A theory of evolution from a nun many years ago

[Cleita]

I have posted this before some months ago on someone else’s thread, but thought some would be interested in this theory to present as a possible reconciliation of science and Genesis to their Creationist relatives and friends. I went to Catholic College and my Zoology professor was a nun, which meant that she believed in everything the Church asked her to believe including Genesis in the Bible. But also she was a scientist.

According to her and the theologians, whose interpretation she accepted as valid, the seven days of Creation were God’s version of days and stood outside of the dimension of time so therefore they weren’t days like our daily earth rotation created. Of course to accept this you have to believe the earth is a sphere that rotates on its axis and that it circles the sun every 365 rotations. I don't think Creationists have a problem with this scientific fact though.

She believed that the Garden of Eden was a supernatural place that God created on earth. Since Adam and Eve were immortal, perfect and spoke to God everyday, she believed they straddled a place between the material world and Heaven. When they were cast out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying God’s commandment not to eat the forbidden fruit, they became the seed or the DNA prototype for all human life to EVOLVE subject to the rules of the material universe, of being born, and dying.

Now this is pretty far fetched too. But if you are a believer in the Bible as the written word of God, it gives you an alternative more in line with the scientific facts that we presently know.

[shoelace414]

1. this is the macro/micro evolution argument

the rapture right is making.

[Cleita]

3. I thought the rapture right stuck to the seven days creation

and that the earth and that Creation was only ten thousand years old at the most. Incidentally, I don't think this should be taught in secular or public schools, however, if they want to teach it in religious schools, they must also teach scientifc evolution. If their children go to public school, they can teach it in Sunday school, but not in regular classes.

[bleedingheart]

2. I have heard other people state the same thing

I prefer to think that God/Goddess set the spark that became the Universe..she then sat back, and has been watching the experiment she set in motion so many billions of years ago....

I bet she laughs and crys at the highlights and the lows...

[Cleita]

4. I don't really like this version.

It makes the goddess look like some sports goon watching the Super Bowl. I think a god, who is our mother, wouldn't be that detatched from her children, all of Creation.

[teenagebambam]

5. Doesn't matter...

...the Fundies place Catholics in the same category as homosexuals, liberals and people who dance and smoke.

[Cleita]

8. So why would you say you got this from a Catholic Christian?

I believe the Catholics got this interpretation from Talmudic scholars but don't want to admit it.

[MsAnthropy]

6. Sounds like a HUGE rationalization to me

trying to fit the spiritual story to the scientific facts. It never works.

[Cleita]

7. This is what religious people do.

They try to rationalize their beliefs to fit the facts. The purpose of my post really is to use some of the same beliefs to lead them in another direction. The first false premise of course is that the Genesis story is true. Until some intrepid archaelogist finds it complete with Seraphim guarding the gate, it is only a myth. (We know that will never happen and to suggest that certain places in the ME are the Garden of Eden is only pure speculation.)So to rationalize it, it becomes a supernatural place.

The second false premise is that there is a supernature. Many rational people do believe this and even now Quantum physics is suggesting that there are other dimensions in the universe that we don't percieve with out limited senses. But as it stands now, supernature is only a belief.

Incidentally, the nun in question, strickly taught biological science along the lines of Linneaus, Darwin and company. My generation were a group of budding atheists so we liked to ask her all these questions in class trying to get her to rationalize our religion. She didn't come out and teach it in science classes without us egging her on.

[Turbineguy]

9. Well it seems

to me that the Bible is a living document subject to interpretation.

So how would you explain the beginning of Earth and subsequent life (Creation) to people who thought the earth was flat and the center of the universe?

Answer: "On the the first day.....etc."

The people who wrote the various texts of the Bible had to talk to people of their day in a way that made sense. Not only that, their knowledge was also limited by what was generally known. Obviously God did not see fit to tell the Bilbical Prophets that the earth was round and that the Sun was the center of our solar system and there were many solar systems in the Uninverse.

Myself, I do not see any real conflict between evolution and creation as it is very likely that God made a few errors, life forms that simply did not work. In short, he tinkers from time to time.

If we are created in God's image then it follows that God gets up on some mornings with an idea for doing things better.

Of course all this would also mean that if we make the planet unworkable, we might be slated for demolition too.

[Cleita]

11. My point is that I don't have any problems with what people

believe in as long as they don't push the facts away to cling to no longer valid beliefs. I myself believe in fairies. I am not kidding, I believe everything on earth has sprites that are part of it. Many would call them guardian angels, but I think they are more like the fairies of legend and myth. No one has proved that they exist, but no one has disproved it. So I will believe it and until facts state otherwise. I won't have a big religious meltdown, however, when that happens and I don't expect everyone else to believe what I believe.

[Turbineguy]

13. Fairies?

Good for you. I carry a "French Angel" at all times.

[Bunny]

10. I have never understood why Genesis and the Theory of Evolution

had to be mutually exclusive, for people of faith. If you believe in God, what is so hard about believing that God created evolution? To me, there need not be any conflict between the two. It does not have to be either/or.

It isn't my particular belief, but I'm open to the idea that this is possibly how it all came to be. After all, who really knows? However, the God part is unscientific and must not be taught in public school science classes, and Intelligent Design is for religious school only. Why can't fundies grasp this????

edited for clarity

[Cleita]

12. Because they are being led by a bunch of corrupt

cult leaders who use religion as a business. Religious fundamentalists have to start realizing that the problem is whom they listen to not their core beliefs.

[DrWeird]

14. I think for a lot of conservatives...

The Book of Genesis is the only book they manage to get through. And of course it has to be literally true.

[Stirk]

15. Prior to Copernicus, astronomers built all sorts of elaborate models

to reconcile their belief with their observations. They believed that the earth was the center of the solar system, and they built their models around this basic idea. They were plodding, overly complex monstrosities, but they did predict the movements of the planets... most of the time.

Anyway, all I'm saying is that people can rationalize things any way they like, but it doesn't change facts. Science is not a negotiation.

[Cleita]

19. I have heard so many convoluted arguments over the

years and it really points to the fact that some people will not let go of something that is important to their belief system. In the case of the scholars who tried to prove that the earth was the center of the solar system and some believed universe, a lot of it had to do with keeping the religious authorities of those days with "facts" to keep them in power. Also, ending up in the hands of the clergy as a heretic was not a pleasant experience.

[Lexingtonian]

16. that's cute

I heard the much the same one from a lot of folks.

What this 'soft creationism' is is almost a full shift from attacking the physical sciences (as full blown Creationists do) to attacking the social sciences- cultural and physical anthropology. Not that I think this nun you refer to meant to do so, but that's what makes this attempt at a compromise strike us as hokier now (anthropology has gained a great deal of authority/legitimacy recently) than at that time.

Cultural anthropology will tell you that all creation myths have the same purposes. They can't and don't even really try to explain the existence of matter- any of them. What they actually do is explain the way psychologically experienced world is- why everything is arranged as it is and how it functions, hardly why it is, and they tend to do it in a way that mirrors the order in which childrens' senses expand their consciousness and their questions with increasing age. Creation myths are explanations for the psychologically experienced order to the world.

The literalist Creationists are people who insist on a great God of Nature, and they can't imagine God in any other way. Their allies are the Ten Commandment extremists, who need a great Judgement-imposing godhead. These are both attempts to save, and argue the exclusive importance of, the conception of God that arose from Nature worship, which in philosophy is the god of Theism- the transcendent far away Big Daddie patriarchal sky deity.

This theory is politically crucial to the Religious Right and missionizing religions (i.e. conservative Christianity) because other forms of God don't imply that there is a blessed, tiny, group of True Followers and Believers who are entitled to special privileges in order to enforce The Rules dictated from Above. Those entitlements would be political dominion and a priori moral supremacy. But as Susan B. Anthony observed, it turns out that the Will of God such people assert they serve tends always to remarkably coincide with their selfish interests/desires/vanities and to invariably excuse their own weaknesses and flaws.

Humanism- the idea that God is experienced in and through human beings, in both sublime and terribly corrupted ways- is the unbearable thing the Modern age is headed for to these people. What it means to them is a loss of status and role in History- if God is accessible to all via personal experience as the gateway, rather than requiring a priesthood of The (Selfs)Elect and their One Book With God In It- then they aren't So Special after all and all their suffering was hardly worth it. Fundies the world over are finding this idea impossible to get over.

Yes, that is in paradox to the stated Christianity of the Creationist crowd, but you will find their Christology doesn't actually consider Jesus of Nazareth a genuine human being- they are heretics, strictly speaking, when you scratch them hard. But the truth about them is that they aren't defending or asserting Christianity- they're Believers in the religions of their pre-Christian (or, in non-Christian regions of the world) or non-Christian ancestors.

[Cleita]

17. I pretty much agree with your position, but I don't think

it will inspire one fundamentalist to explore other ways of realizing that their religious beliefs may not be as true and exacting as they would like them to be. It will drive them further into the dogma with no room to explore it. Many Duers with fundamental religious relatives, neighbors and friends of any religion can testify to this.

Also, about Jesus Christ, a dirty little secret that you don't get from the pulpit, is that many well respected theologians don't believe he existed either. They think there were several itinerant preachers in those centuries who did and said some of the things Christ supposedly did and said in the gospels, and that much that was credited to him came from other sources.

[LiberallyInclined]

20. there were more than just several itinerant preachers-

apocolyptic cults were a big fad back then, and many of them had their own resident son of yahweh to follow.

lucky thing for christianity was that it happened to catch Emperor Constantine's eye, ear, and everything else. it was the equivalent of winning the religion lotto...and the rest is history.

[Cleita]

23. Also, Constantine pasted the Roman patriarchal religious

ideas on it. The Latin rites that the Opus Dei crowd are so fond of were "borrowed" from various rites to Jupiter and the other Roman gods worshipped at that time with Jesus Christ as the son of God, not a big stretch for people used to Jupiter/Zeus having lots of sons.

[Lexingtonian]

28. you're right

I wasn't looking at that angle of it. My post was merely to point out the specifics of the flaw to that thinking, the next pieces in the logic by which people come to give up even that level of Creationism.

To the problem you meant to address, getting fundies to even begin to let go of their dogmatism, in my experience the important thing is not so much being able to offer them a transitional position. They already know them, to some extent, and figure them out on their own.

What gets fundies to question their rigidity, above all else, is their experience of seeing a person or group of people live successfully and spiritually 'real' while embracing a very different set of truths from themselves. For all their arrogance, the truth about them is that their beliefs are defensive and taken from authority and based in emotion (social group sanction)- it's stuff their parents believed, a belief set that their clan or group at the country club or church insists on or ostracizes them for when opposed, or 'in the Bible' according to their betters in their church and religious associations and friends. It's a rare fundamentalist whose rigidity survives exposure to the personal religiosity of people of other religions, or to a kind Modern person who has mature beliefs and extensive education and is willing to treat them as reasonable people.

It's 'witness' by living to greater truths than their own in a comprehensive way that gets fundies. No particular argument does, though they often are ignorant of what else is acceptable to maintain in public than their fundie tenets. (That's why they so often instigate hostile conversations where you have to explain all the intermediate positions between yours and the fundie ones to them- and suddenly cease the hostile provocations, usually claiming one of the intermediate positions you've explained to them at the next conversation.)

About Jesus of Nazareth...I'm of the intermediate belief that such a person existed, but that the Gospels and Paul emphasize his teachings and events of his life in a confabulated and selective way that the man himself would hardly recognize himself in them. The Jesus of the Gospels is Jewish essentially in name and forms only, it is pretended that he taught something revolutionary within Judaism rather than reformative, and yes, a lot of his personal story in the Gospels is lifted from that of Apollonius of Tyana.

I'm personally of the school that Christianity was fatally corrupted by the syncretism Paul permitted the Anatolian churches and the Pauline choice to uncouple Christianity from Judaism, whatever the merits of the original teaching. Christianity simply doesn't work out when it tries to run autonomously- it's somehow incomplete and its adherents have to lift pieces of other religions and install them to get it to work. Which takes us back to the fundies and the pre-Christian paganisms the American kind clings to....

[LiberallyInclined]

18. so....

where did she say Cain's wife came from? :headbang:

[Cleita]

21. We never got into her about Cain's wife. :-)

But we really gave another nun hell in World History class about Noah's flood and the legend of Gilgamesh. Anyone who goes to religious schools knows that history classes are really bible and church history classes. So when studying ancient history which seemed to be mostly the history of the Israelites with side tracks into Ur, Egypt and Babylon, we got a lot what they wanted you to believe and nothing of what you should know like the mythology of the other peoples of that time ergo the flood stories of Gilgamesh and the Greek version of Deucalion's flood.

[LiberallyInclined]

25. the engineering specs on the ark are pretty lousy too-

a wooden boat of that size just isn't possible- it would break apart from it's own weight.(not to mention that less than two weeks after the ark would have landed, there'd be nothing but predators left)

but they always have the BIG copout-

"through god, all things are possible..." :eyes:

[MsAnthropy]

22. Yeah...that's right! There's just too many plot holes in that book!

[Obviousman]

24. The church doesn't view Genesis as how things went down

At least thats my understanding

[SOteric]

26. The Jesuits who were my teachers

included this theory as well as a few others in their teaching of Creation and Evolution.

It's reasonable and reconciliation between the two theories is possible, but I suspect that those who wish to use the matter as a wedge will still use the matter as a wedge.

[Vinca]

27. Then there's the Adam and Eve were a couple of amoebae story.