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To: Sensei Ern

"This is coming from the same group that persecuted those that said the earth revolves around the sun. "

What a strange comment. Do you see the incredible irony?


41 posted on 01/30/2006 7:34:52 AM PST by Kirkwood
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To: All
Here's a link to the text of the speech Father Coyne is scheduled to deliver:
“Science Does Not Need God, or Does It? A Catholic Scientist Looks at Evolution,” by Vatican Observatory director Jesuit Father George V. Coyne. Excerpts:
Despite what is commonly thought, it was not Charles Darwin who caused problems for the theologians with the implications that might be drawn from the theory of evolution. About one hundred years before Darwin the College de Sorbonne in Paris (a kind of French Holy Office or Inquisition) condemned the great French naturalist, Georges Buffon, for having proposed, from both the cooling rate and the sequence of geological strata, that it took billion of years to form the crust of the earth. Darwin’s great contribution to the growing scientific evidence for evolution was not so much evolution as such but rather the adaptation of living organisms to the environment, only one of the two great pillars of evolutionary theory: internal mutations in an organism and natural selection.

[snip]

How did we humans come to be in this evolving universe? It is quite clear that we do not know everything about this process. But it would be scientifically absurd to deny that the human brain is a result of a process of chemical complexification in an evolving universe. After the universe became rich in certain basic chemicals, those chemicals got together in successive steps to make ever more complex molecules.

[snip]

The point is that from a strictly mathematical analysis of this, called the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics, one can say that as this process goes on and more complex molecules develop, there is more and more direction to this process. As the complexity increases, the future complexity becomes more and more predetermined. In such wise did the human brain come to be and it is still evolving.

[snip]

The universe as we know it today through science is one way to derive analogical knowledge of God. For those who believe modern science does say something to us about God, it provides a challenge, an enriching challenge, to traditional beliefs about God. God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world which reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution.


48 posted on 01/30/2006 7:49:27 AM PST by PatrickHenry (True conservatives revere Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and the Founding Fathers.)
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