God Works Through Secondary Causes
Blogged by James Preece on 29th November 2012
Let's theology for a change... Mark Shea writes...
From a Thomistic perspective, I’ve never seen much of a problem with the proposition that God–using secondary causes ranging from the manufacture of carbon atoms in the heart of exploding stars, to the development of the mouth-to-anus gut tract during the Cambrian Explosion, to the creation of live birth reproductive systems and the mammary gland, to the Cretaceous Extinction Event to my own father and mother–created me. God *usually* uses secondary causes. Evolution has always seemed to me to be a way of saying “Grace perfects nature” and “God made man from the dust of the earth reeeeeeeeeeeeeally slowly.” And “grace perfect nature” is a statement that reaches it apotheosis in the proposition that God raises bread and wine to transubstantiation into the Body and Blood of Christ, just as he raises a race of hairy fanged primates to be children of God through God the Son, who became a risen and glorified hairy fanged primate for us and for our salvation.
Read the full post...
I'm a bit puzzled by the whole "evolution proves God false" argument.
All evolution has ever proved wrong is a particularly narrow protestant interpretation of the book Genesis that, frankly, is proved wrong by the book of Genesis itself. The book of Genesis contains two contradictory accounts of creation. Serious biblical scholars have known this for centuries!
Augustine of Hippo wrote a whole book about it in 408 - over fifteen hundred years ago. The modern scientific method hadn't even been invented yet but Augustine was able to recognise that the scriptures contain factual innacuracies about the stars, eclipses, kinds of animals etc.
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].
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This doesn't mean the scriptures are wrong, it simply means that they are not intended as scientific encycolpeadias. They use symbolic language, poetry and metaphor. The point of Genesis is not to provide us with all the technical details about how God made the world, the point of Genesis is to tell us things far more important than that. Not how but who, not what but why...
Far from disproving God, evolution suggests that the universe itself is ordered towards His divine plan. A plan that is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, at calvary, at every Mass.
Reader Comments
Chrysostom said...
You correctly say, "Augustine was able to recognise that the scriptures contain factual inaccuracies about the stars, eclipses, kinds of animals etc." True. But the science that I was taught at my grammar school in the 1950s contained what we now know to be "factual inaccuracies about the stars, eclipses, kinds of animals etc." Scientific knowledge is provisional. Science is at its best when it can perform experiments. It is difficult to perform experiments on things that existed millions of years ago. So evolution is an interesting theory that may well be true. Most certainly, scientists' ideas of what happened in the past will change. And no scientist has yet come up with an answer to Auguste Comte's question, "Why is there not nothing?"
It seems churlish to point out that your excellent blog contains an inaccuracy in its spelling of "inaccuracies".
Our Lady Help of Christians - pray for us.
St Athanasius - pray for us
All Ye English Martyrs - pray for us.
St. Charles Lwanga and Companion Martyrs of Uganda, who died resisting homosexual rape - pray for us.
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mike cliffson said...
Chrysostom, James:
A shelf of books would not suffice.
One point:
Since when are we talking about THE theory of evolution?
Darwinists such as Dawkins do : why should we ?
Another: I don't know why Mark Shea should be so happy to join with the biologos crowd, or whoever, in writing off ID as "god-of-the-gaps" and lumping it in with creationism. That's THEIR turf. Darwinist(the modern synthesis) explanations of a great many things are running into difficulties. So we should join their Aunt Sally world of Science = Evolution = Darwinism = proven Atheism (Which I quite agree, it would not so prove,even did every material detail remain true) versus superstitious fundamentalist young earth creationists, that''s the picture, nothing else , nothing to see here, move along?
The point has practical applications:
Dawkins 2009, in The Greatest Show on Earth (pp. 332-333)presenting the rearguard accepte wisdom that supposed "junk" in the vast majority of the genome as an assured scientific reality that is, in the specific case of "pseudogenes," "useful for. . . embarrassing creationists."
"It stretches even their creative ingenuity to make a convincing reason why an intelligent designer should have created a pseudogene -- a gene that does absolutely nothing and gives every appearance of being a superannuated version of a gene that used to do something -- unless he was deliberately setting out to fool us."
..../.......
"Leaving pseudogenes aside, it is a remarkable fact that the greater part (95 percent in the case of humans) of the genome might as well not be there, for all the difference it makes."
Dawkins with chief rabbi, ther box 2012
"I have noticed that there are some creationists who are jumping on [the ENCODE results] because they think that's awkward for Darwinism. Quite the contrary it's exactly what a Darwinist would hope for, to find usefulness in the living world....
Whereas we thought that only a minority of the genome was doing something, namely that minority which actually codes for protein, and now we find that actually the majority of it is doing something. What it's doing is calling into action the protein-coding genes. So you can think of the protein-coding genes as being sort of the toolbox of subroutines which is pretty much common to all mammals -- mice and men have the same number, roughly speaking, of protein-coding genes and that's always been a bit of a blow to self-esteem of humanity. But the point is that that was just the subroutines that are called into being; the program that's calling them into action is the rest [of the genome] which had previously been written off as junk."
Too late.
Why do I say this has practical results?
Because Dawkins reflects the orthodoxy which already in the fifties was supppressing uncomfortable scientific results regarding the nature and mechanisms and results of mutations .
And one result of immediate interest : unorthodox ( Going into why would require some length)research could have come up earlier with ways (which have been found, too late) of avoiding the problem of antibiotic-resistant mutant strains of bugs "Superbugs" like the one that it seems plausible, irevocably and (now)un- avoidably killed that poor woman in Ireland whose case was evilly spun, see your post below.
If the agenda is to make something as unnecessarily atheistic and anti christian as possible, why should anything whatever, let alone, in this case,an unintended consequence, but a consequence nontheless, the vulnerability of the whole of humanity to disease , and the loss of our arsenal of antibiotics ,stand in your way.
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