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Edited on Sat Oct-29-05 09:45 PM by opiate69
Since the Theory of Evolution touches on the subject of human origins, the Catholic Church naturally has a deep interest in the topic. There are three important questions: How does the creation account in Genesis square with what science can reasonably demonstrate about the origin of the universe and mankind? It doesn't What are the implications of Darwinian anthropology, which understands the human person to be an accidental "thing"? A fundamental lack of understanding of Darwin's work. Surprise, surprise. And what is the scientific status of the claims made by evolutionists who often disagree about major aspects of the theory? What disagreements? Be specific. (hint..they're not nearly as "major" as the author would like you to believe)
Pope John Paul II, who had a deep interest in science, went a few steps beyond his predecessors in laying down some ground rules for approaching these issues. BUlly for him..maybe one of these days the church will actually get in tune with the 20th century..too bad we're alredy in the 21st
First, the Book of Genesis is not a scientific textbook. Truer words may have never before been commited to paper.(Or, in this case, a computer screen) Written in an archaic, prescientific Hebrew idiom, it tells us what God did, not how he did it. What God allegedly did... still waiting fo some corroboration... any corroboratoin The highly figurative language of the "six days" of creation does not preclude a cosmic process that took billions of years to produce carbon-based life in a suburb of the Milky Way. Interesting interpretation... I guess we're not being literalists about this particular part of the Bible then..
The Church has had no problem with evolutionary theory or the idea that the first humans had biological antecedents -- so long as divine causality is not kept out of the big picture. Sorry..that's not how it works... you don't start with a conclusion. The pope added that there had to have been an "ontological leap" from any presumed ancestor to homo sapiens. Again, not particularly scientific.. In other words, we are not simply trousered apes -- something you can verify by trying to explain the Superbowl to the smartest chimpanzee. ?? My wife doesn't understand the Superbowl. Fallacious, specious and wholly worthless sentence.
What raises red flags for Catholics is not evolutionary theory per se, but materialist philosophy disguised as science. Somehow I don't think so.. I'm guessing that what raises the flags for Catholics is the fact that their entire belief structure seems to be based on something for which there is no supporting evidence, and growing amounts of contraindicative evidence. "The Church," wrote Pope John Paul II, "distrusts only preconceived opinions that claim to be based on science, but which in reality surreptitiously cause science to depart from its domain." There is no question that the writings of many Darwinists flunk this test. Unless the author can back this assertion up with examples, he's merely farting in the wind.
People like Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins and Richard Lewontin start with a philosophical premise: There is no God, therefore a purely materialistic explanation of everything, including us, must be true. But this is ideology, not science. Lewontin, who teaches genetics at Harvard, admits as much: "We take the side of science… in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism." Other posters have dealt with this..anything I have to say would be brought to you by the fepartment of redundancy department.
Unfortunately, this crusading materialism leads many Darwinists to make exaggerated claims about what we actually know about the origin of species. Really? It would be nice if for once, instead of making baseless claims, this guy actually presented evidence of said claims. Most textbooks still teach a brand of neo-Darwinism which Gould long ago declared "dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." And Gould is who?? Why do I give a shit what he has to say?
Darwinists also muddle the discussion by failing to distinguish between "Darwinism" and "evolution." The idea of evolution has been around since the ancient Greeks. St. Augustine was a kind of evolutionist, although hardly a Darwinist. What Darwin did was suggest a simple mechanism -- natural selection -- to explain how evolution happened. See my other post But neither the fossil record, nor breeding experiments, nor mathematical probability support the idea that small DNA copying errors "guided" by natural selection created everything from bacteria to human consciousness. Another baseless claim with no evidence.. he seems to be fond of "it's true because I said so" Leaving aside the vexed question of how DNA assembled itself in the first place, a significant minority of scientists (especially outside the Anglo-Saxon world) think that Darwinian selection is a grossly inadequate mechanism for the creation of complex life forms. Let me guess..they're all creationist/IDers? I have to question their objectivity. (Espescially since he, again, fails to identifuy them)
As for the fossil record, Steven Stanley, a paleontologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins, writes in The New Evolutionary Time Table that "the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another." Again, is this guy the be-all, end-all of paleontology? Or is he another ID whack-job? Darwin described the Cambrian explosion 540 million years ago as "inexplicable," and that remains the case. As another poster alluded to, this doesn't automatically mean "Gawd did it",much less "My Gaws did it!!" A man from Mars looking at the record since then would say that species replace other species, rather than evolve into them. Non=sequiter
Several years ago, I had drinks with an evolutionary biologist who works at the Museum of Natural History in New York. I waited until he'd had a couple of beers and then said: "You claim that classical Darwinism is dead, and you're obviously not a creationist. So, what do you believe?" His reply is worth pondering: "Look, we know that species reproduce and that there are different species now than there were a hundred million years ago. Everything else is propaganda." How many years ago? Many,many advances have been takingplace in the last 10 =25 years. (Not to mention, he's quoting a drunk guy fer christ's sake..)
We still lack a hard scientific story of how a batch of inorganic material morphed itself over billions of years into giraffes and trilobites. God of the gaps, god of the gaps... (if I say it enough, it'llbe true!!!) Man is a separate mystery altogether. Special pleading.. you lose. The explanatory glibness of much Darwinian literature retards, rather than helps, the scientific investigation of these issues. No.. the idea of claiming some God is responsible for all the things we do not yet know the mechanisms for is what retards our understanding of the universe. And, evolutionary theory turns out to be a rather weak stick with which to beat on religion. Ha! Only to those who know less than the average 6th grader abour evolution.
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