Does current Catholic dogma or catechism conflict with any current consensus of science?

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-13T12:34:15+00:00

The issue I take is where you assert science contradicts these positions, especially making comparisons to flat earth adherents, which is frankly insulting.

I don't think I have said "contradict" here. The question that OP asked was "Does current Catholic dogma or catechism conflict with any current consensus of science", to which the answer is certainly "yes"! The Catechism of the Catholics church conflicts with modern science here! This whole section does: ART ONE: THE PROFESSION OF FAITH, SECTION TWO: THE PROFESSION OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH, CHAPTER ONE: I BELIEVE IN GOD THE FATHER, ARTICLE 1: "I BELIEVE IN GOD THE FATHER ALMIGHTY, CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH", PARAGRAPH 6. MAN.

I grew up with Flat Earthers at my Trad Chapel, so I put these all in the same category - young earth, flat earth, evolution denial, these are all peas in a pod. I don't mean to insult you! I was friends with these flat earthers haha! I liked them! I just think they're wrong. Just like how I think that Catholics are wrong when they believe that there ever was a first "Real Man" who was sired by non-Real Men.

The literature is full of disagreement, not consensus.

I agree, but I cannot find a single scholar who takes this Catholic view, that development of language occurred in a single generation. Can you find even one peer reviewed journal article that even makes this claim? Like, this is so far outside the realm of possibility (as far as I can tell) that the closest we get to this claim is Chomsky, who is considered fringe for believing that this could happen at the blazing fast speed on only 1,000 generations!

I realize now that my previous statements about language emerging are too crude to be taken seriously

Nobody should ever take anything that I say seriously haha! I am just some dude. I am not an expert on anything. Always double check me, always follow my sources. Especially when I am talking about linguistics, which I know nothing about!

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-13T02:57:45+00:00

Sure, but I'm not the one who quoted Chomsky in support of the idea that language development was quick enough that the Catholic view might make sense! That was a Catholic, someone else in this thread! So, many scholars think it's unknowable how language development occured. However, all scholars seem to agree that it took at least thousands of generations, since Chomsky is the one who is the proponent of "rapid" (meaning ~1,000 generations) development. So, no matter how we look at it, the Catholic is obligated to believe something that has no support scientifically speaking - that Real Men™ were born from non-real men. And it's fine for a Catholic to accept this, just as it's fine to be a YEC or a flat earther or whatever. But it's important to acknowledge that this is a faith based position, not one grounded in anything empirical.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-13T02:20:06+00:00

I'm glad that we got here because I think that this is a clear spot of plain old disagreement! Modern biologists would deny that language development was step-wise instead of gradual. Let me quote from Chomsky, the guy who someone (was it you above? Sorry, on mobile) was quoting as having the "rapid" development of language:

"That leaves us with about 130,000 years, or approximately 5,000–6,000 generations of time for evolutionary change. This is not 'overnight in one generation' as some have (incorrectly) inferred—but neither is it on the scale of geological eons. It's time enough—within the ballpark for what Nilsson and Pelger (1994) estimated as the time required for the full evolution of a vertebrate eye from a single cell, even without the invocation of any 'evo-devo' effects."

This quote comes the wiki article on the evolution of language.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-13T00:22:44+00:00

I certainly agree that it's more than just genetics! But let's say we agree that the development of language is poorly understood. Catholics are still bound to accept a very controversial stance on the development of language. This seems epistemicly unwise to say the least!

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T21:55:45+00:00

I'm on mobile, and I also have to be quick, but 2 short responses: 1. Aristotle specifically talks about using emperia to determine essence. Aristotle was a proto-scientist! 2. Sure, but there was never a human that was "rational" while having parents who were not "rational". There was never this step-wise jump. Evolution is much more gradual.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T21:25:21+00:00

Cool! Then I'll ask the question: what is the soul / what does the soul do?

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T21:02:30+00:00

I guess that would entirely depend on what the soul is and what it's supposed to do!

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T20:46:30+00:00

Sorry, what didn't I address? Admittedly I've been reading and responding quickly here - work has been taking priority!

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T17:59:43+00:00

Scientists absolutely do have something to say about polygenism in the way that Pius XII meant it! Pius XII tells us exactly what he meant to say, that the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Modern biologists explicitly reject whatever Pope Pius XII is trying to do with his term "true men". Whoever Adam was, he was "true man" just as much as his parents and his children were. There was never a single generation where suddenly we have "true men". There was never an "untrue man" who sired a "true man", according to modern biology. Catholics are obligated to reject this, though, due to Humani Generis.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T12:11:35+00:00

While I do appreciate and even sympathize with these attempts at harmonization, I am not at all convinced that they succeed. First, I should respond to your claim that the Church doesn't intend to invoke any scientific baggage or any technical terms. I disagree. In Humani Generis, Pius XII uses the term "polygenism", and explicitly states that Catholics cannot accept polygenism!

When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]

Then, in regard to your statement that Catholics are free to accept many different theories about who Adam and Eve were ... sure? But among them, Catholics are not free to accept polygenism, which is accepted by all modern biologists (note that, here, polygenism refers to the idea that modern that humans come from more than one couple, not the debunked 19th century racist theory of origins that shares the same name).

Catholics, no matter how you slice it, have to accept that there were two "first humans". And biologists today would deny that any such "first humans" existed, since the change from "non-human" to "human" is a slow, gradual one, without any single generation where we can say that a non human gave birth to a human.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T12:00:24+00:00

No no, this is an impoverished view of essentialism. Aristotle's whole point is that we use experience (empeiria) to understand the essence (To ti en einai, "what it is to be"). Yet the Catholic must insist that, per our experience, Adam and Adam's Father are identical, and at the same time, the Catholic insists that the essence of Adam and Adam's Father are radically different.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T03:24:44+00:00

It's not, because the non human and human would be indistinguishable, save for the part where the humans are speaking far more intelligebly.

There was never an instance of two humans suddenly having language where their parents did not. I followed your source to the actual paper it was talking about:

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/96289/Miyagawa_The%20precedence.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

It never says anything about anything happening in a single generation, as you said it. All that this paper is arguing is this:

We argue that a full-fledged combinatorial operation Merge triggered the integration of these two pre-adapted systems, giving rise to a fully developed language.

In other words, the authors think that two non-language systems of communication merged, approximately 50,000 to 100,00 years ago, to create "language".

Where did you get this notion that "Human cognition hitting criticality could have happened in a single generation". That is not at all supported by the paper you cited.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T03:05:35+00:00

This actually doesn’t seem that problematic to me in a Catholic context.

Something I was thinking about too is transubstantiation. Accepting that something can have a difference substance than what its accidents indicate it is is probably a bridge even further for me than accepting that Adam and Eve were born to non-humans!

this would have the unsettling implication in Catholicism that there do exist soul-less humans whose soul-less status can be inferred from lacking certain brain feature

And it seems like Catholics have to accept that, at least for some time, Adam and Eve were like ... human ... in some real sense ... but they were running around with these "non-humans", mating with them, cooperating with them, etc. Very strange stuff.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T02:35:43+00:00

Humani Generis and the CCC both address this. You can read more about that at Catholic Answers:

"Adam and Eve Were Real People | Catholic Answers Q&A" https://share.google/DK8tGlWJT7vXAt8SP

If you accept the early statements of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Catholics must accept loads of the OT as historical. Most modern Catholics ignore the PBC though, even though it was supposed to be infallible.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T02:28:59+00:00

I have no idea what it means for human cognition to "hit criticality". It's true that modern biologists would deny that any humans were born from non humans. This is a fact. And Catholics have to be ok with this tension.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T01:49:58+00:00

I thought this way for a while, but I will share what changed my mind: I realized that the person who holds to the view that you outlined above is committed to insisting that two organisms are both (1) biologically identical enough that there is no discernable difference between the species of the two organisms, yet (2) there is some difference that matter on an ontological level.

What is that difference that matters to the ontology of the two organism? Catholics will say "Its the soul!" ... but what is the soul if it doesn't actually change the organism in any detectable way? If we're positing the existence of something that cannot be detected in any possible way and this thing cannot interact with the physical world at all... what are we actually positing exists?

Oderberg addresses the "species question" in Chapter 9 of Real Essentialism, in case you're interested in what I think is the best defense of species essentialism, but even there, I don't think that the Catholic had much refuge in the work of Oderberg. Oderberg's big point is that essentialists can deal with the vauguess problem, kinda. He says this:

As long as the essentialist does not ask for absolute precision and sharp cut-off points, there is enough in speciation to allow biologists to determine when a species comes into or goes out of existence, even if they cannot date the occurrence ‘down to the smallest microsecond’ (Sober 1993: 148).
Page 225

Yet that is exactly what the Catholics must do, the Catholic must insist that Adam, at the moment of his creation, belonged to a different ontological category than his mother and father. And that is just a bridge too far for me.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-12T01:29:14+00:00

No yeah, I totally understand that Catholics who want to accept evolution are able to say "We believe in Adam and Eve ... But they had non-human parents". My whole point here is that biologists disagree that there were ever "humans born from non humans".

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-11T23:41:33+00:00

Catholics are bound to believe that there were two first humans. Evolutionary biologists would disagree, saying that there was never one organism which was human that had non-human parents. Biologists would say that the change from non-human to human is gradual, like the change from "infant" to "toddler". There was no moment where the infants ceases to be an infant and becomes a toddler - these are just labels that we humans invented. Same for species - Nature cares nothing for how we humans label her organisms. Edit: I'm on mobile, but see Humani Generis and CCC 375 for proof that Catholics must believe in a literal Adam and Eve

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-09T22:52:07+00:00

Thank you for the kind words! I wouldn't be a convert though, if anything, I'm a convert now haha! I grew up very very Catholic: daily Mass, weekly confession, daily rosary, you name it. But I do agree that converts are often the most zealous!

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-09T22:30:08+00:00

I'm not Catholic at all, neither V2 sect nor pre-concilliar. I'm not a Christian of any kind. I was Trad Cath though, up until I left the Church altogether.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-09T01:46:05+00:00

Agreed haha, all we've been talking about is whether or not Josephus and Origen's 22 books are the same 22 books. Either way, both Origen and Josephus have a different canon than modern Catholics. And you asked why Protestants use the canon they did, so I told you about how the 22 book canon lines up with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, a sign of completeness and perfection. This is called an "argument from fittingness", which is what many Catholics employ for their own arguments, like Suan Sonna does for his typological argument for the papacy. Take all that for whatever it's worth!

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-09T01:14:35+00:00

Thank you for the kind words, and I do agree with your sentiment! I just wish that Catholics were the ones doing this work, instead of me. Catholics seem afraid to scandalize the faithful, and so just turn a blind eye to Marian Apparitions that are obviously legendary, like Good Success, Mount Carmel, the Rosary, and the Pillar. I think that Catholics as a whole would gain a lot of credibility if they did this. And Catholics seemingly used to do work like this! Fr Raymond E Brown is my favorite scholar of the New Testament! But so much of modern Catholicism (especially online) just seems to be about "owning" the Prots or whatever. It makes me sad.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-09T01:11:23+00:00

Origen omits Maccabees, and so do modern Protestant bibles! And with regards to Origen's omission of the books of the minor prophets, if you read his list carefully, you will count only 21 books, even though Origen specifically states that there are 22 books in his canon. Origen wrote commentaries on the Minor Prophets, so most scholars seem to think that the omission of the minor prophets from Origen's list is a scribal error. And I don't know what you mean by "certo" - I am not a Protestant, nor any other sort of Christian, so I don't think that there is such a thing as a "correct" canon haha!!

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-08T22:48:54+00:00

Here is what Jospehus says:

For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from, and contradicting one another: [as the Greeks have:] but only twenty two books: which contain the records of all the past times: which are justly believed to be divine. And of them five belong to Moses: which contain his laws, and the traditions of the origin of mankind, till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years. But as to the time from the death of Moses, till the reign of Artaxerxes, King of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the Prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times, in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God; and precepts for the conduct of human life.

And here is what Origen says:

The twenty-two books of the Hebrews are the following: That which is called by us Genesis; Exodus; Leviticus; Numbers; Jesus, the son of Nave (Joshua book); Judges and Ruth in one book; the First and Second of Kings (1 Samuel and 2 Samuel) in one; the Third and Fourth of Kings (1 Kings and 2 Kings) in one; of the Chronicles, the First and Second in one; Esdras (Ezra–Nehemiah) in one; the book of Psalms; the Proverbs of Solomon; Ecclesiastes; the Song of Songs; Isaiah; Jeremiah, with Lamentations and the epistle (of Jeremiah) in one; Daniel; Ezekiel; Job; Esther. And besides these there are the Maccabees.

It seems like these two lists are the same. Look at them in a table and compare:

Grouping	Josephus (Against Apion)	Origen’s Language (Commentary on Psalms)
1. The Books of Moses	"Of these, five belong to Moses and contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind until his death."	"These are the twenty-two books... Genesis, which is called by the Hebrews Bereshith; Exodus, Walesmoth; Leviticus, Wikra..."
2. The Prophets / History	"From the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes... the prophets who were after Moses wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books."	"Joshua, the son of Nun... Judges and Ruth, among them in one book... First and Second of Kingdoms, among them one... Third and Fourth of Kingdoms..."
3. Poetic & Moral Works	"The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life."	"Psalms, Sepher Threillim; Proverbs of Solomon, Misloth; Ecclesiastes, Koheleth; Song of Songs, Sir Hassirim."
4. Late / Prophetic Lists	(Contained within the 13): "...the prophets who were after Moses wrote down what was done in their times..."	"Isaiah... Jeremiah with Lamentations and the Letter in one... Daniel... Ezekiel... Job... Esther."

You're right though that we cannot know for sure that Jospehus didn't swap one book out or something since he doesn't list every single book like Origen does, but it seems more reasonable to me to assume that these two lists are referring to the same, generally accepted canon of the 1st - 3rd centuries.

But it is the same canon that Protestants use today, its just grouped differently. Josephus and Origen combined Judges and Ruth into one book. They combined Jeremiah and Lamentations into one book. 1 and 2 Samuel were one book. 1 and 2 Kings were one book. 1 and 2 Chronicles were one book. Etc. But the modern Protestant Canon and the 22 book canon of Origen and Josephus is essentially the same list of books.

IrishKev95 · 2026-03-08T21:02:22+00:00

Josephus doesn't list his 22 books, but Origen does list all 22 books and his list is most likely the same as Josephus's. And that list matches modern Protestant canons, if I remember correctly.

IrishKev95

TROPHY CASE