Blog Why Christianity Denies Evolution Exists

It seems like a stupid thing for them to do, since the easy cop-out explanation would be to simply say God created evolution, which would let creationism and evolution exist together. But there's a good reason Roman Catholics can't do this, which I found out when I was 9 years old and taking a dumb Bible study class.

We know the Church has always said humans were made in God's image and are special because of it, like we're above the animals 'cuz we have free will and a soul. Well, evolution totally messes this claim up, 'cuz if animals don't have free will and a soul, and man evolved from animals, the question comes up as to when in the evolutionary timeline an animal moving toward being a man developed free will and a soul? Like where was the cross-over point where we suddenly had these things? And how can the Church adequately place spiritual value on a fricken random mutation?

This is the question I asked in Bible class back then. I didn't phrase it like that but when another student was upset her pet wasn't going to Heaven 'cuz it didn't have a soul, I did ask how man could come from animals that didn't have a soul and suddenly have one. This is when the nun made it clear God created man in His image. I asked her if this is why the Church says evolution isn't true. She didn't answer me. This is when I knew the Church could never reasonably say God created evolution. If the Church accepts evolution, the biblical nature of man becomes totally arbitrary.

I still believe in God but this kind of idiotic stuff religion does makes their leaders look stupid. They really should hire a better marketing staff to sell faith in their teachings in a better way.

The truth is nothing more than what we perceive as making the most sense, so this is where marketing comes into everything, I think. Marketing is one of the most powerful things mankind ever invented.

1. To the best of my knowledge, the official Roman Catholic position on evolution is that it does not conflict with Catholic dogma so I am uncertain why you believe that the Catholic church denies evolution.

2. God cannot create evolution. Perhaps you mean that he could guide it.

3. Hundreds of millions of Christians believe in evolution (our shared common ancestry). It is only a subgroup of Christians who claim that Christianity is incompatible with evolutionary science.

Because it did the last time I took a bible study class and because it has to deny it for the reasons I gave.

No, I meant God can create it. Evolution is a chain of events. God could set those events in motion, just like we can line up dominoes and tip the first one to set off the chain reaction.

Most Christians haven't thought through the simple dilemma I figured out at age 9. I'm not surprised, really.

Pope John Paul II declared evolution as, “as an effectively proven fact.” [1]

I do not think you understand what evolution is. It is not something that can be created or destroyed. When humans alter then DNA of other species, no one ever would say they are "creating evolution". Rather, they would say they are affecting or guiding it.

And your entire line of reasoning is called the Fallacy of the Beard. Just because there is not a certain number of hairs that constitute a beard does not mean that you can claim it is impossible for someone to grow a beard. Similarly, just because there may not be a clear delineation between "having a soul" or whatever nonsense you want to use and not having one does not mean that one cannot say that certain individuals have one and certain individuals do not.

Furthermore, there are many different beliefs among Christians as to the notion and I am not convinced that Catholic dogma states that animals do not have souls. Pope John Paul II declared that animals do indeed have souls, saying, "the animals possess a soul and men must love and feel solidarity with our smaller brethren." [2]

[1] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/vaticanview.html

[2]King, B. J. (2010)., Being with animals: Why we are obsessed with the furry, scaly, feathered creatures who populate our world. New York: Doubleday.

LOL, you missed the entire point I was making. That or you're a troll. Don't post in this thread anymore. Oh, and it's also possible you're being honest but are mentally retarded. If that's the case, I definitely don't want you posting in my thread.

I think it's silly that basically the entirety of the controversy over this hinges on a translation that says that God created man "in his own image." If it didn't say those simple words almost no Christians would deny evolution. The Book of Genesis is part of the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Old Testament) and together they form what is basically a biography of the life of Moses and the stories weren't even written down until ~600 BC, which even by Young Earth creationist standards is a hell of a long time after creation. It's even about 700 years after Moses would have been dead.

I mean, at least in theory you can believe that God is telling someone what to write down, but these stories were passed along orally for hundreds of years before they were ever written down. It's not like the account of the 10 commandments where God would have been telling Moses what to chisel into the stone, or zapping it with lightning to write on it. Even though that's still bullshit, it would be a direct transcription if it was true. It's like dictating a letter, only the story of creation is more like dictating a letter after playing a game of telephone that went on for thousands of years.

Even if the Church took away the whole "made us in His image" thing, it's still the case that man is the only creature with the free will to understand right from wrong, which is the basis of morality, and it's still the case that man has a soul that allows us to reach Heaven. These are basic tenets of religion and they are totally undermined if free will and having a soul were just accidental mutations in some random progression of life from ape to man.

I am not a Catholic, but I seem to remember hearing somewhere that the Pope is the leader of the Catholic Church. I could be wrong about that though, but that kind of seems to undermine your claim that, "there's a good reason Roman Catholics can't . . .let creationism and evolution exist together. . . [this] makes their leaders look stupid."

But do not let the facts get in the way of your trite pontificating.

The Pope has to say the Church is okay with evolution officially 'cuz publicly it's embarrassing to deny something that's so obviously true, but the contradiction I raised makes just as much sense. You can't call man made in God's image and give him the golden seal and at the same time admit man was the result of a series of accidental mutations.

Anyway, I'm onto you game, Vociferous. You present a response that makes partial sense and focuses mostly on semantics, then you through in a jab to I guess try to get the person upset, like "you don't know what such and such means..." (LOL) and it's your hope to set off a semantics war for 3 hours. The only person from what I can tell who was dumb enough to fall for this game is that guy Subversion. Everyone else ignores you or laughs at you, except for Sexyweed, maybe, who you know personally. It's possible you're not doing what you do on purpose but and that you're mentally defective. I actually think that's the more likely case, but either way, run along to another thread.

The church can't take it away now. The "church" is already divided into a cumload of separate churches because one church disagreed with another's interpretations. If the pope declared that the words "in his own image" don't belong in the bible anymore, some would follow and others would reject the change.

It's a good point to question where our "soul" or "free will" came from, but in my opinion it's best to stay as far away from religion as possible when trying to answer these questions. There was something I heard Neil DeGrasse Tyson say in a video once that was something like there's only a 5% gap between us and apes, but that 5% was the tipping point that made us 100 times smarter than the apes. The point he was making was that if you imagine an alien species existing that were similar enough to make contact with us and that species was just 5% different from us, we might be so dumb by comparison that we'd be like a pet that you'd train to do simple tasks for a laugh. But I think the point applies to this as well because it's pretty simple to just say that all it takes is a small but significant change to make us as special as we think that we are. It doesn't have to be magic or some gift from a higher power that makes us seem so much more amazing than an ape. But I suppose that until we find a species that is better than us or until they find us, you can still believe whatever you want.

Yes exactly, it would be very interesting to map the genome of the Neanderthal and compare it to the genome of a human and see where the differences are, 'cuz somewhere in that difference is free will and the "soul" we're supposed to have. There's no way the Church could ever allow the soul to be reduced to a gene, but if evolution is considered valid, the soul would very much have to be a gene. This is the type of question the Church never wants to have to answer.

I've never been very convinced that free will exists. I think the "soul" exists but I don't know if it makes more sense to me that it would have to be a gene or if it would be something wilder, like a collection of social programming that gets passed on to you as you grow up so that you accept a certain set of values and develop you own in places where you either were taught something too late to accept it blindly or rejected something as not being logical and had to replace it with something that made more sense to you.

It's not Christianity that denies evolution it's individulas who do. It also seems to be mostly an American thing. It's quite uncommon to encounter a creationist in my country. I know they exist because I'm a BHA member and we fight against the small number that exist here.

The Vatican have made it clear that they support it and that their 1 billion or so followers should too. I ws taught it at my Catholic Seconday School around 13 years ago. Then why wouldn't they? Evolution is a observed and proven fact of life. It happens. There is more evidence to support this fact than there is evidence to support Gravitation or Plate Tectonics. The confusion seems to rise up from ignorance, often when people don't understand the word "theory" in a scientific context and confuse it with "hypothesis" which isn't the same thing in science at all; and then carry on their ignorance to believe that the "theory of evolution" means that evolution occuring at all is a "theory" when in actual fact it's a "theory" on HOW it might occur. For example, you let go of an object. It will almost certainly fall to the ground. Gravitation Theory would describe HOW it fell to the ground not whether or not it fell at all.

Anywhoo, I love that there are Fundies who won't come to the UK because Charles Darwin is on our money.

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/audiences/alpha/data/aud19860416en.html

I think you'll find this an interesting read. Especially if your school was teaching things that were against the Church's views.

The Vatican supports it but it can't be news that many of the nearly 20,000 Roman Catholic churches in the US and the nearly 1.5 million around the world don't fall in line with the politically correct statements made by the Vatican. The Pope condemns priests molesting boys also yet we know the individual parishes, at least in the US, have almost institutionally condoned it for years by failing to report it legally or even remove the priests from their jobs in the church. They chose to move them to new parishes where oftentimes the molestation continued. So it's not strange there are many churches, at least in the US, probably elsewhere, that conduct study classes that disobey the official position of the Vatican. Many old school believers don't accept the modern view by the Vatican that evolution is in line with creationism.

This is fascinating. So the position of the Vatican is that animals had been evolving upward from lower primates for 1000s of years and God, who did NOT make man in his own image, but instead merely witnessed his creation by random accident, just arbitrarily decided to single out man, who is essentially nothing more than the current highest point on the evolution chain, and give us souls. That's so ludicrous it's funny.

It still leaves 2 really key questions unanswered:

1) If man wasn't created in God's image but was just the station on the evolutionary chain where God decided to bless an otherwise animal-like creature with the "Golden Seal" of having a soul, what happens when the next step of evolution occurs and man is trumped by a super species and becomes 2nd best on the evolutionary scale? Do we still have souls? Will the super human race have something better than souls? Will they go to the same Heaven humans strive to get to? Or will the human race lose its soul so that only the super humans have one?

2) Morality is based on right and wrong. To know the difference, an animals must have free will. Even if the Vatican comes up with some pure hogwash to explain why humans were distinguished from the lower animals (on the evolutionary scale) and blessed with souls, it doesn't explain where the power of free will came from. So we're to believe the soul was a gift bestowed on humankind by God 'cuz I guess he felt like giving it to us but free will, the key to Judgement Day, was formed out of the random chaos of genetic mutations in nature?

The Vatican would be better off just sticking to its original claim that evolution is invalid or at least that it doesn't apply to human beings. Giving in to that Pandora's Box of supporting evolution creates bigger problems then denying it ever did.

It'll be interesting to see where this discussion leads. I'll weigh in on it later.

this right here. this is what i want. i want them to isolate the different genes humans have and ask all the scientists on earth, who claim man has free will, to point to the gene with free will written on it.

then i'd like to see the pope asked to do the same.

i don't think man has free will. i think we're a product of instinct just like the animals are. imo our decisions are also instinctive reactions, no different than animals. ours are just based on far more complex variables.