Posted on 11/07/2005 2:23:36 AM PST by Crackingham
In the mid-1980s I was a member of a Vatican body with the impressive title International Committee of the Pontifical Council for Culture. Each year we had a meeting with Pope John-Paul II; on one occasion he gave us lunch and served a light white wine from, I think, a papal vineyard. The other members of the committee included a splendid Ibo lady, the head of the Catholic Women’s Movement in Nigeria, an Indian nun, a Japanese Jesuit and a Francophone president of an African nation who believed that French culture and a sound classical education would be the best answer to Africa’s educational problems. I enjoyed our discussions, which were almost always held in French.
The idea, which came from the Pope himself, was far-sighted. We foresaw what has subsequently been called the “clash of civilisations”; we tried to relate that conflict to the widely differing cultures of the billion members of the Roman Catholic Church. We discussed the impact of particular developments in modern science but so far as I can remember we did not try to deal with the central problem of the relationship between science and religion; that seems to have come now. Our chairman was Cardinal Paul Poupard, an admirable example of the cultivated French intellectual in the Roman Curia; he is still the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. Whether the council still has an international committee I do not know, since I left it nearly 20 years ago. Last week the cardinal was giving a press conference before a meeting in Rome of scientists, philosophers and theologians; this week they will be discussing the difficult subject of infinity. Cardinal Poupard had a beautifully trained French mind and inner loyalty to the Catholic faith. Nothing he says is said without careful thought. At the press conference he was discussing the issue of evolution, which is the critical dividing line between science and religion. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shook religious belief when it was first published in 1859 in a way that Isaac Newton’s equally important Principia had not shaken the faith of 1687. In The Times Martin Penner reported the cardinal’s argument. He had said that the description in Genesis of the Creation was “perfectly compatible” with Darwin’s theory of evolution, if the Bible were read properly. “Fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim.”
He argued that the real message of Genesis was that the Universe did not make itself, and had a creator. “Science and theology act in different fields, each in its own.” In Rome, the immediate reaction was that this was a Vatican rejection of the fundamentalist American doctrine of “intelligent design”. No doubt the Vatican does want to separate itself from American creationists, but the significance surely goes further than that. This is not another Galileo case; the teachings of the Church have never imposed a literal interpretation of the language of the Bible; that was a Protestant mistake. Nor did the Church condemn the theory of evolution, though it did and does reject neo-Darwinism when that is made specifically atheist.
Indeed, one can go back nearly 1,500 years before Darwin and find St Augustine of Hippo, the most commanding intellect of all the early doctors of the Church, teaching a doctrine of evolution in the early 5th century. In one of his greatest works, De Genesi ad Litteram, he stated that God did not create an organised Universe as we see it now, but in the beginning created all the elements of the world in a confused and “nebulous” mass. In this mass were the mysterious seeds of the creatures who were to come into existence. Augustine’s thought does therefore contain the elements of a theory of evolution, and even a genetic theory, but does not have natural selection. St Augustine has always been orthodox. He did not foresee modern science in AD410, but he did have an extraordinary grasp of the potential evolution of scientific thought. Cardinal Poupard’s address to the journalists should not be seen as a matter of the Roman Church changing its mind and accepting Darwin after 145 years.
It is a precautionary statement, distancing the Church from the American attack on Darwinism that Rome considers to be neither good science, nor good theology. It will also be taken as an indication of the priorities of the present Pope Benedict XVI.
Wow. I'll have to look this up. Thanks for posting!
This is a very well written article. I'm forwarding it from the original web address to a fundamentalist friend of mine.
Thank you for posting this.
It sounds rather like certain Catholics are wanting to make the bible itself into something "nebulous." Whatever a "scientific aim" might or might not be, words have to mean something. It's laughable to believe the bible is true yet dismiss the opening sentences of Genesis as a pretty parable when the theme "created... created... created..." is hammered in. If God did less than this, the "parable" would be a blasphemy, like stories of Him partying it up with the Devil.
OK, I read it, and it's claptrap, as is your assertion that "evolution is a false religion which competes with Christianity".
Evolution has zip to do with ethics, religion, or anything other than how species changed over time. Marxists and others have hijacked part of the concept in an attempt to justify their tyrannies--but that is simply and completely a lie.
Like it or not, the Jewish and Christian religions (and Christ himself) have used parables since their inception. The problem is you fundies, who want to force it to mean that the universe is 6000 years old, when the Bible itself is clear that such is not the case ("...and a night shall be as a thousand years...".
"God created..." says nothing about "how" the creation was done, and is, in fact, totally compatible with evolution. In fact, the more science learns about how the process probably happened, the more it agrees with Genesis.
The problem with your gloss is that explicit creating happens more than once in the story. Evilutionists will grudgingly, admit that maybe IF there is a God He at most created just once, and that's only because they can't come up with a theory for what had to have gone down before T=0.
The Catholic Church isn't saying "In the beginning God did NOT create Heaven and Earth". It is saying, and always has said, that God created Heaven and Earth.
God evidently uses Evolution to make and sculpt all living things. All reality comes from God: therefore He is clearly not absent from the process of evolution.
The sticking point for many Christians is that evolution is often presented as a byproduct of random genetic occurrences. However there is no scientific basis for insisting that any random event is actually random: if a pseudo-scientist insists that evolution must be aimless because it is a result of random processes, ask him to prove that the processes are in fact random, and not directed by God Almighty.
Pretty lame; we have discrete creation events happening during discrete days. One might try for a day = age metaphor, but many creations = one creation is hopeless.
Ah, I see the misconception. You are equating the act of primary creation (life from nothing) with speciation (other forms of life from previous life). Evolution is about speciation: it has nothing whatever to say about the origin/primary creation of life.
It's funny how Protestants insist that every single word of the Bible is literally accurate but when you ask them if they believe that the bread and wine literally becom God's Body and Blood on the altar they say "oh, that was just a metaphor".
Oh yeah, and there was the 'water into juice' discrepancy.
We learned that God created the world, he did it just as it said in Genesis, but we don't know what a 'day' or a 'night' meant to an infinite being. We know what He did, but we don't know HOW, and it would be hubris to claim that we did.
With all that said, please don't flame me because I think that evolution is a very weak and inadequate theory as well, nothing more than a working model that has been elevated into some sort of 'earth is flat, everyone knows that' dogma by theforces of 'modernity'.
O-tay, viewed through your goggles, God speciated (genusated? familyated?) and speciated and speciated again. During several ages. Don't help much.
rees-mogg was editor of the times of london during the mid-60s. he crapped out on conservatives during that culture war and he's doing it again.
I am a 'fundie' but have NEVER believed that the universe was 6,000 years old. The Bible uses what we know as time that has passed, I have always been sure that GOD's time frame is much vaster. A second to him could be like a million years to us.
If the bible provides a window into the creation sequence that makes it plausible to call many creation events one, Genesis ain't it.
Sorry I couldn't help. It seems a cleaner theory somehow that God created life once, like lighting a single flame, and then sculpted it into all its myriad forms rather than light a hundred fires. Maybe (I don't know) the non-english pre-cursors of Genesis don't use the same word for "created" throughout. Some biblical scholar can elucidate this for us.
To finish on a point of unanimity: I think that both of us would insist that God created Man by "special creation" - our immortal souls are clearly not a product of evolution.
Well that's another angle; some people believe animals have souls of some kind. But even they tend to stop at, say, trees.
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