Posted on 09/25/2010 9:47:50 AM PDT by spirited irish
I'd suggest spending a little more time with your Bible, pnh102.
Evolution, at it's core, depends utterly upon death as an objective good, a literal requirement for improvement of basic life forms and every successive and more putatively advanced life form thereafter.
The Bible states that death was not part of God's Creation. The disobedience of man, the original sin of man, brought death into this world, not just for mankind, but all of Creation.
This is inescapable, and it's not something that can be easily and simply segregated to just Genesis and blithely discarded. It's present throughout the Old and the New Testaments. Jesus Christ himself spoke upon it and validated it. He was, after all, the Second Adam, brought into the world to undo the damage done by the first Adam.
There is no dispute that there are atheists among the supporters of evolution, but there are many devout Catholics and followers of other religions who have accepted the Theistic Evolution as a compatible with the Bible.
"The world is not, as people used to think then, a chaos of mutually opposed forces; nor is it the dwelling of demonic powers from which human beings must protect themselves. The sun and the moon are not deities that rule over them, and the sky that stretches over their heads is not full of mysterious and adversary divinities. Rather, all of this comes from one power, from God's eternal Reason, which became -- in the Word -- the power of creation."
"One answer was already worked out some time ago, as the scientific view of the world was gradually crystallizing; many of you probably came across it in your religious instruction. It says that the Bible is not a natural science textbook, nor does it intend to be such. It is a religious book, and consequently one cannot obtain information about the natural sciences from it. One cannot get from it a scientific explanation of how the world arose; one can only glean religious experience from it. Anything else is an image and a way of describing things whose aim is to make profound realities graspable to human beings. One must distinguish between the form of portrayal and the content that is portrayed. The form would have been chosen from what was understandable at the time -- from the images which surrounded the people who lived then, which they used in speaking and in thinking, and thanks to which they were able to understand the greater realities. And only the reality that shines through these images would be what was intended and what was truly enduring. Thus Scripture would not wish to inform us about how the different species of plant life gradually appeared or how the sun and the moon and the stars were established. Its purpose ultimately would be to say one thing: God created the world."
- Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
I’m increasingly of the opinion that Vedic “gods” were some of the Biblical great men of old, men of renown, and all the extra-Biblical, Enochian implications that come with it.
Their knowledge was and is very impressive, and if you’re familiar with the subject, you know that part of the problem was the forbidden knowledge introduced into Creation via teaching mankind.
Vimanas, which sound for all the world like advanced spacecraft. Plausible descriptions of atomic warfare. Makes sense to me. Some find the notion bizarre, that I do acknowledge. It’s not at all bizarre to Biblical literalists who have familiarized themselves.
Absolutely! Final cause is a rebuke to those who hold the opinion that evolution is essentially a random development. Therefore, it must be denied — the only Aristotelian causal category denied/rejected by mainstream contemporary science.
"Temporal non-locality" does not fit into the Newtonian paradigm. In that framework, changes of state of a system in nature can be entailed (caused) only by a preceding local state. What Alex Williams has called "inversely-causal metainformation" is regarded as patently impossible, dismissed out of hand. In effect, his idea was that biological functions are in a certain way "pulled from the future," not produced in the past by means of random development, putting it very crudely. That is to say, biological function depends on the three causal categories of formal, material, and efficient causes, all of which are themselves entailed by the fourth category, final cause.
It was Francis Bacon who kicked final cause out of science. Today, an increasing number of serious thinkers are beginning to recognize that biology cannot be addressed without it. The mathematician/theoretical biologist Robert Rosen is one such.
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your outstanding essay/post!
I noticed the quotation marks. Who exactly are you quoting?
bb & A-G: what is your "take" on the Ratzinger statement in #64, please?
I am fascinated by these discussions and not a little intimidated by my poor grounding in scientific literature.
Darwinian science is an expression of sin. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a black science born of the perversion of God consciousness into human consciousness. As such it is an appropriate belief system for lost souls.
God Consciousness occurs at salvation. When we accept Christ as our savior we receive a new mind and a new body. Until then we were surely lost in death. Now we are reborn into life.
The immeasurable brightness of God illuminates our life and sparks a flame in our soul that can never be extinguished.
My admonition for the Gnostics, the Goths, the progressives, the materialists is simple:
Come out from under the rock that blackens your soul and sufffocates your mind. Come into the light of God’s Truth. He will make all things clear to you.
As you pointed out awhile back, it is humorous when biologists evade final cause by saying apparent function.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
Creation week is described in Genesis 1 in less than 40 sentences. Yet the books written about physical cosmology fill rooms in libraries.
The relationship between them is like the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and the myriad IRS publications explaining the U.S. Tax Code (26 U.S.C.) - the former speaks in broad concepts and the latter, while being derived from it, is expressed in exacting detail with a different purpose in mind - in the case of the IRS, not to leave any money on the table.
I would however quibble over his (or the translator's) use of the term "religious book" because Scriptures contain the words of God which are spirit and life. They are not in the same category with any old religious book, e.g. the Koran, commentaries, hymnals, ancient manuscripts.
It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. - John 6:63
Chesterton once said that "the cosmos is about the smallest hole a man can hide his head in."
A cosmos that was created in under 10,000 years is even smaller. So it will fit nicely between the ears of a five-basics-of-faith fundamentalist.
Thomas Nagel is a great philosopher, and this quote from him, shows how good he is. He basically is admitting his bias ahead of time and alerting his readers to watch for any errors that might have crept in because of it.
This statement is akin to someone who has just experienced a soul-shattering experience such as the death of a child and says something to the effect "I want Christianity to be true, but how could a loving God allow an innocent child to die so young?" It shows that Nagel is still open to both sides of the argument, which is something that very few on the FR boards are on any issue.
Some pope. It's in an encyclical somewhere.
I’m not a Catholic although I admire the Pope a great deal. From what I’ve read, the TOE has so many holes, mistakes, and outright fudging of truth in it that even an intelligent and non-fanatic atheist, if not already wedded to it emotionally, would find it hard to believe.
I do not agree with your interpretation but you are certainly free to have it! ;-)
The Vedas pre-date any Biblical time frame and this has been shown to be factual in various ways, including references in the Puranas to astronomical phenoma (witnessed) that happened, for instance, 26,000 years ago. Now if my computer was not being extremely bad and I had my files on it I maybe could find some sources but alas this is not the case.
I accept the Vedic timeline for creation which is explains the universe as immeasurably more ancient than young earth creationists (IIRC 2 billion years is a round age).
But that said, the number of years is to me less important that the understanding that God is the creator, and there is transcendent purpose and meaning to life, order founded on Divine Intelligence of God, and matter came from life, not life from matter.
And AFAIK, not all Christian creationists are young earth, but I don’t know enough their ideas to know.
When one attempts to answer questions not posed by Darwin it does fall short, however when the problem statement is limited to explaining variation change over time it makes perfect sense. If evolution exists it is because God created it. What other process would God utilize when creating life to remain viable in a dynamic environment.
Dear TXnMA, you asked for my "take" on Pope Benedict's statement (#64).
It takes a penetrating mind (IMHO) to perceive the critical distinction between form (the symbols used) and content (the bolded part of the Holy Father's comment).
It seems important to note that the symbols used, though expressed in a manner that would be understandable to the people of the time, convey universal human experiences that people of our own time share with them. That is, they refer to problems of the universal human condition, in particular problems of the spiritual kind. They are eternally relevant.
I particularly admired this statement:
One cannot get from [the Holy Scriptures] a scientific explanation of how the world arose; one can only glean religious experience from it. Anything else is an image and a way of describing things whose aim is to make profound realities graspable to human beings.The only thing I'd add to that is I think it is possible for scientific explanation to benefit from the "big picture" outline of creation given in the Bible. I don't see how science can attack the problem of origin of the universe without it.
Which is perhaps why so many scientists nowadays prefer to ignore that problem, or simply wish it away (like Stephen Hawking, for instance).
Well FWIW dear brother in Christ!
AGREED. WELL PUT.
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