Surely evolution and Christianity are fundamentally opposed?

[Melchior]

Duh, wrong-o!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_C ... _evolution

"In the 1950 encyclical Humani generis, Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces."

[David Handeye]

Duh, wrong-o!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_C ... _evolution

"In the 1950 encyclical Humani generis, Pope Pius XII confirmed that there is no intrinsic conflict between Christianity and the theory of evolution, provided that Christians believe that the individual soul is a direct creation by God and not the product of purely material forces."

Catechism of the Catholic Church [302 Creation has its own goodness and perfection, but it is not out of the hands of the Creator accomplished. It is created "in a state of journeying" ("in statu viae") toward an ultimate perfection to which God has destined, but that is yet to be reached.We call divine providence the dispositions by which God guides his creation toward this perfection.]
Concern of Humani Generis was definitely safeguard materialism. Pio XII did not own such a theory, and how it continues, "The theory proves its validity to the extent that it can be verified", therefore leaves open the discussion on the floor "epistemological" as accurate, but does not teach evolution.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Before Galileo, God told the church fathers that Aristotle's science was the accurate description of the Universe, according to the RCC. This meant that all planets and the sun and moon revolved around the earth in perfectly circular crystal spheres, and the superlunary realm was governed by different physics. Ptolemy provided the correct number and dispositions of the epicycles to explain retrograde motion of the planets.

Eventually they had to accept that the earth was not the centre of the Universe.

And before Darwin the church insisted that all species were the special creation of God; that all fossils were the vestiges of the deluge; that all species were immutable, and the earth was created in seven days and finished at teatime on Sunday 30 October 4004 BC.

Thing about religion: it does not matter what god thinks happened, or what their forebears thought happened. They just pretend they knew it all along, and science just had to catch up.

It seems that the church can burn who it wants to for the Truth, regardless of what is in fact true. Why anyone would trust these boy buggering liars os a source of continual puzzlement to me.

[thedoc]

You would still need a distinct moment of decision when mankind chose what mankind chose: i.e. to distrust the intentions of God, and to separate himself from fellowship with the Supreme Being. And whatever else happened, this moment could not be gradualistic in its actualization...it would have to be a real decision made by the progenitor pair. But beyond that, the origin of mankind is spoken of in the Bible not as merely one story among many in animal evolution, but as a unique undertaking by God, a deliberate privileging of the human species above the animals, which are definitely marked as already existing when this last creative movement was undertaken. The theological point seems to be the isolation of the human species as unique and as responsible in stewardship for all creation: and this has very important theological implications.

The timing's a bit elastic: I think the facts are harder to stretch.

I would disagree that there needs to be a distinct moment. The Bible is Mythology in most of the OT and there would only need to be a gradual development of humanity among a group of hominids that were becoming human. The Bible mythology can be descriptive of that development.

[Hobbes' Choice]

You would still need a distinct moment of decision when mankind chose what mankind chose: i.e. to distrust the intentions of God, and to separate himself from fellowship with the Supreme Being. And whatever else happened, this moment could not be gradualistic in its actualization...it would have to be a real decision made by the progenitor pair. But beyond that, the origin of mankind is spoken of in the Bible not as merely one story among many in animal evolution, but as a unique undertaking by God, a deliberate privileging of the human species above the animals, which are definitely marked as already existing when this last creative movement was undertaken. The theological point seems to be the isolation of the human species as unique and as responsible in stewardship for all creation: and this has very important theological implications.

The timing's a bit elastic: I think the facts are harder to stretch.

I would disagree that there needs to be a distinct moment. The Bible is Mythology in most of the OT and there would only need to be a gradual development of humanity among a group of hominids that were becoming human. The Bible mythology can be descriptive of that development.

You are quite right - the idea of a distinct moment is ridiculous. This choice can be made by an individual, by institutions, by groups, or never chosen at all since it is perfectly obvious that some never acquired the delusion of a single "Supreme Being" (whatever the hell that is). History proves this the case for anyone with the sense to read it.

However the Bible does not and never has been descriptive of anything you might want to call a "homonid".

[ReliStuPhD]

ReliStuPhD wrote:

nb This is not to defend evolution (though it's the model I hold to), but to work out whether it is truly incompatible with the various creation narratives, understood allegorically.

Oh, I understand. That's fine: I get your intent. No problem. Let me respond, then, in the same spirit.

Whatever else we think might be the metaphorical and theological implication of the Creation, it does seem apparent to me that a significant theological point is made out of the unique, subsequent event of the creation and commission of mankind. And it's important because where we come from, and why and how we were created, are taken therein to show something very significant about our relative importance and the roles for which mankind was created.

We can fudge that, I think; but it will be hard to recover the full theological weight of the incident if we do. Gradualism would not per se amount to a denial of the theology -- so long as the priority and order of creation plus the real events of commissioning and Fall were taken literally still: but to do so would surely require us to fashion an alternate, gradualist creation narrative. The motives for doing so, and the degree to which we'd be able to guard against our own wild imaginings would be uninsured by revelation if we did that, so it looks to me like a perilous project at best, and at worst a mere attempt to reconcile revelation with popular fashion.

So I'm going to stick to the Biblical narrative on the creation of mankind, in all it specifies, and leave what it does not specify to a future date.

You?

That's a fair, well-'said' position.

As for me, I'm much more inclined to find ways the bible fits the scientific consensus rather than the reverse. So while the Biblical narrative may have a certain theological gravitas that evolutionary processes do not, I don't find that to be particularly bothersome (at least not at this point). I will, however, say you point about our "wild imaginations" is a good one, though I think it's at play on both sides of this particular point.

[Immanuel Can]

One is always forced to choose what one will believe, since 100% certainty only happens in mathematics and symbolic logic -- and there only because they are internally-consistent systems of abstract symbols, not empirical situations. We live in the empirical world, not the world of symbols, so we don't get to be certain. We get instead to exercise our best judgment, based on the data we have, plus a little of what we might call "faith" in how that data will play out.

Since we must choose, I am not willing to hand myself over to the human, fallible system of secular wisdom -- to those who once taught us that the body had four humours, that matter was simply solid, that the world was flat, and that the Piltdown Man was authentic. And I'm certainly not the only one: from Kuhn and Polanyi to modern Atheist Thomas Nagel and former Atheist Anthony Flew, plenty of very reputable thinkers have expressed their distrust in secular wisdom and in the Evolutionary Paradigm, and have pointed out good reasons why we are but a hair's breadth from a paradigm shift away from the moment when Gradualist Materialism will have to be discarded -- and that for rational, scientific, and non-religious reasons.

So I don't think I'll hang my hat on the twitching corpse of Mr. Darwin. I'll take my chances with God instead.

[Lawrence Crocker]

Combining evolution with the Catholic doctrine of souls and the actual existence of Adam and Eve, as I understand it, leads to some interesting consequences. Adam and Eve, as the first creatures with immortal souls, had parents without immortal souls. It would seem to follow that they would not have had an obligation to honor their fathers and their mothers, indeed could treat them as they would any other mere animals.

[Immanuel Can]

An intriguing thought, Lawrence. I had not considered that angle -- primarily because I tend to favour the either / or option, rather than trying to reconcile the Evolutionists' narrative with the Biblical one. But yes, that would seem to follow.

Proto-human ancestors would have to be sub-human in a very profound sense...not possessors of "will" or "soul" or whatever other quality we tie to the idea of culpability for original sin. It also raises an additional question of how this "will" or "soul" suddenly emerges from a gradual process that, by its own account, would contribute to "will" or "soul" not at all.

In a way, the emergence of consciousness in animals is gradualistically inexplicable. How did inert material become "life," and how did clustering amino acids suddenly become "aware" and move from mineral to animal? How much more difficult would it be to explain how human beings suddenly became genuinely human, with none of the previous steps being any account of how it came about. And how inexplicable from a gradualist perspective that we ought to regard Adam and Eve as morally responsible, but their immediate progenitors as in no way implicated in morality.

It's a huge difficulty for the proponents of any Evolutionist-Creationist compromise.

Very interesting. Thanks for that thought.

[Hobbes' Choice]

Combining evolution with the Catholic doctrine of souls and the actual existence of Adam and Eve, as I understand it, leads to some interesting consequences. Adam and Eve, as the first creatures with immortal souls, had parents without immortal souls. It would seem to follow that they would not have had an obligation to honor their fathers and their mothers, indeed could treat them as they would any other mere animals.

Obviously the main point that is missing is that Adam and Eve were the first "men", and did not have parents, soulless or otherwise. This is a key factor in why Christian Ideology has always been opposed to any kind of evolution - at least before the 20thC fudging.
You can argue till you are blue in the face about the tree-rings in the Garden of Eden: it does not point to evolution as God was perfectly capable of of putting them there in the first place - and the fossils in the rocks too.

Adam & Eve's father was God, and Eve at least failed to honour his wishes. But then Moses and his commandments were still far off at the time. And if you want to being evolution into the equation, you'd have to respect the basic rules of history first.

[jackles]

Reckon christianity and evolution are compatable in that evolution deals with physical change of forms. Consciousness on the other hand does not evolve it stays indistinguishably the same in all animals. Brains change forms but consciousness being supernatural remains the exact same thing. Christianity is the description of consciousness .so evolution does not affect christianity.

[jackles]

Cant see why christianity and evolution are compatable because evolution deals with physical change in forms. Where as christianity deals with consciousness. I dont think evolution effects consciousness because consciousness is supernatural.

[Immanuel Can]

Hi, jackles

What you are saying sounds a bit like the NOMA hypothesis, which is the idea that science and religion have "non-overlapping magisterial." That is, that they occupy two different zones: science, the physical world only, and religion the existential zone only.

But this is generally now rejected by both sides. Particularly in areas like the question of origins, it is generally accepted that any conclusion about the physical would have important implications for the non-physical or spiritual realm, such as the necessity of a Creator, the chances of placing science within a larger framework of human meaning or the possibility of teleological direction for evolution. Likewise, it has been pointed out recently, and especially by philosophers of mind, that any observation of a real "self," "mind," "soul," "meaning," or other such things would be bound to have radical implications for physical science as well.

So the matter cannot be easily settled in a NOMA way, it seems. But it was once considered a winsome solution.

[ianrust]

I see no reason why they should be opposed. Simply read the bible with a little knowledge of hebrew and greek, add in to genesis either prophetic inference or creation (not beyond Gods power) depending on your bent.