FishEaters Traditional Catholic Forums

(07-04-2018, 12:08 PM)Some Guy Wrote: [ -> ]

Quote: Perhaps you're right. But one who denies that Fatima is true is not a heretic. We aren't bound by private revelation.

The most important Marian apparition involving the most spectacular miracle God has graced the modern Church with is pretty important. If someone is ignorant of Fatima, that's one thing, but to deny it... Well I would be seriously suspect of that person's faith.

Public revelation ceased with the death of St John. One can be an orthodox Catholic and not believe in any of the apparitions. But there's really no reason not to, and the idea that the Miracle of the Sun was simply a mass hallucination seems very unlikely. Especially since it's not only Catholics or even Christians who report seeing it.

(07-04-2018, 12:50 PM)Paul Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-04-2018, 09:53 AM)MagisterMusicae Wrote: [ -> ]I'm not sure we want pit "evolution" against "creation". That's a common Fundy Prot tactic, but really does a disservice to the whole subject by creating straw men.

Creation is simply the idea that at the beginning of time God produced from no previously existing subject all matter and all forms (i.e. everything). Some would hold that God produced everything as we see it today in a single instant, others that over some time God took this matter and arranged it (either 6 days or some other indefinite period).

And neither is acceptable to most scientists, since they only accept natural causes for everything. If anything points to any sort of possible supernatural involvement, it's dismissed, and the natural alternative is accepted, no matter how improbable or how poorly understood it is.

That's how we end up with theories like the multiverse and an endless cycling universe being deemed scientific, even though we have no way to ever prove or disprove it. Even if it's true that there an infinite number of universes, one with every possibility, you're limited to one of them. Yet this is scientific, when proposing that biology appears designed and might be guided by some sort of intelligence is derided with 'flying spaghetti monsters'.

Some evolution - what's usually called microevolution - has been seen to occur. Organisms change. New groups of them appear that no longer breed with other groups. But we don't see macroevolution, which involves new genetic information that wasn't there previously.

Once one dispenses with formal and final causality (which is what modern science does), like Significant Figures, you've lost information you can't get back. You can only say so much about the universe. If everything must be explained by material causality, then one can never come up with any purpose in anything. Sadly, the Darwinians don't see that their very assertion of "random" (i.e. purposeless) evolution then undermines Natural Selection, which clearly shows that certain traits are more adequate for reaching some end, goal or purpose. By asserting that evolution is "blind" and "purposeless", they remove any ability to assert that there is more than a genetic connection between things, and can say nothing about any progression or transition.

As you note, lots of unprovable and thus "un-Scientific" or "pseduo-Scientific" notions, like the multiverse result, all undermining Science itself. In fact it is the moderate Realism of St Thomas and Aristotle which supports and promotes Science.

As regards the gaining of information, this is a problem, but only if you say that by some unguided natural force more organization came about. There would need to be something which was supplying that order, and thus, information. Not impossible, but again, it has some serious problems.

Important, I think, however, that we be careful not to fall into the Fundy Prot trap, and instead be a bit broad in our allowances here, since otherwise we risk pitting reason and Faith against each other, and making conversion harder for others.

When an atheistic scientist come up to you and assumes he can attack your Faith by an argument against a Protestant Fundamentalists "Creationist", it's always a highly useful retort to dismiss his arguments as silly because a Catholic has no theological or dogmatic issue with a limited evolution or an Old Earth. Instantly such a person sees that they're dealing with someone who values reason and Science, even if he takes issue with some things. I've had many such conversations and it's always fun to just pull the rug out from under their assumptions. Such people then sometimes actually listen to what Catholicism teaches, and think about it.

It's such things that St. Augustine clearly warned us about when talking of Scriptural exegesis.

(07-04-2018, 12:50 PM)Paul Wrote: [ -> ]I agree with you that evolution of man's body is not heretical, despite the problems of it seeming unfitting. But there's also the philosophical argument that the soul is form of the body - did Adam have a non-human soul that was replaced with a human one? Or was a human soul given him at his conception, which I suppose God could have done? Although that would make Our Lady an Immaculate Conception, not the Immaculation Conception. But then, Latin doesn't have articles, anyway.

The original was : "Que soy era immaculada concepciou" (It's the Franco-Spanish dialect around Lourdes), so, yes, there is no article here, definite or indefinite.

Still, I think this is a fairly weak argument, since even if there were some definite article, we clearly distinguish in modern languages the definite and indefinite articles in such a way that the definite does not exclude others, but emphasizes some unique greatness of this thing : "Chuck Norris is the man!" does not mean that there are not other men, but this guy is almost the prime analog of man -- what a man should be -- look up man in the dictionary and this guy's picture is next to the definition -- rather, look it up and there's no definition but just a picture!

Also, if Adam were a different being before the infusion of a rational soul, then he would not have been conceived as a human, but "transubstantiated" into a human by the replacement of the animal soul by a rational human one, so he was not immaculately conceived any more than any irrational animal is now.

The argument from fittingness works much better to reject that Adam's body evolved, and then God inserted a human soul, I think.

(07-04-2018, 12:08 PM)Some Guy Wrote: [ -> ]Time has a beginning and as end. Just cause the sun and moon weren't there in the very first seconds of creation doesn't mean time hadn't started. Again, if God wanted us to believe in 6 eras of creation and a 7th era of rest, why didn't he inspire those words? God creates through fiat. God's miracles were always through fiat. He didn't tell Moses to leave his staff in the sand for 5 years and eventually it would turn into a snake. But I guess he wanted to make an exception for Genesis. (Or maybe demonic influenced atheists are very purposefully and meticulously attacking Genesis. If Catholics can be convinced that "REAL" science rejects Genesis, then there will be no new Catholics. Which means there is no One True Church to destroy, because they all converted themselves to more worldly affairs.

Genesis 1 itself already takes "yom" in several different senses. In Gn 2.5 "yom" means about 12 hours in the first half and then 24 hours in the second half of the verse. In Gn 2.4 "yom" means a period of time (specifically here all seven days of this week just described). In Gn 2.17, "yom" means some indefinite moment in the future.

Right there we see that the very words of scripture indicate that there is more going on here than meets the eye, and given it is Moses reporting a vision of this creation, it is easily seen as a series of visions to Moses, or an organized structure in which Moses is presenting three steps in making the elements of the universe, and three days in organizing and adorning that universe. Some Fathers of the Church read this in the presentation.

So asking why God didn't have Moses write it another way if He wanted us to more clearly understand, is like asking as some Protestants rhetorically do why didn't Jesus more clearly say, "Listen guys, I'm giving you the power to forgive sins in my name through Confession, and in no other way, and by the way, when you say the words of Consecration the Host and Wine will be Transubstantiated into my Body and Blood which will be the renewal of the Sacrifice of the Cross ..."

Scripture is literal history, but it is not history as presented in a play-by-play method we expect today. Moses wrote this history as the Jews would understand it. The Fathers and Magisterium explain to us how we are to understand it, and the Fathers split on their opinion, and the Magisterium clearly allows various opinions, within limits.

One example of that split is St. Cyprian who understands the seven days as long periods of perhaps 1,000 years each. (And yes, while that doesn't get us anywhere near billions of years, it already shows that a literal 6-fold 24-hour day period is not the only meaning possible Genesis 1 -- admit it could be something other than 144 hours, and there is no reason to restrict it arbitrarily to any period unless some other information, like Geological or Physical evidence suggests otherwise)

That means we cannot hold someone to one opinion or another under pain of rejecting the Faith.

God does create by Fiat, but there is no reason for that Fiat to have taken some temporal period, and in fact the theological reasoning would tend to reject that God created over a period of time, since Creation is not the organization of pre-existing things, but the production of things from nothing. Creation seems to happen "In the Beginning" and the organization seems to happen over time from the very words of Genesis, and that is supported by Sirach 18.1 : "Qui vivet in æternum creavit omnia simul," which is what convinced St. Augustine of his third opinion on the subject of an instantaneous Creation and the six days as either six revelations, or an ordered explanation of the adornment of nature, leading to the number seven which showed perfection.

MagisterMusicae

Solid stuff as it relates to the 7 days/eras. Not saying you won me over, but solid. The whole "yom" thing makes perfect sense and is exactly what I was talking about. Now if "yom" is not supposed to necessarily mean "day" why have we been translating it that way for so long?

Everything else, I could care less about. I am 100% against macro evolution. It is pushed for the purposes of destroying Christianity and has literally zero proof of being representative of reality.

(07-04-2018, 02:13 PM)Some Guy Wrote: [ -> ]Solid stuff as it relates to the 7 days/eras. Not saying you won me over, but solid. The whole "yom" thing makes perfect sense and is exactly what I was talking about. Now if "yom" is not supposed to necessarily mean "day" why have we been translating it that way for so long?

We speak of day in those senses even today, so it's not a bad translation, it's just how we work. We speak of day as the light portion of the whole midnight-to-midnight calendar day, and also indefinite periods ("some day, kid, you'll be a star!").

While early along some Fathers and arguably the general understanding was that we were speaking of six calendar days, the modern push for a 6 24-hour day Creation among Fundamentalist Protestants was actually a product of a self-proclaimed Geologist and Seventh Day Adventist George McGready Price's effort to argue against evolution.

The general opinion had transitioned from six literal days to a longer geological period, which is why the arguments against Darwin's theories are not immediately religious argumentation.

Adventist "prophet" and "visionary" Ellen White, claimed to have visions during which she witnessed Creation and saw it was a literal week, and so Price became her disciple promoting this as a way of arguing against evolution as a shortcut : six days is not enough time for Evolution. Thus he came up with "Flood Geology" which holds that the entire Earth's features are the product of the Great Deluge, even though the common opinion was that the flood was a local and ethonographically universal flood (but not geographically local). This explains the strata and is the basis for all of the pseudo-Scientific theories of "Creation Science" some of which posit an expanding Earth, overnight continental drifts that created the buckled mountains from friction against an unknown surface, ice meteors, and all kinds of wild speculation that has no foundation in mythology, history, or natural sciences, but which is presented with scientific terminology and pictures in order to make it seem like good science.

Thus the modern "Creation Science" movement really does not date back much before the 1970s, and if we look a bit further back, it's foundation is not really anterior to about 1900, even if some basic theories and ideas that Price borrowed existed beforehand.

(07-04-2018, 02:13 PM)Some Guy Wrote: [ -> ]Everything else, I could care less about. I am 100% against macro evolution. It is pushed for the purposes of destroying Christianity and has literally zero proof of being representative of reality.

I think the key is that really, the whole "How" question is interesting, but really not so important to a Catholic. In the face of such allowances, the end result is that the doctrine (which is the important part anyway) survives.

I would distinguish, however. You use the term "Macro Evolution" but even this is a pretty ill-defined term, since its posited existence is explained through various possible mechanisms. Certain of those mechanisms are pushed in order to try to undermine Christianity. Others are Christian responses which try to show that those who claim such contradictions have an agenda. In the end, it's really not an important question for most of us, if we maintain the fundamental doctrine that is taught by Genesis 1-3 : God created the universe and everything in it, He rules it, He created it to diffuse His Goodness, He created various irrational creatures, and finally he created two rational creatures whom he raised to a Supernatural end and these two, Adam and Eve, were the only two and their fall from grace is why we have Original Sin, and why Christ came.

In the face of that, exactly the process for how a chimp came to be is of pretty minute importance.

I am not trying to be rude, but you're typing a lot of words, but not giving me much substance. I feel like after every other sentence I'm reading I'm asking myself, "...So what?"

If you really believe that evolution doesn't play an insanely large role in Modernism... Well I don't know what to tell you.

I'm done with this thread. Not angry at any one. At all. But I was unhappy with all the theistic evolution and big bang loving that was going on and wanted to offer a little resistance. Sorry for de-railing the thread. Also sorry for anyone who is buying into scientism and thinking it's legit science. I hope everyone still has their tonsils, fyi, they're not a vestigial organ from the ancient monkey-humanoid days. They're part of your immune system.

(07-04-2018, 05:06 PM)Some Guy Wrote: [ -> ]If you really believe that evolution doesn't play an insanely large role in Modernism... Well I don't know what to tell you.

Nobody said it doesn't. Nor has anyone here said macroevolution is definitely true. But neither has the Church said, 'If anyone says, that the body of Adam came from another living creature, let him be anathema.'

And it was a Catholic that came up with the Big Bang. Which, to me, looks an awful lot like '"Fiat lux." Et lux facta est."

(07-04-2018, 09:15 PM)Paul Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-04-2018, 05:06 PM)Some Guy Wrote: [ -> ]If you really believe that evolution doesn't play an insanely large role in Modernism... Well I don't know what to tell you.

Nobody said it doesn't. Nor has anyone here said macroevolution is definitely true. But neither has the Church said, 'If anyone says, that the body of Adam came from another living creature, let him be anathema.'

And it was a Catholic that came up with the Big Bang. Which, to me, looks an awful lot like '"Fiat lux." Et lux facta est."

Nor has anybody stated that if macroevolution is true then it necessarily means that man is the product of said evolution.