Turns out I’d misinterpreted what she was saying. She agrees that the Vatican is neutral on the subject of (macro)evolution, but believes that this decision was motivated by a desire for the Church to be PC. In her own words, “I’m not a fair-weather Christian who only believes something while it’s comfortable, and then leap frogs to something else.”
She also pointed out that the entire Eastern Orthodox Christian church still rejects (macro)evolution, which I hadn’t known before.
Maybe not public opinion per se, but things like Vatican II and the exonneration of Galileo (4 centuries after the fact) do lend themselves to a perception that the Church is trying for a “kinder, gentler” image, at least to its members if not to non-Catholics.
Heck, the Catholic church even is apparently soft on the issue of whether non-Christians, let alone non-Catholics, can go to heaven. Turns out they don’t want to have to pass up Ghandi.
They do not seem to be laying down a hard line against evolutionary theory, here.
In this Q & A section from the Orthodox Church in America Fr. Matusiak lays out the “differences” he supposes between Orthodox teaching and Darwin’s theory, but he mangles Darwin’s theory in ways that indicate that if the Theory of Evolution was stated correctly, it would not seem to be a problem for the Orthodox.
Certainly, there seem to be more Orthodox authors than Catholic authors who attack the Theory of Evolution, (e.g., the Fr. Seraphim Rose mentioned in the OCiA article), however, I suspect that there is no unified expression of “Orthodox” thought on the subject:
This survey of religious attitudes toward evolution puts the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the Orthodox Church in America in the “neutral or ambivalent” group and the Russian Orthodox Church in the “we can’t find their position” group. This different survey of religious attitudes toward the creation account in Genesis says of the Greek Orthodox, putting them with Catholics in the “Churches that implicitly or explicitly encourage or permit a nonliteral interpretation of the bible, or that recognize the truth of evolution” category.
Tracer’s co-worker sounds as though she is among those Catholics who have been leaning (unintentionally?) toward Fundamentalist belief. (Particularly with her comments about looking “PC” which are simply absurd when applied to John Paul II.)
Heck, from the conversation I had at lunch with 'em yesterday, it looks like the entire software testing department of my little company may be made up of Creationists! The Catholic co-worker just happened to be one of 'em (along with the Calvinist co-worker and the I-don’t-know-but-it-sounds-like-he’s-Creationist co-worker).
You got a problem with the way God cools off my hot chocolate, bub?
But seriously, folks – one of the tenets of evolutionary mechanism theory is that precisely which traits happen to arise within a population that improve (or at least do not harm) its reproductive success is a matter of dumb luck. Similarly, the external forces that change the reproductive successfulness of a given trait are just a matter of contingency.
The “God is the engineer” approach is an entirely theological proposition. It says that the outcome of these seemingly random or chaotic contingencies is in fact determined by God, perhaps according to some fatalistic plan or in accordance with some ultimate purpose. This approach is sometimes called “thesitic evolution” and is not at all incompatible with a natural-scientific approach.
I don’t get it. I mean, if I design a machine to perform a certain task, then the machine would be the mechanism and I would be the engineer.
Similarly, if there was a creator, then why couldn’t that creator have designed evolution to be the mechanism for life development? Or why couldn’t the creator have created the laws of physics so that evaporative cooling is the method used to move heat from an object?
There is no problem with theistic evolution, i.e. the belief that God created evolution. The issue is whether divine intervention is ongoing or was simply precipitous. It’s fine to say that God created the universe and its laws and set evolution in motion so as to result in human beings. Such an assertion is not contested by science or contradicted by evidence. The problem is asserting supernatural influence during the course of evolution (“guided evolution”/“intelligent design”). There is no evidence that once the process was set in motion there was ever any need of further intervention. That’s not to say that we did not get the result that God wanted. God, being God, could have willed the big bang and set things in motion precisely so as to end up with Walmarts and reality shows. Somebody in one of these threads (I can’t remember who) likened theistic evolution to a giant, cosmic trick shot by God. It’s extraordinarily complex, of course, but a piece of cake for an omnipotent God-- and it’s not contradicted by any physical evidence.
But there’d be no way to detect whether or not God has made some “course corrections” to that trick shot along the way.
You’ve heard how a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can provide just the right amount of impetus necessary to trigger a hurricane in the North Atlantic because the weather is a chaotic system, right? Well, evolution is a similarly chaotic system – we can tell ahead of time whether thus-and-such mutation would be harmful or beneficial given thus-and-such change in externalities, but predicting which externalities are going to arise and which of the possible beneficial mutations is going to be the beneficial mutation that catches on is impossible.
It is in those impossible-to-predict contingencies that God could be providing a nudge here and there.
That we are not at present able to record and track the amount of information sufficient to make such predictions does not mean that such predictions are “impossible”. All of these things are simply parts of causal chains. Though the chains as a whole may seem untraceable, meandering, and downright silly to an human observer without the proper information, they would be fully explainable to a human observer who did have all the facts.
Every individual event from the butterfly to the hurricane has a cause, indeed it must have a cause. No condition can obtain without sufficient cause, and if sufficient cause occurs then the condition must obtain.
So if God were making “course corrections”, these would be detectable. We would merely need to look for an event obtaining without sufficient natural cause. By Mill’s rules of inductive logic, we could then infer that at least one aspect of the event’s cause was unknown. If we exhausted the list of all possible natural causes (which could be done in principle if we had a unified field theorem that fully explained all forces acting upon the subject), we could then infer a non-natural cause.
The question of course would remain, the question that ID’ers who criticize the lack of complete knowledge about the evolutionary mechanism fail to see, “what is God’s mechanism?” What exactly does God do? Which bit of matter moved where, which energy state altered, and how are these adjustments made, and what does the supernatural mechanism look like? There is every reason to assume necessarily that supernatural mechanisms are just as bound as natural ones by causality when they act upon the material universe. If they are, then not only are they detectable as I have already concluded, but they would be predictable.
The supernatural cause would exist within the causal chain of the universe, and could be reproduced by creating the same circumstances that brought it about in the first place. If God were the source of such supernatural causes, then in a sense you could manipulate and control God just as you manipulate a natural cause, such as a magnetic field. Over time, our knowledge of supernatural mechanisms could in principle match our knowledge of natural ones. We could power the particle accelerator at Fermilab with God. God would be subject to rule, and therefore not the ultimate lawgiver. God is described as an uncaused cause, and as a free agent subject to no higher law than himself. Since the universe has no free agents, nor uncaused causes, God must of necessity remain outside of it.
Quantum mechanics does limit people’s knowledge in some ways, but there’s no evidence at all that uncertaincies on the quantum level have any noticeable effect at all macroscopically. That we cannot accurately record certain pairs of data about a subatomic particle is indeed an epistemic limit on we human observers.
But is this really the sort of room you want to give God to fool around? Is this the only place that supernatural mechanisms would be allowed to occur then? Is God waiting for some scientists to record an electron’s position really, really, really accurately so that he can utilize some supernatural mechanism to change it’s velocity and thereby remain untected? Unless all supernatural mechanisms occur at the subatomic level, and only when the Uncertainty Principle would make them undetectable, then at least sometimes supernatural mechanisms will be detected.
So let’s leave your God’s “course corrections” at the quantum level then. Do changes at this level really impact anything at the non-quantum level, where everything important happens?
Oh, and don’t rule out the possibility that quantum mechanics is physics’ greatest blunder. It could be that in 100 years, they’ll be thinking of quantum mechanics like they do of the aether, one great misunderstanding that caused a whole field of conclusions to be erroneous. When you think about it, quantum mechanics is really just to outlandish and preposterous to be true.
She is right. The mechanism for how we got to this point is not a matter of faith (except perhaps as regards the matter of how our souls were coupled to our bodies), so Catholics can believe short earth creationism or evolution and the Big Bang, whichever they find more convincing, as long as their belief in that regard is not purely materialistic, thereby excluding God altogether from reality (in which case they would have far more serious problems with Catholicism than any that could be attributed to evolution).
For what it’s worth, during my many years of formal Catholic education (setting aside early grade school), inluding 4 years of Catholic high school and 4 years at Catholic university, I never met a short earth creationist Catholic. It wasn’t until after graduation, when I moved south of the Mason-Dixon line, that I met my first Creationist Catholic, and now I have met many online, so I know they do exist. If they seem in the majority, perhaps it is due to their outspokenness, not their number.
Strange statement. The Vatican rarely pays attention to public opinion. Witness contraception. According to two studies, 90% of Catholic laity (in the US) and 70% of priests dissent from the position of the Catholic Church against contraception, which makes things inconvenient for the Pope, but I don’t hear him issuing any encyclicals changing the Church’s position. Given your friends non-fair-weatherness, I presume she supports Humanae Vitae?
Is she Catholic or Eastern Orthodox?
The bottom line is that she can believe whatever she wants to believe with regard to evolution, since evolution is a matter of science and history, not of faith (as far as the Catholic Church is concerned). It’s kind of funny to hear people say, “How conveeenient,” when I suspect if the Church had the opposite position, they would be saying, “How ridiculous.” Perhaps we should give the Catholic Church credit where credit is due, and if you want to attack it, do so where it is more vulnerable.
God did not and could not have “created” evolution: it’s the logical consequences of basic principles.
One of the most important principles of science is that the properties we perceive in the world aren’t arbitrarily thrown together or somehow grafted into the universe. They’re the results of deeper and more profound principles.
It’s just like high school geometry: when initial axioms are chosen, all possible proofs are instantly defined. Changing an axiom alters every proof that relies on it.
Even thinking that God designed evolution is like thinking that evaporative cooling and osmosis are distinct phenomena: the basic assumption is fatally flawed. The same principles that cause the one cause the other as well.
Why can’t a Catholic (or any theist for that matter) easily respond to your statement by saying that God created the ‘basic principles’ which resulted in evolution?"
The Catholic Church does not teach that God “created evolution.” It does, however, teach that God created the universe with it’s basic principles.
The Catholic Church makes no statement regarding the veracity of evolution as a phenomenon. Catholics can accept that scientific teaching or not. If that scientific teaching is replaced by a different model or explanation, Catholicism as an institution will march on without missing a beat. It is only the biblical literalists who will have a problem. A few Catholics are biblical literalists (and that is fine as far as the Church is concerned), but most are not biblical literalists when it comes to historical, non-faith matters (and that is fine, too, as far as the Church is concerned).
First principles lead to foreseeable effects which lead to further effects. If I design a system, and a foreseeable effect occurs, can I not say that I designed the foreseeable effect? If God designs the universe with certain principles that lead to the occurrence of a foreseeable thing called evolution, can we not say that God designed evolution?
We seem to be arguing semantics. If God created the principles, I think it is safe to say that we can credit him with creating the results of the principles. The question of whether there is a god or not will always remain, but regardless of whether the premise of the Creator is accepted, I see no inherent problem believing in evolution or not (unless you happen to believe in a kind of religion which excludes evolution, which Catholics do not).
She’s Catholic. However, she makes some mention of the “Universal Church,” and I’m not sure if by that she means just the RCC (since the very word “catholic” does mean universal, after all), or if she means the RCC and the Eastern Orthodox Church collectively. Anyone know? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
