An evolved system is complex and dynamic, and can lose its stability. A created system is presumed to be static and always stable, so Christians don’t consider LUC to be an issue with respect to the environment.
The distinction here would be that a created system’s complexity is designed to be stable even with changes, not that it isn’t complex and dynamic.
Historically, Christians objected strongly to fossil evidence that some species had gone extinct. They said God would not have created species and then let them go extinct.
Perfection is a crucial part of Christian ontology. God’s creation was perfect. That means, in the Christian way of thinking, it is unchanging. Read Christian descriptions of God (who is perfect), and “unchanging” is always one of the adjectives. “Unchanging” is a necessary attribute of perfection in Christian theology, and God’s creation is necessarily perfect. The environment, therefore, was designed and created not to ever change.
One could argue that individuals are thus imperfect because they are born young and then mature. I’ve never heard a counter-argument against this accusation, though I suspect they exist in the wreckage of medieval theology.
(AIUI, you should be able to delete a comment after retracting it and refreshing the page, at least provided that no one has replied to it in the meantime.)
Yep, the argument to justify the imperfection of children, and thus the necessity of growth, is based on Aristotle’s notion of perfect and imperfect actualities. Aquinas wrote:
Everything is perfect inasmuch as it is in actuality; imperfect, inasmuch as it is in potentiality, with privation of actuality. … It is impossible therefore for any effect that is brought into being by action to be of a nobler actuality than is the actuality of the agent. It is possible though for the actuality of the effect to be less perfect than the actuality of the acting cause, inasmuch as action may be weakened on the part of the object to which it is terminated, or upon which it is spent.
The reason God created humans so that they have to grow from imperfect childhood (lacking the maturity of a complete human) towards a perfect adult state, rather than being adult, is thus so that they may learn virtue, which is the process of striving for perfection. (The environment does not need to learn virtue; therefore it was created perfect.)
I don’t know whether humans would have born offspring that were babies if not for the Fall, nor why animals bear babies, if not for the sake of their spiritual growth.
(The environment does not need to learn virtue; therefore it was created perfect.)
If you think you are giving Aquinas’s views there, you are mistaken. He says that the opinion that the environment was created imperfect and gradually perfected is “better and more theological” than the opinion that it was created perfect.
He also gives a reason for this to happen, namely that by coming to be gradually, the world can participate in causing its own perfection.
I was unfairly inserting in the parentheses my own presumption about why Christians saw the world as having been created perfect. The passage I was talking about from Aquinas did not talk about perfection of the environment.
I’d like to see what Aquinas did say. Have you got a citation? I’m pretty sure that the notion that the world was created imperfect has never been tolerated by the Catholic Church. Asserting that creation was imperfect might even be condemned as Manicheeism. Opinions vary on what happened after the Fall, but I find it unlikely that Aquinas could have said God’s original creation was imperfect. (If he did, he was probably copying Aristotle, and making some fine definitional distinction not explained here, to avoid heresy.)
I know he does make that statement about his opinion being “better and more theological”; however I don’t have the specific citation at the moment. However, I did find this text from the disputed questions on power:
It should be said that it does not only pertain to the liberality of a giver that he should give quickly, but also that he should give to each thing ordinately and at a fitting time. Whence where it is said, “When you can give immediately,” one should consider not only the power by which we can give something absolutely, but also by which we can give more fittingly. Whence for the fitting preservation of order God first instituted things in a certain imperfection, that thus they might come gradually from nothing to perfection.
He was not copying Aristotle (since Aristotle thought the world was eternal and would have passed back and forth an infinite number of times between perfection and imperfection), but Augustine. Augustine says that the world was created in an instant, in an imperfect state, but one which contained its perfections in potency. Logically this is even consistent with what actually happened (i.e. Big Bang and evolution). Needless to say neither of them was thinking of any such detail in giving that general account.
Both of them think would say that the account in Genesis is true, and in that way avoid heresy. But Augustine’s explanation of the text is at any rate extremely metaphorical.
The distinction here would be that a created system’s complexity is designed to be stable even with changes, not that it isn’t complex and dynamic.
I didn’t mean to retract this, but to delete it and move the comment down below.
Historically, Christians objected strongly to fossil evidence that some species had gone extinct. They said God would not have created species and then let them go extinct.
Perfection is a crucial part of Christian ontology. God’s creation was perfect. That means, in the Christian way of thinking, it is unchanging. Read Christian descriptions of God (who is perfect), and “unchanging” is always one of the adjectives. “Unchanging” is a necessary attribute of perfection in Christian theology, and God’s creation is necessarily perfect. The environment, therefore, was designed and created not to ever change.
One could argue that individuals are thus imperfect because they are born young and then mature. I’ve never heard a counter-argument against this accusation, though I suspect they exist in the wreckage of medieval theology.
(AIUI, you should be able to delete a comment after retracting it and refreshing the page, at least provided that no one has replied to it in the meantime.)
Yep, the argument to justify the imperfection of children, and thus the necessity of growth, is based on Aristotle’s notion of perfect and imperfect actualities. Aquinas wrote:
The reason God created humans so that they have to grow from imperfect childhood (lacking the maturity of a complete human) towards a perfect adult state, rather than being adult, is thus so that they may learn virtue, which is the process of striving for perfection. (The environment does not need to learn virtue; therefore it was created perfect.)
I don’t know whether humans would have born offspring that were babies if not for the Fall, nor why animals bear babies, if not for the sake of their spiritual growth.
If you think you are giving Aquinas’s views there, you are mistaken. He says that the opinion that the environment was created imperfect and gradually perfected is “better and more theological” than the opinion that it was created perfect.
He also gives a reason for this to happen, namely that by coming to be gradually, the world can participate in causing its own perfection.
I was unfairly inserting in the parentheses my own presumption about why Christians saw the world as having been created perfect. The passage I was talking about from Aquinas did not talk about perfection of the environment.
I’d like to see what Aquinas did say. Have you got a citation? I’m pretty sure that the notion that the world was created imperfect has never been tolerated by the Catholic Church. Asserting that creation was imperfect might even be condemned as Manicheeism. Opinions vary on what happened after the Fall, but I find it unlikely that Aquinas could have said God’s original creation was imperfect. (If he did, he was probably copying Aristotle, and making some fine definitional distinction not explained here, to avoid heresy.)
I know he does make that statement about his opinion being “better and more theological”; however I don’t have the specific citation at the moment. However, I did find this text from the disputed questions on power:
He was not copying Aristotle (since Aristotle thought the world was eternal and would have passed back and forth an infinite number of times between perfection and imperfection), but Augustine. Augustine says that the world was created in an instant, in an imperfect state, but one which contained its perfections in potency. Logically this is even consistent with what actually happened (i.e. Big Bang and evolution). Needless to say neither of them was thinking of any such detail in giving that general account.
Both of them think would say that the account in Genesis is true, and in that way avoid heresy. But Augustine’s explanation of the text is at any rate extremely metaphorical.