AMEN!!! to that, dear Matchett-PI!
I suspect allmendream may be a little confused — AFAIK, neither Pope John Paul II nor Benedict XVI has ever said that human beings come "from pre-existent and living matter." Neither man is hostile to the idea of biological evolution. But that is not the same as saying that the origin of life is (tautologically) pre-existently living matter. If this is what Darwin's theory requires, then neither of the Holy Fathers could plausibly be called a Darwinist.
Matter is dumb and lifeless. It is not the "source" of the living body, but the "building blocks" of it....
The "dust of the earth" was pretty much nothing, until God breathed life into it....
Gagdad Bob hits it out of the ballpark yet again! Thanks, Matchett, for the ping!
The Pope has said that “there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.”.
“Proof” and “reality” - yeah - that is sure ambiguous. NOT!
I agree. Here's more:
"There is a rabbinical tradition that attempts to read between the lines of scripture to discern its hidden meaning. In so doing, the rabbi will invent a midrash to illuminate a passage. These are often full of paradox, puns, wordplay and other midrashcally rabbitorahcal devoices, almost like zen koans.
"Sometimes a midrash is necessary when you encounter a couple of Bible passages that seem to contradict each other. I have always been intrigued by the fact that Genesis tells two very different versions of the creation of man. Most people seem to just skim over this inconsistency, but maybe God is trying to tell us something. Perhaps we need a midrash to reconcile the two.
"Boris Mouravieff had an interesting way of reconciling the two passages. That is, he felt that they were not referring to the same event, but to two distinctly different ones. In the pre-Adamic account in Genesis 1:27, both man and woman are created simultaneously. But in the second version in Genesis 2:7, God forms man “out of the dust of the ground,” and more importantly, “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” so that he became a truly “living being” with a divine spark within.
"Before you get all high and mighty, bear in mind that this was all before the fall and much subsequent miscegenation between the children of light and the daughters of the earth: “Pursuing the mirage of temporal goods,” Adam and Eve lost touch with the higher intellectual center through which they had enjoyed direct contact with God. “The beauty of the daughters of men did the rest. Adam turned away from his real ‘I’ and identified with his personality.”
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The Story of God and the Prodigal Scientist
"....Higher mammals may have some vague sense of the passage of time, but they are too immersed in it to gain anything like a clear view. My dogs can sometimes get (or at least look) bored, but they know nothing about the history of canines, to say nothing of how boring it is. Only man can be in the river of time while simultaneously laughing about it on the way to the bank.
What we call "Darwinian" evolution is obviously horizontal. It doesn't take a genius to notice that there are prokaryotes, then entry level eukaryotes, followed by reptiles, mammals, and humans, yada yada. But it cannot make any value judgments about the process, because in order to do so, one must stand in a transcendent, vertical space of qualities -- qualities such as truth, compassion, beauty, etc.
From a strictly horizontal Darwinian perspective, there would be no essential difference between, say, a cave painting and a spider's web or bird's nest. Or, if the differences are essential, then Darwinism has proved its own insufficiency.
Again, horizontal is to time what vertical is to space; science can pretend that only the former is "real," but the truth of the matter is that man cannot exist outside this total cosmic sensorium of vertical and horizontal, or quality and quantity, form and substance, facts and values, music and words, etc.
It is in this vertical sense that the cosmos "completes" itself in man -- or in the psychospiritual activity of man. Even looked at only horizontally, the cosmos is always surpassing itself, e.g., from matter to life to mind.
But it also transcends itself vertically in every act of knowing. Nothing in the cosmos is "complete" in itself. Rather, everything moves toward completion via relationship. Objects are related to, and find their completion in, the subjects who know them. And a subject cannot "be" itself unless it is situated in a world of objects that yield real knowledge.
But at the same time...." bttt