Are you saying that as a Catholic, you don’t believe intelligence and design are behind the origin of life on Earth?
I know many Catholics personally, and not one of them removes God entirely from Creation. This is, in effect, intelligent design, otherwise known as theistic evolution, that I understand your church to accept. So, I don’t see the logic behind the resistance, from a religious standpoint.
I also don’t see the logic behind precluding any recognition, of the possiblity that an outside intelligence played a role in establishing life on Earth, from a scientific point of view.
Ruling out plausible theories, as to the origin of life on Earth, strikes me as not scientific, and indicates a bias borne of a priori assumptions.
You’re certainly free to believe as you choose. So long as you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son Of God, who died for our sins on the cross, and rose on the third day, and you sincerely repent of your sins, then everything else should ultimately fall into place as a result of that faith. So, anyone claiming that you are not Christian, if the above is true of you, is misguided, and is being excessively harsh. Salvation is what matters.
But, faith leads to seeing the world differently. I didn’t question evolutionary theory until after I became serious about my Christianity, having been raised in a home that was not at all opposed to religious belief, but only attended church on special occasions. I now won’t accept a belief that runs counter to the Word. Acceptance on faith leads to that conclusion, for many.
Was this world created 6,000 years ago? I don’t know, and the Bible itself does not make a specific claim, but sincere, fellow Christians of faith and good intent have made an attempt at calculating the age of Creation by counting generations, and that is what they determined, give or take, some saying up to 10,000 years.
On the other hand, is Creation hundreds of millions or even billions of years old? Without making backflips on translation, meaning and debating about whether a given passage is allegorical or literal, that is not supported by scripture, by any stretch. So, I’ll lean heavily toward a more recent Creation than current scientific assumptions indicate.
Does that invite the ridicule of the world, in the here and now? Obviously, it does. We see it frequently even here on Free Republic, but I’m ok with that ... to a point. The approval of the world seems to matter much more to some, than to others.
I’ll never believe that God and the Bible are ultimately in conflict with honest science, though. Even if the Biblical account of Creation is allegorical as some claim, I’m very dubious of the notion of allegory that does not represent truth. Evolutionary theory renders even allegorical interpretations misleading in many instances, That’s not of God, no matter how you interpret it.
As a Catholic, my personal belief is that God is behind the origin of all life on eartth.
>> This is, in effect, intelligent design, otherwise known as theistic evolution, that I understand your church to accept. <<
The church accepts theist evolution, it doesn't have an official position on it. While theistic evolution is the same thing on paper as intelligent design, the difference is intelligent design presents itself as a scientific theory. My belief that God is the origin of life is not based on scientific studies. It's my own personal spiritual belief. Theistic evolution is not a theory in the scientific sense, but a PERSONAL view about how the science of evolution relates to religious belief and interpretation.
>> So, I don’t see the logic behind the resistance, from a religious standpoint. I also don’t see the logic behind precluding any recognition, of the possiblity that an outside intelligence played a role in establishing life on Earth, from a scientific point of view. <<
There is no known method on earth to test this hypothesis. It's simply a spiritual belief. As I noted, I have no problem bringing up "intelligent design" in a philosophy class. I object to it being taught in a science class because it's not science, just I would object to calculus being used to try and explain good vs. evil. Catholic schools do not teach theistic evolution as part of their science curriculum. They teach the facts of evolution and the scientific theory of its mechanisms. This is essentially the same biological curriculum taught in public schools.
>> Ruling out plausible theories, as to the origin of life on Earth, strikes me as not scientific, and indicates a bias borne of a priori assumptions. <<
It's not a theory, it's a hypothesis that can't be tested. If were to teach every possible explanation for the origin of the universe in a science class, we'd take months going over hundreds of scenarios of how the universe started and how life began. We don't, we go with the most likely version supported with the most amount of scientific evidence. The current science lesson doesn't supposed the involvement of a creator, not does it rule out the possibility. It is silent on the matter.