Which I know perfectly well (e.g., the Baluchitherium), but now you’re contradicting yourself. There have been many manlike species in earth history as well, but you told me those don’t count. So why do the multitude of rhinoceros-like species count, but the many manlike species don’t? Make up your mind.
That’s irrelevant to the point you were making, or at least to the point you appeared to be making. You wrote as if Denton’s view would be false if earth hadn’t produced other kinds of manlike animals, outside the family Hominidae. But it wouldn’t be. There is nothing in his idea that requires that every planet that develops primate life then goes on to produce more than one type of manlike animal.
But I am wasting my time arguing about something you haven’t read. It would take you less time to read the bloody book than it would take you to go over every point you’ve heard about secondhand and quarreling with me over it. Read what he says, and then all your questions about what he says would be answered. (And if don’t trust that I can tell the difference between a mammal and a reptile, there is no reason why should trust my summary of Denton anyway, so there’s another reason for reading it yourself.)
How many times do I have to point out to you the difference between beings which do and do not have free will? You don’t seem familiar with Christian Metaphysics 101, yet are trying to discuss questions at a much more advanced level.
There is no reason why the means which God uses to guarantee his plans regarding humans could not differ in some respects from the means he uses to guarantee his plans regarding subhuman entities.
You’re trying to argue (though you’re not arguing it very clearly or coherently) that if God used a “billiard shot” way of guaranteeing exactly a certain sequence of organisms, God would be some kind of bully who overrides “free will” – but that’s simply a wrong inference.
No, that’s not it. I want to know how you reconcile God’s plan with God’s passiveness towards His uncontrolled humans? How do you think God guarantees that your (soon to be) reply is the one he had in mind from the very beginning?
No, you don’t seem to understand (the predominant) Thomist arguments. It’s one thing to say that you think they’re wrong, quite another to say they’re not within “Christian Metaphysics 101”
We’re not discussing human free will here. If you want to discuss human free will, start your own new topic and those who want to join in can join in. Look at the topic at the top of this page. It’s about a model of cosmic and biological evolution in which, hypothetically, God could plan the whole course of evolution from Big Bang to man so that it all falls out by natural causes, in an order determined by him from the beginning. That has nothing at all to do with free will. Do you have any comments on this hypothetical view of evolution, or not?
Free will presents the same problem as randomness. How does God guarantee his plan when some portion of it is granted autonomy, making God a passive watcher.
God chooses to grant His creatures the power to cause. He creates things not just to happen, but to happen in a particular way. St. Thomas is clear that “whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the plan of divine providence conceives to happen from contingency.”5 The fact that a particular phenomenon has an element of randomness or contingency does not remove it from divine providence. God’s creative power is such that the very powers that allow a creature to act and to cause, even to cause contingently and by chance, depend at every moment on His sustaining power. Whatever happens in the world, whether it is a radioactive decay, a biological mutation, a decision to sin, or a decision to praise Him, does not catch God by surprise. In fact, He gives His creatures their existence and their natures that allow them to decay, to mutate, to sin, or to praise. This type of knowledge seems to go against our very understanding of what knowledge and causation are, but that is because we are only familiar with how created causes know and work. God is not another part of nature. He is not even the greatest part of nature. Rather He is nature’s author and sustainer. He is the Creator, totally other to the created universe.
I’m willing to discuss the Thomist arguments after I’m convinced that you haven’t read just one side – the side championed by Austriaco, Feser, Carroll, etc. – but have engaged deeply in the counter-interpretation of Aquinas proposed by the other side – Chaberek, Torley, etc. So far, you are simply presenting me a party line, not a balanced discussion.
The party line is also known as Catholicism, thank you very much.
How could God still be in charge if there is so much randomness? The author quotes William Carrol to answer this question: Aquinas “argues that God causes chance and random events to be the chance and random events which they are, just as he causes the free acts of human beings to be free acts.”
No, it’s not Catholicism – it’s a particular, slanted, modern interpretation of Thomas Aquinas – and one which, as I have indicated – but you won’t read the other side to find out – willfully ignores certain direct statements of Aquinas which the modern Thomists find inconvenient.
The big question is WHY? Why would God choose a “pool shot” which looks exactly like unguided evolution with a random component has occurred? If humans were the goal why go through 3.5 billion years of evolution including at least 5 major mass extinction events? Why give creatures an extensive evolutionary history in the fossil record and in the genomes of extant species?
If nothing else Occam’s razor says we should reject the claim.
Apparently you don’t. Baluchitherium isn’t rhinoceros-like. It was a rhinoceros. I’m talking about the many independent evolutions of similar forms. Triceratops, for example. Brontotheres. Etc.
Name one that’s independently evolved from Homo.
I hope I have adequately explained why you are confused about this.
Can you now see that I wasn’t making the point you thought I was?
Why? If, supposedly, there is some kind of natural process that inevitably results in a “manlike animal”, why does that force operate on only one lineage?
Yes, but not in the way you think. You’re wasting your time because you’re unwilling to think about Denton’s ideas and defend them. Flouncing will not help.
I imagine you can, but who ever claimed you couldn’t? I think this reveals the depth of your misunderstanding of all the issues here. For that I apologize; I will try to be clearer if I can figure out where you went wrong. So, are you claiming that you don’t understand Denton and are incapable of communicating his thought? I’ve ordered the book.
Both Darwinism, with its secular challenge to the unity of faith and reason, as well as the attempt of ID theorists to disprove evolutionary theory vindicate Pope Leo’s selection of Aquinas as the model for Catholic intellectuals (see “Catholic Faith and Modern Science,” below). Thomism has something useful and corrective to say on both sides of the debate. At the same time, Thomism does not replace the natural sciences, or perhaps to put it better, a Thomistic intellectual synthesis includes precisely the sort of research found in the modern natural sciences that have produced so much understanding of nature. In the Thomistic view, the teachings of the faith are fully compatible with what we learn of nature through scientific research, provided we both understand those divine teachings correctly and we do our scientific research consistently and rigorously. The truth or falsity of the claim that the diversity of living species is due to some sort of evolutionary process is a matter to be settled through biological research. Whatever the outcome of this research, it can never replace the need to explain the existence of the natural world in terms of a creation ex nihilo according to God’s divine design.
Clearly, the secular claims associated with modern Darwinism require the sort of corrective provided by Thomism. Does this mean, then, that Catholics should make common cause with ID advocates? Insofar as ID theory represents a “god of the gaps” view, then it is inconsistent with the Catholic intellectual tradition. Thanks to the insights of Aquinas and his many followers throughout the ages, Catholics have available to them a clearer and more consistent understanding of Creation. If Catholics avail themselves of this Thomistic tradition, they will have no need to resort to “god of the gaps” arguments to defend the teachings of the faith. They will also have a more complete and harmonious understanding of the relationship of the Catholic faith to scientific reason.
First clause: False, because ID theory doesn’t rest on god of the gaps arguments. Read Meyer at length to see why.
Second clause: False, because “Catholic intellectual tradition” includes Aquinas, who thought that man and the higher animals were created directly, by special divine action. (I.e., there was a “gap” in nature that God filled by direct action.)
You missed the part where Catholicism and Thomism didn’t stop with the death of Aquinas. Indeed, if Thomas was alive today, I have no doubt that he would rethink his theology in light of 800 years of of knowledge. What he might change, I don’t know.
Realizing that the exhortation to unifying faith and reason would be best supported by an example, Pope Leo provided one: the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. Were we to take St. Thomas as our model and inspiration, we would have a good foundation upon which we could rebuild Catholic intellectual life in the face of the new secular challenge. In the nearly 130 years since the release of Aeterni Patris , a modern Catholic intellectual movement has indeed been established and, following Pope Leo’s lead, its prominent character has been that of a Thomism that seeks to apply the perennial insights of Aquinas to the problems of modern science and culture.
I don’t mind if Thomism develops after Aquinas. I do mind when modern Thomists misrepresent what Aquinas teaches. If they have the guts to say, “Aquinas thought this, but Aquinas was wrong,” then fine. But I don’t hear Tkacz, Carroll, etc. doing that. I hear them pretending that Aquinas taught that in creating the world God used only secondary causes, no primary action. And they’re doing that to curry favor with modern science. But it’s not right to deceive the world about what Aquinas said. Chaberek tells the truth about what Aquinas said. But the truth he tells is not popular among theistic evolutionists, so they prefer to mislead the public about what Aquinas says.
I have. It’s still the same ol’ god-of-the-gaps pig with lipstick. It’s also a whole lotta ignoring and misrepresenting the evidence, which is never corrected when false claims are pointed out.
And using the principles of Thomism, how are we to understand Aquinas’s claim that stars, like God, are eternal? Knowing that Science and Scripture cannot conflict, we must reevaluate. And is there something new that either of the two can contribute? Absolutely!
So, what do you make of Aquinas’s claim?
Likewise evolution or any other facet of modern science. Thomism is more than just Thomas Aquinas in a bottle.
I did not know that he made that claim. In fact, it seems highly unlikely that he would have, given that the Bible explicitly teaches that God made the stars and I have never known Aquinas to directly contradict the Bible. Can you find me a passage where he says the stars are eternal?
Paul Davies did his Post Doc under Fred Hoyle at Cambridge, and in addition to his popularizing works has published academic texts in QM and the nature of time.
Martin Rees is a cosmologist with over 500 published papers, and occupied the presidency of the Royal Society for five years.
I would absolutely construe their books, even if directed to a broader audience, as reflecting discussion within mainstream cosmology and physics.
For what it is worth, neither of them, to the best of my knowledge, are Christian or in any way theist, and they have no interest in promoting an apologetic.