Posted on 11/07/2005 12:05:04 PM PST by Mikey_1962
THE Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly. His statement was a clear attack on creationist campaigners in the US, who see evolution and the Genesis account as mutually exclusive.
"The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator".
This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to "understand things better".
His statements were interpreted in Italy as a rejection of the "intelligent design" view, which says the universe is so complex that some higher being must have designed every detail.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
Funny, that doesn't stop you from "speaking" for Him.
Do you think it's theologically permissible to believe that the descendents of this original human couple interbread with proto-humans?
Maybe not, but his opinion is identical to that of at least 4 popes, including the present one.
So why doesn't the world get in an uproar when someone launches yet another expedition to try to find, say, Nessie?
If there were an organized, well-funded movement to get fake "evidence" for Nessie inserted into high school biology classes, there would be.
Why is it that you guys must be so dishonest in every bloody exchange down to the last of you!
It isn't about Science or the Scientific method. It is about what you twits constantly wish to claim in it's regard. You want all the praise for what Science has accomplished and want to make excuse after bloody excuse for it's manifold failures.
It is a sum total that is the problem. What is asked is if you don't know "SHUT UP". It isn't that difficult.
If you want to be a fiction writer, go make your bones writing fiction. Science is not a fiction mill; but, that's what evolutionists have turned it into. Shut up. When you have something, speak. Until then shut up.
Mega bump
Possible Nessie sightings appeared a time or two, I recall, during the course of my senior year biology. It was to the effect of "oh, some biologists think there may be something in Loch Ness accounting for the claimed Nessie sightings; here's a claimed picture, and here's what's being tried to locate it; some think it could be a manatee [accompanying picture and description of manatees]." Nobody got bent out of shape and no other attention was paid to it. But the mention fit the best in a biology class, not, say, social studies or history.
The Examiner has determined that Noah's Ark lies atop Olympus Mons on Mars.....
Next Week: A detailed examination of the flight of B24's found on the Moon.
I don't think I've misunderstood atheism at all. However much you protest that you are admitting non-physical causation, your image of causation is plainly physical, since the infinite regress argument is an image of a temporal sequence, and makes no sense atemporally.
I do admit a great deal of sympathy for the rejection of what I like to call 'one god paganism', the crabbed little sort of monotheism which imagines a super-powerful (often irrationally vengeful) old man in the sky as the 'first cause'. But do read Dionysius, at least a little. A good full-blooded monotheism like his is the intuition and conviction that that which is beyond the distinction between being and non-being, and cannot properly be likened to any created thing, but by some improper likeness is more like a person than a thing or abstract idea. Of course, he as a Christian (as do I) sees the decisive self-revelation of that which is beyond being and non-being, not in the handing out of a pack of rules, do's and don't's, but in a Person, partaking fully of our human nature, while retaining the suprasubstantial nature which is His properly from before time.
A real atheism, as opposed to an agnosticism, must not just reject the vengeful old man in the sky, but embrace with firm conviction the belief that the ground-of-all-being is not in any meaningful analogy more like a person than a thing or idea, and thus not worthy of the name God.
Observation may have led some scientists to evolution. Others were led past it for failing of the evidences. They wound up in the ID camp. You want to state that ID has no evidence supporting it; but, that stands in contrast to the evidences claimed by the scientists that wound up there as a result of them.
Care to cite all these scientists? Let's see them. Who's put their names and reputations to ID?
And before you post it, I'm not talking about that forged list from a conference of supposed "400 signers" that's been debunked by the very men whose names appear on it. I'm talking about articles in scientific journals, books and other tangible statements from these unbiased scientists who you say have turned to ID because of the evidence.
Blow up? What blow up? Why do you assume it takes any more energy or angst to say what I said than to say the ocean is blue. Don't try to assume - it's a disservice to yourself.
It is a sum total that is the problem. What is asked is if you don't know "SHUT UP". It isn't that difficult.
If you want to be a fiction writer, go make your bones writing fiction. Science is not a fiction mill; but, that's what evolutionists have turned it into. Shut up. When you have something, speak. Until then shut up
I think that you have failed to see the fullness of my point. I reduced your argument to the absurd by taking it and running with it to its extreme. You want to pick and choose what parts of science you believe? OK, I showed you what science has given you and what you would be without science.
You want to demolish parts of science because you don't like the results. You are willing to destroy the scientific method, and people's trust in that method on the way. I prefer not to see this happen.
As far as fiction, well some of my colleagues thought my dissertation some 20+ years ago was fiction, but you know, not a one of them told me to shut up. Since then a lot of it has been confirmed.
And I took their advice to heart. My first novel should be on the racks within the year. But its fiction, so don't pay it no mind.
Evening, all.
No response to AC goes unpunished.
Amen.
Oh, come now. The Latin church does not teach that Scripture is an allegory.
On the other hand, the Scriptures certainly contain allegories--read Proverbs.
It is a matter of discernment which passages are to be taken literally, and which are allegorical.
One must pick whether John or the synoptics correctly recorded the time of Christ's Crucifixion--as an Orthodox Christian I hold with St. John the Theologian, while the Latin church and most protestants hold with the synoptics, hence the controversy over 'azymes'. And if you pick the synoptic Gospels' chronology, then John's timing of the Crucifixion during the slaughter of the Paschal lambs is allegorical.
What warrant have you to insist that Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are to be read literally, and worse still with a sense of 'literal' based on a hermeneutic which didn't even exist at the time they were first written down--that of reading everything as if it were written by and for post-'Englightenment' rationalists--when the generation of Christians who were alive when the Church fixed the canon of Scripture didn't give them that reading? St. Basil the Great in his Hexaemeron--often held up as a patristic support for six-day literalism--early in the book writes, "It matters not whether you say 'day' or 'aeon', the thought is the same." St. Gregory of Nyssa describes the opening chapters of Genesis as "Doctrine in the guise of a narrative." Where do you get off insisting on literalism, misnaming the Holy Scriptures, 'the Word', when Christ Himself is the Word, as if they were a Christian Koran?
Are the mods anti-Catholic, or have the creationists exceeded their Papal abuse quota for the day?
Of course, the Indiana legislature would have been better off demanding that all measurements be done in cubits (in which case, given the variability of
human forearm lengths, the approximation of pi by 3 is perfectly respectable).
Oh, bunk. The method isn't the issue. It's what people do with it and try to excuse with it that is at issue. You just don't seem to have the capacity to admit that. You present an all or nothing approach that is at best dishonest and at worse an outright logical fallacy. We both look at a baby in a soiled diaper - I propose changing the daper. Logical and appropriate. Your summation of this is that I either have to accept the baby in the soiled diaper or throw the baby and diaper out together. And you somehow think this some brilliant argument..
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