Not to worry, the more the better.
Thanks
I made that term up myself, it seemed the best way to describe how man's understanding of God ( as in what God's wants of us ) has evolved. 2 Kings 6,28 & numerous other texts of Scripture describe a primitive almost ape-like theological understanding of what God wants from humanity. Man certainly has evolved theologically since that time in his understanding and while there certainly were evil people in the times of 2 Kings it becomes obvious and necessary that evil has also evolved to give God's wishes for us a run for their money.
Ok. Do you at least consider it a reasonable suggestion that the earlier periods of man's theological evolution could be coupled to his physical evolution also, at least in principle if not on the finer details?
I don't have a problem with belief that God 'used' situations beyond our current ability to fully understand in the genesis and myself do not believe God is like the "Q" character on Star-Trek that just snaps His fingers and things appeared. If God is God then He must be so far past our understanding that what we think ( no matter how smart we get ) is total stupidity compared to Him. That said I think science is good and is as important as religion. If I could explain it another way I would go so far as to say that Science has made Religion better more so then Religion has improved Science.
QFT
The crux of this issue for me is that the Faith and Morals generated from Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture are marker buoys placed by God Himself into areas we are better off not going into. To me, Adam and Eve being dumped onto the ground followed by a splat of afterbirth from their soul-less mother'S seems contrary to the deposit of Faith to me.
Man was created with a soul "at conception" if we are talking about Catholicism and herein is my issue.
Fair enough - perhaps it's best if we focus on the soul aspect, then? As regards to the whole birth aspect, I'd rather move away from that if possible - birth has been messy for every human being that's ever lived:
With two exceptions though, but even if Adam and Eve weren't the first human generation to sin, they still wouldn't necessarily have generated offspring after the fashion in which they were created by God.
There are many things within evolution I think are obvious so it's not that I want to get the torture equipment out and ask you to stop talking about evolution or anything like that.
That's cool brother, nothing wrong with a good discussion!
True, for me, that God, for lack of a better word, put engineering into life that goes beyond our level to fully understand elevates God past that of a God who just snaps His fingers ( like Q on Star-trek ). I don't have a problem with that at all.
I agree, although I think there are different levels of this, i.e: there is physical engineering (things like genetics, biochemistry etc) that we can empirically determine the mechanisms behind. There are also spiritual mechanisms at work, which don't play by the same rules - one can maybe discern something about them through praying, reading Scriptures etc, but
they can't be as concretely defined.
My issue is that I believe that God has spoken to man directly through Ex Cathedra statements and while the Pope said evolution is a "possibility" the Pope NEVER said it was a certainty.
Well, it's a step up from a lot of churches
And TE can raise awkward questions, as this thread has established, however it's important to at least recognise that there is scientific data out there which lends itself to ToE being a good theory, and to not shut down discussion on it, so I can't fault the Pope for that.
Ex Cathedra statements ARE a certainty and when it's a matter of Faith that I accept that a individual's "soul" is infused into a person at inception I am bound to believe that and it becomes difficult for me to accept a gradual evolutionary process that removes Salvation from the biological mother of one who's granted it.
Just so I'm absolutely clear on this, there exists an Ex Cathedra statement that says that evolution can't explain the soul, so your explanation for that is coming from standard RCC teaching?
If I could quote one thing that you've said;
There has to have been a point where mechanisms operated to bring inanimate matter together to form simple replicating systems.
I have to say that what you've said above sounds very "
theological" in nature to me, in fact it's a theological statement that describes "another religion".
I wouldn't go that far, we don't exactly worship the idea and it's hardly dogmatic. As I said, our bodies are made up of a self-replicating cluster of non-replicating particles, regular matter like we see all around us, why the inherent redundancy there? If we were specially created, why not have a unique type of replicating matter not comprised of non-replicating matter?
The smallest forms of life are a few thousand particles if that - it's not unreasonable to extrapolate back and consider that there was a point in the past where these particles came together into a phase that was able to replicate after absorbing enough energy and materials from the environment. The tricky part is finding the reaction and the initial conditions, as there's a lot of ground and time to cover - that doesn't mean it didn't happen however.
The difference for me as a Catholic is that Ex Cathedra statements are without error and this is what my Faith is built upon. I can accept that a whale may have once walked about on land or that other creatures lost legs or slowly grew wings but Adam being dumped on the grass like an Orangutan??? This is a hard theory for me to accept.
As I said, birth is unceremonious for practically all of us, and even God approved of David waxing lyrical about the process in Psalm 139, so it can't be all that bad!
The problem herein is an old one, it's initially tough sometimes to apply evolution to oneself, particularly to a species with as high an opinion of itself as humans - but one has to wonder then if we didn't evolve from apes, why are we so similar to then, not just in appearance and biochemistry, but so similar genetically in ways that can only imply descent? Why would that information be there otherwise?
That's just it, "we became the first species to become SELF AWARE and aware of our maker". That's saying if the world lasts long enough Elephants or perhaps Dolphins will become aware and be able to accept Jesus and drink wine with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of heaven. I've thought about this and I will admit that I can't get my mind around it, it's like the feeling I get when I see a big spider run accross the floor - I don't want to grab it with my hand, I want to use my foot and do something else.
I've no big gripe about that myself - the Psalmist says let everything that has breath praise God, Jesus said that even rocks would praise him, so maybe we're the exception to a more general rule here? Maybe I was incorrect before, maybe as we evolved we were granted the ability of choice, due to sentience perhaps. And we're certainly not the only entities in existence with that trait, just look at the pantheon of heavenly beings...
In terms of the idea of animals becoming like us, that doesn't especially bother me, I personally don't equate being made in the image of God with being human; God's not exactly human either so surely being made in his image would indicate qualities rather than physical characteristics?
In the end, whatever is was that dumped Adam onto the ground was not elibible for Salvation while "it's" offspring ( Adam ) was. Theologically this is where I'm at. Think about it, Adam having a soul and being called a "man" at the SAME TIME His Mother ( that we can only call an "it" ) wasn't a "woman", wasn't eligible for Salvation, this, by the way I understand the Catholic Faith would have been the case for 9 months while Adam was developing inside "IT". I'm sorry but this sound like some type of "New Religion".
I've thought about this and other issues I'll not bring up now. I can't answer that and it becomes yet another mystery for me to ponder on. At some point T.E. will start to hammer on what I've been told is truth, like the I.C., Hell, keeping the Commandments, etc, etc, etc. I just know it..
I still don't think you're quite getting me - my point, in short, was that populations evolve, not individuals. That was why I brought up ring species, and suggested that there were other humans alive when Adam and Eve were - the notion of what a species actually is is not a discrete "species X/not species X" on an individual level, especially when a species has just diverged into two isolated subgroups. Adam and Eve would have been effectively the same species as their progenitors, it's not so stark a case of animals giving birth to humans. The major difference arises not from members in the group they diverged with, but from the members in the other group, that they diverged FROM.
If you took a child of your own and put it with a bunch of other contemporary children and isolated them on Mars for a sufficiently long time, eventually the accumulated genetic difference would run the risk of them being completely incompatible reproductively with those they left on Earth (who would have been changing too). And yet I suspect our powerful human traits like rationality, sentience, intelligence etc wouldn't be selected against as they'd prove useful, so technically they'd be another species, but would you really exempt them from salvation?
Ok, creatures. Look, if at some point they dig up a bunch of creatures that essentially look like humans but clearly are not human I'll deal with it when that happens.
Would you mind clarifying that exactly? It's just that I suspect some people would answer that that's already been done.
It would be easier for me to accept if I wasn't bound to believe that a persons soul exists at the moment of conception but I hold this to be true so this is where I must start.
Absolutely, and if we simply can't get past our working assumptions/beliefs, I'm not going to then e.g turn on your acceptance of Ex Cathedra etc, we'll simply agree to disagree, there's too much belief bashing on this board at the best of times. But I do hope I can at least begin to convince you that TE isn't as inhuman as it sounds.
