Vatican Backs Science Over Intelligent Design
The right wing religious wackos attacking evolution are too far out for the Vatican:
A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into “fundamentalism” if it ignores scientific reason.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the “mutual prejudice” between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States. . .
Poupard and others at the news conference were asked about the religion-science debate raging in the United States over evolution and “intelligent design.”
Intelligent design’s supporters argue that natural selection, an element of evolutionary theory, cannot fully explain the origin of life or the emergence of highly complex life forms.
Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or Science, Theology and Ontological Quest, reaffirmed John Paul’s 1996 statement that evolution was “more than just a hypothesis.”
“A hypothesis asks whether something is true or false,” he said. “(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof.”
posted by Ron Chusid at 3:20 PM
6 Comments:
<<“(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof.”>>
What the Vatican is saying, is that evolution theory is accurate, in terms of sequence of processes involved in the formation of life.
However, understand, that the church solidly adheres to belief that God generated life on earth. The church also, holds as required dogma, that every Catholic must accept the teaching that Adam and Eve were the first 2 living souls on earth, and that humanity, as it was intended in it's fullness, began roughly 8 thousand years ago.
By teaching this, the Church indirectly requires us to believe that God also caused the historical events a few thousand years ago, as mentioned in the bible. That would include the flood and the dividing of pangea.
Note that the lines in Peru which form various animal species, could once be seen from the Andes Mountains, which moved quite a distance since the lines were drawn several thousand years ago. This is consistant with biblical events of flood and dividing of pangea.
It sure sounds like you are working hard to twist facts to fit your religious beliefs. While I'm sure I wouldn't be in complete agreement with them at the Vatican, from this statement they are far more open to considering science despite the risk that it contradicts some biblical stories. After all, that is what the bible is--stories to illustrate ideas, and not something to be taken literally as fact or as reason to ignore science.
I am glad to see that the Catholics are using alittle more common sense. Maybe they did learn sopmething from their go-round with Galileo after all. It is right that evolution is more than a hypothesis, because there has been lots of valid testing. Intelligent design is not even a hypothesis, and therefore cannot be scientifically tested, because it is a philosophical belief. The papers should quit calling it a theory, because it does not fit the definition.
I am glad to see that the Catholics are using alittle more common sense. Maybe they did learn something from their go-round with Galileo after all. It is right that evolution is more than a hypothesis, because there has been lots of valid testing. Intelligent design is not even a hypothesis, and therefore cannot be scientifically tested, because it is a philosophical belief. The papers should quit calling it a theory, because it does not fit the definition.
One problem with intelligent design is that there's not much there.
Let's say a school district decides to teach id. Once they teach that there is a designer, without knowing any specifics, what next? All they really have to teach is a bunch of bogus claims to try to discredit evolution.
One "text book" which was published to "teach" id just took an old book promoting creationism and substituted intelligent design everywhere that it said creationism.
Mark resorted to adding a comment attacked to an old post on evolution from November, perhaps to reduce the chance of rebuttal. It was filled with the same pseudo-science as his more recent comments here at at The Democratic Daily.
Opponents of evolution should at least obtain a minimal amount of knowledge of basic science in order to keep their statements from being totally absurd.
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