Posted on 11/14/2005 5:12:54 AM PST by jodiluvshoes
In a remarkably odd statement this past week, the Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin!
In fact Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture said that "if the Bible were read correctly" that the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible."
"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".
He went on to advocate that the idea of creation is a theological one, while the substance of origins is a scientific one and that Catholics should "know" how science sees such things so as to "understand better."
(Excerpt) Read more at muscleheadrevolution.com ...
You're right. Maybe that's unbelievable too.
So the catholic church is peddling atheism now?
No, but once in a while some people ride bikes.
I can't believe anyone would believe the Adam and Eve story....
Probably sarcastic, but I do as do many other Christians. However, I don't throw science out on its ears either.
So, if it's in "poetic form" then the Bible doesn't have to be "literally accurate"??
How about when Jesus uses parables?? Are THOSE supposed to be taken as "literally accurate" too??
Sorry, you lose your case---the Bible in MANY cases uses "figurative language". The literalist idea is simply ridiculous. Both Judasism and Christianity have ALWAYS used figurative language in many places.
Nice emphatic point.
Given that 40% of the world isn't Christian, 2.4 billion people don't beleive it either.
I guess my public school physics' class could be wrong about that. I highly doubt it was mistaken, though.
You are right on this one.
What the socialist anti-Christians and athiests want everyone to believe is that man evolved from apes. That conflicts 100% from Genesis. My question to them has always been, we still have apes. Why aren't the apes ''still'' evolving, if their theory was accurate? Where are all of the remains of all those apes that were in-between that evolutionary process? Answer: in their anti-God imaginations.
"Scientific proofs of evolution do not debunk the Bible, nor does the Bible deny the validity of science. God set it in motion, whether six thousand years ago or four billion."
I've read four Hitler biographies. None of them mentioned any interest or attempt by Hitler to study as a Jesuit.
I ask you again: will you document this, and will you explain why it would be relevant if true?
Yes, some make ID into a silly issue when they politicize it too much. I've always believed in it though, ever since I was in junior high school. However, I've never had any problem learning evolution either.
DBeers to another-----Looks like you have a lot of anti-Catholic baggage that you have a hard time controlling...
I thought that wouldn't get past the airport sensors.
I've read four Hitler biographies. None of them mentioned any interest or attempt by Hitler to study as a Jesuit.
So that's where they went!!!
It took me bit to track it down again, but here is the story of who "BIG BANGED" first. A Jesuit scholar......
Georges-Henri Lemaître (July 17, 1894 – June 20, 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest and astronomer.
Lemaître is credited with proposing the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, although he called it his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'. He based his theory, published between 1927 and 1933, on the work of Einstein, among others, as well as ancient cosmological-philosophical traditions. Einstein, however, believed in a steady-state model of the universe.
Lemaître took cosmic rays to be the remnants of the event, although it is now known that they originate within the local galaxy.
He estimated the age of the universe to be between 10 and 20 billion years ago, which agrees with modern opinion.
Not very concerned with honors, Lemaître did not think it desirable to become famous, nor to publicize his article. In fact, he was already concentrating on a new challenge: to solve the problem of the origin of the Universe. The same year, he returned to MIT to present his doctoral thesis on The gravitational field in a fluid sphere of uniform invariant density according to the theory of relativity. He obtained a PhD and was then named ordinary Professor at the University of Leuven.
In 1931, Eddington published an English translation of the 1927 article with a long commentary. Lemaître was then invited in London in order to take part in a meeting of the British Association on the relation between the physical universe and spirituality. It is there that he proposed an expanding universe which started with an initial singularity, and the idea of the Primeval Atom which he developed in a report published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Lemaître himself liked to describe his theory as "the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation", which was later to be coined by his critics as the Big Bang theory.
This proposal caused a sharp reaction from the scientific community of the time. Eddington found Lemaitre's notion unpleasant. As for Einstein, he found it suspect, because, according to him, it was too strongly reminiscent of the Christian dogma of creation and was unjustifiable from a physical point of view. The debate between cosmology and religion took the form of a polemic that would last several decades. In this debate, Lemaître would be a fundamental actor who unceasingly tried to separate science from faith.
However, in January 1933, Lemaitre and Einstein, who had met on several occasions - in 1927 in Brussels, at the time of a Solvay congress, in 1932 in Belgium, at the time of a cycle of conferences in Brussels and lastly in 1935 at Princeton - traveled together to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened".
In 1933, when he resumed his theory of the expanding universe and published a more detailed version in the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels, Lemaître would achieve his greatest glory. The American newspapers called him a famous Belgian scientist and described him as the leader of the new cosmological physics.
On March 17, 1934, Lemaître received the Francqui Prize, the highest Belgian scientific distinction, from King Léopold III. His proposers were Albert Einstein, Charles de la Vallée-Poussin and Alexandre de Hemptinne. The members of the international jury were Eddington, Langevin and Théophile de Donder. Another distinction that the Belgian government reserves for exceptional scientists was allotted to him in 1950: the decennial prize for applied sciences for the period 1933-1942.
No. YOU are just not right enough to defend any subject regarding the Bible from an absolute position. You are guilty of pride and arrogance by pretending to speak for God.
the Bible in MANY cases uses "figurative language".
My favorite is when Jesus called someone a fox. Then there is that other one where it says that when they woke up they were corpses.
I happen to think that the Doctrine of the Enslavement of the Will (or as Flip Wilson would say "The Devil Made Me Do It") is at the heart of most of what is wrong with liberalism.
I think that denying free will - as Luther did with this doctrine - is a major step away from Christianity, whether you call yourself a Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox.
Besides, even Luthers contemporaries described him as a drunk, and he did strip books out of the Bible, and he did try to get rid of James and Hebrews (which he referred to as a Jewish Fraud). How is it Christian bashing to point this out?
Let me put it to you this way...if I posted an opinion that the Bible is innacurate and needs editing and that several of the books of Scripture were frauds should be removed, would you consider that supportive of Christianity or opposed to Christianity?
I give you credit for being consistent. You doubt it all. Some have decided to pick and choose what they want to believe.
Archival ping.
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