Oparin's Out, Modernist Dominican Doesn't Get It

Where Does Life Come From? Evolution and God's Creation (Aquinas 101)
The Thomistic Institute | 3 May 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL_JygxcSYU

2:18 Creation Scientists have long since discovered excellent reasons against life arising from complex interactions of non-living things.

Evolution believers, both Atheist and Pseudo-Catholic ones, are behind the times.

An eggcellent (!) one is lecithine. It's a phospholipid. In lots of cell membranes, I think even inner membranes of plant cells, the outer membrane of which is cellulose, the material is phospholipids, of which lecithine is an eggsample (!). Egg yolks (!) contain lecithine, which is crucial to ice cream and mayo. Shouldn't be easy to miss, right?

Well, the fact is, Miller Urey conditions will certainly not produce lecithine or any other phospholipids.

I heard a rumour of Montmorillionite clays helping to synthesise phospholipids. Not so.

The clay montmorillonite is known to catalyze the polymerization of RNA from activated ribonucleotides. Here we report that montmorillonite accelerates the spontaneous conversion of fatty acid micelles into vesicles. Clay particles often become encapsulated in these vesicles, thus providing a pathway for the prebiotic encapsulation of catalytically active surfaces within membrane vesicles. In addition, RNA adsorbed to clay can be encapsulated within vesicles. Once formed, such vesicles can grow by incorporating fatty acid supplied as micelles and can divide without dilution of their contents by extrusion through small pores. These processes mediate vesicle replication through cycles of growth and division. The formation, growth, and division of the earliest cells may have occurred in response to similar interactions with mineral particles and inputs of material and energy.

This is an actual science report, [I was just] citing the abstract:

Experimental Models of Primitive Cellular Compartments: Encapsulation, Growth, and Division
Martin M. Hanczyc,* Shelly M. Fujikawa,* and Jack W. Szostak†
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4484575/

It would help form vesicles, but it would not produce the fatty acids. They need to be there before they can form vesicles. The one thing outside modern industry and the spiritual world capable of synthesising fatty acids known so far, is biology already alive. Ditto for the subclass phospholipids.

Miller Urey conditions are one setting in which modern industry will not synthesise phospholipids.

2:28 St. Thomas thought that the astrological influence of the planet Sun was the ultimate cause for biological life, as for the metal gold. Just as Venus is for love and for copper. Mars for strife and for iron. Right or wrong, this kind of thing is not what modern science is studying.

It's definitely not the universe of modern science that suggests that plants could arise from non-life.

And in St. Thomas' view, lower life forms could indeed be caused by Generatio aequivoca, Sun working without prior biology to produce biology, but not of higher beasts (or man), nor was there a transition between lower and higher inside biology.

2:40 Yes, "overarching order" and not "everchanging sequence of different orders" ... opposite of Evolutionism.

Also, the overarching order was not that of a clockwork. Rather, if we compare St. Thomas to Paley, St. Thomas is clearly less Deist. A clockwork needs no more input from the clockmaker unless it's broken. It needs the mechanism, the winding, and it will work on its own. St. Thomas compared creation to an instrument of which the creator is also the player.

5:08 "it's possible for order to emerge from seemingly random events"

Distinguo. Order as in symmetry, granted, irrelevant for DNA or RNA. Order as information, not granted, and that is what is relevant to DNA and RNA.

6:16 Seminal reasons translate as embryo.

If you know Latin you know "seminal" comes from semen, seed, and if you know biology, you know a seed is a fertilised plant ovum, a plant embryo.

It also has a connotation of Platonic Form ... which embrya do incorporate of their respective created kinds.

7:08 "long and complex process of development"

You are confusing biology and chemistry.

Miller Urey conditions can create amino acids. They will also quickly produce the disintegration of the same amino acids they produce. Quickly meaning within hours, not millions of years open to development.

Aquinas and Geocentrism

Two Minor Disagreements with Ken Ham · Aquinas and Geocentrism

What's Wrong With St. Thomas' First Proof for the Existence of God? (Aquinas 101)
The Thomistic Institute, 7 March 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS-V90xxYLI

3:35 Too bad.

Hot dogs are classified as sandwiches in Paris, as are Hamburgers. AND there is an ice cream in Sweden called "sandwich" which is vanilla ice cream between two soft chocolate cookies.

4:13 Infinity is not a number.

In arithmetic, number grows into a potential infinity, but is always actually only finite, since number is 1 added to 1.

Another way to look at it is, the things that are both moved and movers can be regarded as a "road" or a stretch and "infinita non est pertransire" ... (Greek use of infinitive instead of gerund is a mark of Medieval Latin). Any line is the distance between two points, but by that fact, these points become ends of the line and the line is always finite.

Infinity is also not a size ... too bad for Cantor.

4:24 There are not in actual existence an infinite number of even integers. Integers only exist in so far as things exist to be numbered. We have no manner to tell what the highest actual integer is, but this doesn't mean there isn't one. Beyond that, we have potential integers, if God choses to create another item not yet counted.

And 1/3 only has "an infinite number of decimals" because of the convention of expressing ratios in decimals, which are incommensurable with thirds.

And pi only has "an infinite number of decimals" because it is not a number at all, but a geometric size to size ratio. 3 is too low, 4 too high. 3.1 is too low, 3.2 is too high. 3.14 is too low, 3.15 is too high. 3.141 is too low, 3.142 is too high. 3.1415 is too low, 3.1416 is (just barely) too high. 3.14159 is too low, 3.14160 is too high ... sizes are divisible infinitely. This means that size ratios are not always numeric ratios.

4:38 And Leo XIII was unwilling to condemn Scotus and Suarez.

Scotus famously disagreed with St. Thomas on this one, because time is like arithmetic. It grows in one direction.

Now, St. Thomas would have classified stars as "fire, specifically light" and have considered that one constant way in which matter can be.

Since then, fusion means that what's emitting light in stars is a process, that goes one way:

H > D, D > He.

This by itself means, the universe as we know it has to have a beginning.

Credits to Dom Stanley Jaki and to Rev. Bryan Houghton for the observation, btw.

6:30 If you look up in Contra Gentes, I think chapter 13, possibly book II, St. Thomas explains day and night this way.

God moves the sphere of the fix stars, which is the primum mobile, which moves spheres inside it, down to the sphere of the Moon (and including somewhere on the way the sphere of the Sun), which under itself moves air and even waters into what are known as winds of passage and equatorial oceanic currents.

Given that earth does not rotate, which we observe it doesn't, this movement coming in from the outside has to have an ultimate source. Which we call God.

Tycho Brahe had a comet "shatter the crystalline spheres" but if instead of that we imagine this as involving interatomic matter, a k a aether, the model is still viable.

Heliocentrism can only be proven by assuming there is no God or are no angels.

8:13 It can be added that atheism can intelligently be stated as involving no denial of the first three ways. One just has to identify 1st way "god" as "forces" and 3rd way "god" as "particles" and 2nd way "god" as both of these.

Two ways to break this objection down.

1) Q 11 shows the unity of God from the unity of the universe that's moving around earth. Yes, 1st way may be stated in a more general way, but one really can formulate it as "patet sensibus res moveri, utputa sol" ... Geocentrism is only possible with a God outside the moving parts of the Universe moving these parts. Not that God were relegated to the parts outside, but that He's also there;
2) By reference to ways 4 and 5. The one involves man being nobler than beasts which are nobler than plants which are nobler than stones. Hence, the argument from "reason is not a projected aspect of matter" - and the other involves God as the one ordering the universe, so it keeps together.

Now, St. Thomas' example would be, once again, Geocentrism. One can switch this argument for "fine tuning of constants" if one believes Heliocentrism (for whatever reason, when being Christian one doesn't need to), or for "irreducible complexity" .... which is exactly what Creationism does.

Ergo - Creationism and Aquinas "même combat" as they say here in Paris.

Belated happy feast day, by the way!

Fr. Dominic shot himself in the foot, sorry, Legge, on Adam and Eve

Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? w/ Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P. (Aquinas 101)
The Thomistic Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppbXsyTE3TI

0:39 What would your arguments for that position be?

Did you make an interview with Moses for 3cents Magazine?

2:19 Petrus Comestor disagreed.

In the beginning of the Gospel part of Historia scholastica, he considered it a known fact of Biblical chronology (given the distance from Flood to Abraham and Creation to Flood : the text version is LXX without a second Cainan) that Christ was born 5199 after Adam and Eve were created.

Not only that.

Before you appeal to St. Thomas' typical output as being too intellectual to accept such "simplistic readings" - he had made an oath to uphold:

• the theology of Peter Lombard
• the Biblical history of - yes - Historia Scholastica
• the canon law of Decree of Gratian.

Plus obviously, he never took a distance from his probable youth work, Postilla in Libros Geneseos, except from its Latinity. Probably changed his Latin grammar a bit when going from Benedictines in Naples to Dominicans in Paris.

3:14 First of all, taking the days of creation as actual days, which is the natural reading, yes, Genesis answers that in the negative.

Second, even without Genesis, a man can have irrational ancestry only on two alternative conditions : either he was directly born of beings fully irrational, or there is a graduation from irrationality of beasts and rationality of man.

The second opinion is very popular among scientists and especially atheists among them, as it means "rationality" is just a quirk in animal consciousness. But it's incompatible with Christianity.

The first of these involves that Adam was before he sinned treated badly by God. He was put into the position of becoming a feral child.

3:37 That the Sapiens race "mated" with Neanderthals has no bearing on whether Adam had ancestry.

Not more than Black and White people getting married now.

Candace Owens is pretty Black, and at least the father of her spouse, Michael Farmer, probably her spouse too, George Farmer, is White.

If both descend from Adam it doesn't mean Adam had non-human ancestry.

Neither do pre-Flood marriages between Sapiens and Neanderthal races.

3:43 Timescale.

If you put Adam into 7000 BP, as you should, and this into the Evolutionary Timescale (or Uniformitarian, not all who hold it are Evolution believers), it means, Adam wasn't the first man, and probably not ancestor of pre-Columbian or pre-Cook populations.

If you put Adam into 40 000 BP or 100 000 BP, and note this, taking these as the real dates, you have suddenly made Genesis 3 impossible as history. It couldn't have been accurately transmitted, when if so even Genesis 5 and 11 were inaccurately transmitted.

3:59 We have lots of other evidence that Neanderthals had rational souls.

They deliberately buried their dead.

A Neanderthal at Shanidar became one-armed, handicapped, and he didn't die before the lesion of the bone had been very well healed, rounded off. This means, he was kept alive, while not being productive.

They also used ravens for dark feathers, a symbolic behaviour which is only possible with a rational soul.

4:21 Y-Chromosome "Adam" is better known as Noah.

"Mitochondrial Eve" would be the woman who was last common ancestor of his three daughters in law. So, she was born, and that well after 5199 BC. Again, your view of the timescale makes your view seriously unbiblical and unthomistic as well.

5:08 "lacking the light of reason"

In that case, they could not have had language.

Don't be fooled by fools, they do not lack the light of reason, they lack the correct use of reason in deliberation.

A total lack of the light of reason would clearly imply no notionality, and no need for a language going beyond c. 500 "word-sentences" comparable to road signs - the maximal capacity that monkeys have been shown to have.

5:16 "from this population ... two new creatures"

Were they created like the population, or was the male so?

If that is the case, when God later endowed him (or them) with reason, he (or they) would have had either the amnesia or the shame of a bestial past.

Were they created unlike the population, or was the male so?

If that is the case, he (or they) was growing up like a feral child (cured by God at a later stage?) or with a superiority complex or "not at home with them" complex to the rest of his kin. Plus that a language acquisition without parents actually speaking would have been possible only by a miracle.

5:31 The larger pool than one couple argument is soundly refuted by the Pitcairn population.

5:44 If Cain's and Seth's wives were originally non-human, and if they were endowed with rationality only on becoming such, namely wives of actual men, we would be talking of a wooing with no words, and of a first act of intercourse in bestiality.

6:13 No "a very long time ago" is very much not needed.

Give a pre-Flood population of races Neanderthal, Sapiens and Denisovan, and Noah as tenth from Adam being Sapiens pointing to Adam being close to that too, Neanderthals and Denisovans can be explained as part or totally Nephelim, and Homo Erectus Soloensis as extreme case or as a bred kind of warrior giant.

And the genome can be explained by Noah's inlaws having such ancestry. Only about 5000 years ago.

And no actual non-humans ever involved with either human anatomy or ancestrality of modern day human populations.

Neanderthals were Human and Lived After Adam Was Created 5199 (or 5500) BC - Contra Gaine

Fr. Gaine OP is presenting arguments for not taking Neanderthals or even all Homo sapiens as rational and as image of God. He is, however, at the end coming out on the end of favouring their rationality and full humanity. I am answering, somewhat harshly those arguments, and mistaking them for his pov, but this should be taken as ... sorry, at the end (57 minutes and some) he does in fact admit the possibility, which should be condemned, of non-rational biological humans.

Did Christ Die For Neanderthals? | Fr Simon Gaine, OP
14th Febr. 2020 | The Thomistic Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKcwCpWOZhk

26:29 Solution.

Eve was a clone of Adam, but with one X chromosome doubled and the Y chromosome taken away.

The Y chromosome was then kept and Our Lord is a clone of Our Lady, with one X taken away and that Y chromosome from Adam added instead.

27:57 What about Neanderthals and us being the same KIND, descended from Adam and Eve, and "species" in Linnean sense being more or less a buzz word?

In Linnaeus' time, I think we had canis lupus and canis canis registered as two separate species, you only need to read Phantom of Bengali to know they are interfertile ... as modern classification reduces the difference to one of subspecies.

30:03 If we accept that one couple was theologically human and their offspring married the children of contemporaries biologically human, we are saying that these children of Adam and Eve actually raped a kind of beasts who were not able to consent.

You are also forgetting that the imago Dei of the human soul is not a "mystery of faith" like the Trinity, but a thing that can be rationally proven, for instance from the fact that language is not a purely practic communication like traffic signs or bird calls. Once you have a being able to say "the soil is brown" - which is true, but serves no practical purpose to say - you have a being that is created in God's image. No beast can say in any way shape or form "the soil is brown".

If on the other hand you imagine that theologically non-human biological humans could communicate with language like us, could have social interactions on a voluntary and contractual basis like we, you are demoting the "imago Dei" to the rationally unknowable, you are making it a simple extra serving no actual purpose in everyday life, an "asset" to get some part of us an eternal fate. You are destroying the anthropology of St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as that of Aristotle and Plato.

Neanderthals could speak. They had hyoid bones like we, and the hyoid bone from an exemplar of Kebara (forget if it was 1 or 2) showed by an ultrasound scan it had been used much the way we use our hyoid bones. That Neanderthal had used oral communication. Neanderthals and Heidelbergians - to a lesser degree Solo man - had the same hearing range as we. This means they could hear consonants. This means they were created for the same kind of communication as we are. One in which sentences are built up by adding different morphemes (I am not saying words, the morphemes for the subject and even object can be incorporated into the word with a morpheme for the verb action, as in Latin, Hungarian and Greenlandic), and one in which morphemes are built up by adding together phonemes, vowels and consonants. There have been some speculation, since then corrected, that Neanderthals could not pronounce all vowels, they could have pronounced ee or oo, and üh and ur, but not ah, aw, ay, this is no proof to the contrary, it just means, if true, they spoke another language than we, one in which no words contain ah or ay or aw. But this kind of communication for which I have given mathematical coordinates is very different from one in which a sentence is a morpheme is a phoneme or at best an alternation between two phonemes (which could also count as one, consider "ts" is one and not two phonemes in Greek) only makes sense if you need to be able to pronounce an infinity of different sentences. Beasts can pronounce and understand up to 500 different sentences that are usually words that are usually sounds, with or without repetition. That is what you want to a purely pragmatic communication, as that of beasts. The traffic signs in US are purely pragmatic, and there are 500 of them.

30:22 "If it suffices with only one parent with an immortal soul" .... then the other parent is a rape victim. Besides being an ontological anomaly, created anatomically for human communications which are only possible if you have concepts, which are only possible if you have a rational soul (or are an intelligent angel). But even so not having that which biologically it is created for.

32:38 And the fact that Neanderthals were created to pronounce and understand an infinity of sentences, including "the soil is brown" means that they had immaterial pursuits.

The beings that have only material pursuits have no sense of the subject of a verb, no sense of an object apart from an immediate action, often enough simply point at the objects and have very standardised sounds for the actions. A beast can say "let's chill" or "let's eat" or "come here" but there are only a very limited amount of actions to be taken about purely material things, therefore an irrational animal has no need or point in the full human hearing range or in Broca's area (Solo man has Broca's area, but of the speech sounds, he might have had trouble with very high pitched consonants like labial or dental stops and fricatives - same solution as for the case if Neanderthals had been handicapped as to low vowels).

The clear non humans pretended to be in our ancestry are Paranthropus and Australopithecus, a hearing range incapable of consonants and a hyoid bone meant to carry air bags of resonance as in apes. And there is no evidence that they actually left us any genes.

In other words : Australopithecus, Paranthropus, part of Homo habilis (not rudolfensis ones) are not the image of God.

Rudolfensis and Solo man are the image of God physiologically damaged, reduced speech capacities.

Neanderthal, Denisovan and Sapiens are the image of God with normal speech capacities.

And by the way, since Antecessor in Atapuerca is morphologically Heidelbergian and genetically close to Denisovan, Denisovan = Antecessor = Heidelbergensis. We don't have the Denisovan morphology in the Denisova cave, but we can supplement it from Atapuerca and Heidelberg (with Terra Amata). We don't have the Heidelbergian genetics, no one did so far an palaeogenetic investigation of Heidelberg man, but we can supplement it from Atapuerca and Denisova cave.

If Heidelbergians are a bit closer to Solo man and Rudolfensis man than Neanderthals or sapiens are, we can conclude the Nephelim were perhaps not all Denisovans, but within the Denisovan population, and probably Solo man and Homo rudolfensis correspond to Baruch 3:26-28 There were the giants, those renowned men that were from the beginning, of great stature, expert in war. The Lord chose not them, neither did they find the way of knowledge: therefore did they perish. And because they had not wisdom, they perished through their folly.

Daniel Everett considers the average brain capacity of adult Solo men as that of ten year olds ... they were tribes with big muscle, small brain, and probably used as war machines rather than philosophers.

34:58 Non-human animals all lack one specific "sophistication" - speech.

A parrot repeating "dirtbag, dirtbag, dirtbag" doesn't speak any more than a grammaphone doing so. An ape cannot hear or pronounce "dirtbag" even. No observed natural communication has the triple levels by double articulation, the level sentence articulated into several morphemes, the level morpheme into several phonemes.

No non-human animal has Broca's area in the brain. Or Wernicke's - but it seems that one is more inferred from Broca's than directly attested in the skull.

35:47 Any pretence that human language has been found in some form in birds or in whales is false.

Birds and whales communicate in intervals, and therefore in more than one tone. And many intervals may be stringed together to form a name. But a name is not a sentence.

A bird cannot say "it is I who ate the birdseed" - it cannot say "it is I who" anything at all, since beasts only have verbs in the imperative or other jussive type moods, and the subject being the one adressed is not expressed. And it cannot say "ate" in the past tense, given that it can only adress other birds for present or imminent future purposes.

A bird cannot say "the soil is brown" ... man can, because man is created to classify things like the qualities of objects. The first act Adam was called on to perform was name the animals, that is an act of classification. Not of social naming of one's social surroundings, as "names" in birds or whales.

And only by classification do you get a physiological need to communicate more than 500 sentences for each of which a sound (or an interval) will suffice.

37:36 I can imagine a role for a disabled in a rational group - teaching the small to speak.

This lacking, I don't know how you can imagine a role for the disabled in a non-rational group.

If men in a zoo keep disabled individuals alive, that's another matter. Or if the handicap was not truly disabling.

However, you seem to find excuse after excuse to deny that Neanderthals were human ... like certain founders of a Synagogue of Satan found excuse after excuse to deny Our Lord is divine. After a miracle He made, they asked "show us a miracle" ... meaning the one He just did was not good enough.

Chesterton's Everlasting Man was so right to start one part with a man in the cave and the next part with God come down to one in Bethlehem.

38:38 You have totally missed the kind of communication all sorts of animals are capable of.

No beast is made, and therefore no beast is formed physiologically, for forming an infinity of sentences by rearranging a set of speech sounds.

39:07 And Neanderthals, like even Solo men, had Broca's area, helping us to analyse sounds in a way unknown in the animal kingdom outside God's image.

47:05 Neanderthals, Denisovans, Sapiens in their times prior to carbon dated 40 000 BP had certainly heard the proto-Gospel - Genesis 3:15.

Those of them that were saved were so by belief in the woman and her seed who were to crush the serpent's head and in preferring the ways of Abel to those of Cain.

Those who weren't were however damned for violent lives or fearful lives or for acts of black magic (Cannibalism in Atapuerca), but not for idolatry of types like Hinduism or Shintoism.

How is this possible? Well, fairly easily if their lifetime was during the pre-Flood era, between 5199 and 2957 BC.

Not at all if they lived tens of thousands of years after Adam and Eve, or if they did not even belong to their lineage. Hence the interest in rejecting modern dating methods at least as far as when they conflict with the Biblical chronology.

50:31 The appearance of inbreeding can be due to mirage of tens of thousands of years.

If two individuals share as many genes as a grandparent and grandchild and are tens of thousands of years apart, they arguably had much inbreeding in between. If they share as many genes as that but lived close to each other in time, they could have been ... grandparent and grandchild.

50:56 If all carriers of Neanderthal genome and of Denisovan genome on the Ark were halfbreeds with the race called sapiens, mystery solved, pure Neanderthals and Denisovans died from the Flood, any who had survived up to it.

This also would mean 40 000 BP is the raw carbon date for the actual years 2957 BC.

52:03 "there would have been rational beings not descended from Adam, who are in the ancestry of Christ"

Namely, if Neanderthals really lived 600 000 to 40 000 (perhaps 28 000) years ago.

B U T if they lived from some time after 5199 BC to 2957 BC, this does simply not follow.

If it were true, instead of a rape of non-theological humans, you have non-Adamite theological humans, or theological humanity separated from rationally analysed ontological humanity. All of which are no-nos to Catholics.

Remember, some Neanderthals lived very harsh lives, for instance the man without an arm in Shanidar (Iran). Impossible, theologically, before Adam sinned. See Trent Session V.

52:26 "an Adam that is ancestral to a population ancestral to both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals"

Ah, Fr Simon Gaine starts speaking sense.

Yes, indeed. This is the only thing sensible according to Trent Session V on Original Sin.

However, this can only be on one of two conditions, excluding each other:

• Adam lived hundreds of thousands of years ago
• or no Neanderthals or Homo sapiens lived that long ago.

The first of these would make the historical transmission of Genesis 3 more than just moot. The latter of these poses no problem to theology, and no real big ones to those who look closely at the dating methods.