic and materialistic methods

Whether one answers the first question positively or negatively, the answer to the second question must be negative: by definition, science involves only naturalistic and materialistic methods

In particular, scientific methods really cannot shed light on the first question: one is (of course) entirely free to take the stand that you take (namely, that everything of interest can be described by naturalistic and materialistic methods); such a stand obviously precludes the possibility of a positive answer to the first question -- but it precludes a positive answer simply by assuming from the beginning that no positive answer is possible

Since science cannot shed any light on the first question, whatever stand one takes on the first question is irrelevant to the practice of science -- so the discussion of a scientific matter should never involve philosophical disputes over the issue Are there aspects of our experience that cannot be addressed by scientific methods?

The failure to distinguish logically, between the two questions, is at the root of many pointless and heated "discussions" about evolution: the claim, that the world and the humans in it are merely natural/material phenomena and cannot be understood in any other way, bothers many opponents of evolution; but (of course) evolutionary theory cannot involve any other presumption -- because evolutionary theory is a branch of science, and science (by definition) involves only naturalistic and materialistic methods

Thus, although you claim I am making some factual assertion, I am actually just pointing to a logical and philosophical distinction

[Deep13]

26. It's a circular argument.

The supernatural is so because it cannot be observed. It cannot be observed because it's supernatural. So what is the starting point for this? Why even discuss it like it's a real possibility when no one has ever found anything that could possibly be supernatural?

First of all, how can something be of interest to us if we have no way of knowing about it? The only way for supernature to exist and not be subject to observation and fact-based investigation is if it either has nothing to do with this universe or else it is so removed from us as to be imperceptible. If true, we have no reason to suppose it is anything more than a wishful attempt to hold onto ancient superstitions when they have been pretty conclusively excluded.

Whether or not the supernatural exists is a question of fact. It either does or does not. Even if we have no way of ever finding out, it is still a question with one right answer only in principle. The problem, as I have said, is that the whole idea of supernature is a made up term. There is no reason at all to suppose it exists. And since that is the case, we have to assume it does not. What makes science different from other branches of philosophy and contrary to theology is that its findings are grounded in the observation of objective fact. However you choose to characterize the question, we end up at the same point. If a human experience cannot in principle be investigated scientifically, then it is not a real experience. Even out imaginations have their basis in physical reality. Most of the claims of religion including the alterted states of perception people call religious experiences have been investigated scientifically and god is just not the right explanation.

[struggle4progress]

28. For the purposes of this subthread, I do not care whether you or anyone else

"believes in the supernatural"

My point is simply that your argument is as circular as the view that you denounce: namely, you begin from the assumption that all human experience can be understood by naturalistic/materialistic methods, and from there you want to argue that there is nothing supernatural, since scientific investigation does not reveal anything supernatural -- but (in fact) your conclusion is the same as your starting assumption

If A says "We know that invisible penguins do not exist because no one has ever photographed one," and B replies, "Of course, no one should expect to obtain a photograph of an invisible penguin," then B is raising a valid logical objection to A's reasoning: whether or not B believes invisible penguins exist, A apparently proposes to investigate a question by inapplicable methods

If you dislike "invisible penguins" as an example, it is possible to substitute other terms, that are more intellectually rigorous: if, for example, A says "We know that measurable cardinals do not exist because no one has ever found any physical evidence of their existence," then many mathematicians (whether or not they believe measurable cardinals exist) will agree that the speaker is badly confused, and that questions about the existence of measurable cardinals cannot be resolved by physical observations -- because the sense in which measurable cardinals "exist" or "do not exist" is not amenable to study by naturalistic/materialistic methods

[Deep13]

30. I fully understand your argument.

I just don't think it has any validity.

I'm not suggesting that photography is the way to investigate claims of invisible penquins. I am suggesting that before we accept invisible penguins as a possibility, there has to be SOME reason to think they exist. Otherwise it is meaningless to talk about the best way to detect them. If there are penguin footprints, scat and noises in a location where penguins are never seen despite a continuous effort to locate them, then it might be worth considering. If further investigation reveals invisible feathers, egg shells and carcasses, then it would be safe to conclude that invisible penguins exist. It would be explicable from an evolutionary point of view because invisibility is useful in evading predators. (That is, it agrees with known biological theory.) Now, the existence of invisible animals would cause problems for physicists who have to explain how that is even possible, but that would not negate the evidence for their existence.

The point is that science IS the right tool for determining theological questions as they are ultimately questions about the universe. And questions concerning the ultimate origin of life, the universe and everything are fundamentally scientific. We may be looking for invisible penguins with cameras, but that is a limitation of technique, not a limitation in principle. And even if we never figure out how to build an invisible bird detector, it does not mean that theology IS that thing. The universe does not owe us an explanation. Science has explained a lot in a very short time. Theology has explained absolutely nothing and in fact has actively opposed real discovery. And no philosophical logic can trump objective fact.

And in the case of the divine, the supernatural or whatever you want to call it, we have not found the invisible egg shells or heard the penguin noises from an apparently empty beach. The gaze of science is a lot more probing than you are giving it credit for. At this point, if there were invisible penguins, or whatever it is you are talking about (you are changing footing with each post), we would know about them. As it is, the penguin noises are just the sea and the footprints and scat are really just natural rock formations caused by erosion.

This whole argument is still nothing more than an effort to rationalize belief in the impossible.

[struggle4progress]

33. Apparently you don't understand my argument at all, since you attribute to me

views I do not hold and which I have never stated. The theology that interests me does not ultimately involve questions about the universe or the origin of life. Nor do you seem to have any real basis for your assessment of my actual views of the scientific method

[Deep13]

36. I guess it isn't possible for me to understand and still disagree.

:eyes:

[Strong Atheist]

37. Lol! nt.

[Warpy]

2. This is really old news

as the Vatican came to terms with evolution many years ago. They found ample wiggle room to insert a grand puppeteer into the process, so the theory was compatible with the rest of their nonsense.

[Occam Bandage]

8. "Grand puppeteer" aside, they've also come out against "Intelligent Design."

They're making an across-the-board effort to ensure that nothing they say is at direct odds with testable, observable reality.

[Warpy]

10. One wonders if they finally learned their lesson about that

so many years after they destroyed both Galileo and Copernicus.

[Occam Bandage]

11. I think their collapsing levels of support in Europe are probably the driving force. nt

[Chulanowa]

3. Ah, gotta love it. Our Lady of the Perpetual Salad Bar

I have yet to understand why so many Christians will pooh-pooh levitical law on up to the rules set forth by Jesus himself as "allegorical" but approach Genesis as the absolute literal truth.

I mean hey, I don't think anyone should beat their own children to death with rocks for backtalk, either, but I can't wrap my head around taking "God says do this, this way, at this time" as allegory, and take an obvious allegory as unquestionable fact.

[zbdent]

6. I still can't figure out

why we have a transcript of God speaking with the only human in existence, but we don't have it on the record what he called the dinosaurs when he was naming the beasts of the Earth presented to him by God ...

and why one of the holiest days of Christianity is based on when a full moon appears?

[FLyellowdog]

4. I wonder how many people besides myself are missing the "God Gene"?

:shrug:

[Sandrine for you]

5. it had even been proposed to ban Intelligent Design

Organisers of a papal-backed conference next month marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species said that at first it had even been proposed to ban Intelligent Design from the event, as “poor theology and poor science”. Intelligent Design would be discussed at the fringes of the conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University, but merely as a “cultural phenomenon”, rather than a scientific or theological issue, organisers said.

[Occam Bandage]

7. The Catholics have been pretty good on science in the past decade,

their paranoia regarding "the dignity of life" aside.

[laconicsax]

12. You have to love the first comment in the Times article:

Well, hmm, considering it says in the Bible that God spoke everything into being.. I would have to say that evolution is a false and the Bible to be truth. If you can't understand how powerful God is than that is just sad. Cos I truly believe that God did speak tings into being.

Remember, evolution is "a false" because the Bible says that God created animals and then humans, but once he created a man out of dirt, he thought that he should create other animals, and then a woman.

[Occam Bandage]

14. Literalists rarely bother reconciling Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. nt

[laconicsax]

15. Or most other glaring contradictions.

[struggle4progress]

16. Details of Vatican evolution conference announced

Vatican City, Feb 10, 2009 / 12:03 pm (CNA).- The Vatican officially announced today that a conference on evolution will take place in Rome this coming March. The goal of the conference is to re-establish a dialogue between faith and science about evolution ...

The conference will be divided into nine sessions Fr. Marc Leclerc S.J., the director of the congress, explained. The sessions will address a myriad of issues, such as: "the essential facts upon which the theory of evolution rests, facts associated with palaeontology and molecular biology; ... the scientific study of the mechanisms of evolution, ... and what science has to say about the origin of human beings."

Fr. Leclerc added that attention will also be given to "the great anthropological questions concerning evolution ... and the rational implications of the theory for the epistemological and metaphysical fields and for the philosophy of nature."

Two of the sessions will also be devoted to studying evolution "from the point of view of Christian faith, on the basis of a correct exegesis of the biblical texts that mention the creation, and of the reception of the theory of evolution by the Church," Fr. Leclerc said ... http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=15041

[skepticscott]

18. Still irritating

that the Vatican seems to think that evolutionary science isn't really complete and fully acceptable until it has their imprimatur. Not to mention the idiotic implication that it was Catholic thelogians who beat Darwin to the punch, as if anyone has ever claimed that Darwin was the first one to come up with the idea that species had evolved.

And WTF is up with this:

He said it was time that theologians as well as scientists grappled with the mysteries of genetic codes and “whether the diversification of life forms is the result of competition or cooperation between species”

Exactly what are theologians going to do to investigate the genetic code?? Scientists have been grappling with it for 50 years and understand more and more about it all the time. Theologians can't even make that claim about the purely theological issues that are supposed to be their purview, so how the heck are they going to be any use of all to scientific inquiry?

[edhopper]

20. So the Church was wrong about this

What else have they been wrong about?

Rhetorical question.

[struggle4progress]

22. When did the Catholic church ever take a stand against evolution?

[edhopper]

23. well...

July 12, 2005, at 6:19 PM ET

In a New York Times op-ed, Roman Catholic Cardinal Christoph Schönborn wrote that it's a misconception that the Catholic Church believes in evolution. While conceding that "evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true," Schönborn asserted that natural selection is not compatible with church
teachings.

"In the 1920s, the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made a controversial attempt to integrate the new science with Catholic beliefs. His unorthodox views were silenced, however, when his Jesuit superiors shipped him off to do research in China."

[JerseygirlCT]

25. The Jesuits have always been the best scholars and teachers

because they're willing to challenge the status quo.

[edhopper]

27. How does shipping a

Priest off to China when he questions the orthodoxy challenge the status quo?

[JerseygirlCT]

32. I imagine those in the leadership know from whom they've got to take

their marching orders. The RC hierarchy usually attracts the syncophants to those positions.

The rank and file Jesuits, however, have been long known for their willingness to put academic values first.

[struggle4progress]

34. Since I'm neither Catholic nor theologian, and since I do not speak for the Vatican, the best

I can do is to read the available documents and try to understand what is being said

The Pontifical Bible Commission in 1905 considered questions of the following sort, regarding the literal interpretation of Genesis:

... Whether, since in writing the first chapter of Genesis it was not the mind of the sacred author to teach in a scientific manner the detailed constitution of visible things and the complete order of creation, but rather to give his people a popular notion, according as the common speech of the times went, accommodated to the understanding and capacity of men, the propriety of scientific language is to be investigated exactly and always in the interpretation of these? -- Reply: In the negative ...

Whether in that designation and distinction of six days, with which the account of the first chapter of Genesis deals, the word (dies) can be assumed either in its proper sense as a natural day, or in the improper sense of a certain space of time; and whether with regard to such a question there can be free disagreement among exegetes? -- Reply: In the affirmative ... http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/p100.htm

Such documents are difficult to parse: the POV of the PBC seems to have been that the Bible is true and cannot be dismissed as mythology but that both literal and non-literal allegorical readings could sometimes be simultaneously acceptable.

The 1950 encyclical Humani Generis of Pius XII is willing to countenance the study of evolution, provided that one does not adopt as a result a completely materialistic view that ignores the Church's traditional teachings on issues such as sin and salvation:

... the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God ... http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html

I do not know whether the Schonborn op-ed, that you reference, says what you think it says, though perhaps you read Schonborn's intention correctly: his objections (as indicated by his papal quotations) seem to be to the notion that our world is entirely materialistic and random

July 7, 2005
Finding Design in Nature
By CHRISTOPH SCHONBORN

... "It is clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity" ...

"We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance" ...

"We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary" ...

http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/catholic/schonborn-NYTimes.html

Schonborn seems to indicate that he is concerned primarily with certain philosophical conclusions that might be associated with modern science. Since science is concerned entirely with material descriptions of the material world, one cannot expect science itself to countenance non-material explanations; but perhaps there is a coherent philosophical view that merely regards that as an unavoidable limit on what scientific methods can accomplish. The objection to the idea that the world is "random" appears to be based on a very common notion of "random" -- which has connotations of pointlessness and incomprehensibility. Various mathematicians have sought other meanings of "random": Chaitin, for example, has investigated this topic, and has on his http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/">webpage a relevant Liebniz quote But when a rule is extremely complex, that which conforms to it passes for random and if you search the site carefully you can find some interesting pages on the topic. Such careful intellectual examination of the notion suggests that "random" might merely be a word used to describe phenomena which are currently beyond our ability to understand computationally

[JerseygirlCT]

24. Having been raised as RC, this doesn't really come as a surprise to me

We were taught evolution, and that there was no conflict in understanding that was likely the way life developed. For believers, it wasn't hard to understand or see the hand of God in that, as well.

Then again, coming from Ratzinger, anything that places them beyond the 15th century is good news.

[moobu2]

29. Just where would you find the hand of god in evolution?

OR in anything else in the universe for that matter? Obviously, here’s no such thing, but if you think you have any evidence that there is, I’d really like to hear it.

[JerseygirlCT]

31. Obviously I have none of the "evidence" that you'd want to see

(these same old arguments are getting so very tiresome, really).

Those who believe will see a creator behind the process at some point. Maybe behind the very beginnings of the universe and in the vast design of it all.

There's nothing scientific about that. But then again, faith and science are two entirely different things, and that doesn't mean they're oppositional things. Which is my point. My Catholic education never stinted on science, never attempted to present faith as science or vice versa. So this comes as no surprise. A creationist would have gotten the "F" he or she deserved if she or he attempted to present the biblical account of creation as fact, not allegory.

[Strong Atheist]

35. "Then again, coming from Ratzinger, anything that places them beyond the 15th century is good news."

Agreed!