Posted on 05/09/2011 9:16:50 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
Catholics "cannot accept evolution as we scientists accept it - as an unguided, materialistic process with no goal or direction," said University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne, who writes about science and religion in his blog, "Why Evolution Is True." All agree there is order and majesty in nature. But they disagree over how it got here....
....The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that if the clock were wound back to the age of the dinosaurs and evolution was again allowed to take its course, the process would lead to a completely different mix of living things - a mix unlikely to include us. Some Catholic scientists, such as University of Pennsylvania paleontologist Peter Dodson, say Gould may be right.
"Perhaps we'd get intelligent penguins" the second time around, he said.
Evolution occurred at the hand of God. Starting billions of years ago.
Flame away.
Why not?
It’s God. He can do whatever He wants however He wants. That’s what’s important. Recognizing the hand of the Creator. How He created everything? Well that’s just a fun study for humanity.
glad I got drawn away from the genetics world into physics, et al. Too many of these folks come off sounding like fruitcakes.
This is a truly silly statement.
True science deals only with the results obtained. We exit the realm of science when we proclaim there was or was not a goal or direction.
Science just doesn't have anything to say about this. All science can say is that we don't SEE evidence of goal or direction. But any true scientist will agree that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Actually, this is not a scientific fact.
Physically, scientists contend the universe has no center. So saying the earth is the physical center is no more or less accurate than assigning the center to any other location.
Science has nothing at all to say about whether the earth is "the center of the universe" in a moral, spiritual or importance sense. If the Son of God came here and died for mankind, and potentially for all intelligent beings, then it would be the center of the universe in all these senses.
The Inquirer plays “Fun With Deliberate Misquotes!”
In the scientific world, beliefs belong in church.
Words mean things.
I concur.
So where does that leave in the Incarnation? Think about it before you flame.
Augustine dealt with abiogenesis in one of his works (on the Literal Interpretation of Genesis maybe?), on the question of when flies & maggots were created.
Since they were, by the science of the day, considered to be spontaneously generated by rotting meat, he argued that they may well not have been created actually during the first six days but only created potentially. So during Creation, God created the properties in meat such that when it would rot, maggots would spontaneously form in it.
Granted the faulty scientific premise, his argument is still important theologically.
God chooses to use the natural processes HE CREATED to run and regulate His world mostly (Once in a while He bypasses this in what we call a miracle ). He gave us intelligence to understand these processes.
Evolution is an attempt to understand these processes. We have a crude understanding of it at this time. There is much we don’t understand.
That’s how I interpret Genesis.
The definition of a miracle is God bypassing His natural processes for His own purposes. The Incarnation was indisputably a miracle. Other examples we view in a mirror darkly.
I’m not even sure that Catholics ever meant “Earth was the center of the Universe” in the way some people think they meant it.
Heck, Dante put the Earth at the physical center, yes, but then Hell and Satan at the center of Earth. So technically, Satan was the physical center of the Universe.
Dante also says in Paradiso that it is only to our physical eyes that earth is the center. If we look with spiritual eyes, and of course the medieval believed the spiritual more real than the physical, it was *God* who was the center, and earth at the periphery—the cosmology literally turned inside out.
Atomic decays cannot be predicted and appear to obey a random disintegration frequency.
Mutations cannot be predicted and appear to obey a random distribution pattern (with some mutations being more frequent than others due to mechanistic factors).
A dice roll cannot be predicted and appears to obey a random distribution pattern.
Knowing this it seems strange to me that evolution is always attributed to be random and thus Godless - yet nobody seems to claim the same for Physics or games of chance at the Casino. I.O.W. I have yet to hear someone opine that God's power stops at the Casino door.
So why the big bugaboo about randomness only in regard to biological evolution but not anywhere else?
We could do with a lot of Mother Angelicas, in or out of penguin suit.;-)
What the above does not take into account the party line of the Evolutionists since the beginning, which is 1) human beings are simply intelligent animals and 2) that our lives are meaningless excerpt as they contribute to our survival, and no even our individual lives but the species, and that evenb the species does not deserve the high respect that tradition gives to it. Beasts do not covenant with the Lord; if there is a “higher power,” then we are but slaves to it.
Nothing silly about it all if you expect priests to accept creation as an unguided materialistic process you can forget it. The two fields coexist. Scientists have their head down in the weeds methodically looking at things they can deal with and religious folks look at the bigger picture that includes the spiritual realm.
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