Vatican Dumps Darwinist-Boosting Astronomer

LifeSite News ^ | August 21, 2006 | Hilary White

[NYer]

ROME, August 21, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Jesuit priest-astronomer who vocally opposed the Catholic understanding of God-directed creation, has been removed from his post as head of the Vatican observatory.

Fr. George Coyne has been head of the Vatican observatory for 25 years is an expert in astrophysics with an interest in the interstellar medium, stars with extended atmospheres and Seyfert galaxies. He also appointed himself as an expert in evolutionary biology and theology last summer in an article for the UK’s liberal Catholic magazine, The Tablet.

Fr. Coyne was writing against Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, a principal author of the Catholic catechism, who said that an “unplanned process of random variation and natural selection,” both important parts of evolutionary thinking, are incompatible with Catholic belief in God’s ordering and guiding of creation.

Coyne, retiring after 25 years of service for the Vatican observatory, said, “The classical question as to whether the human being came about by chance, and so has no need of God, or by necessity, and so through the action of a designer God, is no longer valid.”

Schonborn had written in the New York Times that “neo-Darwinian evolution is not compatible with Catholic doctrine.”

Fr. Coyne is being replaced at the Vatican Observatory by Father Funes, 43, a native of Cordoba, Argentina.

Vatican Astronomer Contradicts Cardinal’s Support of Catholic Teaching on Evolution
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005/aug/05080901.html

Visit the website of the Vatican Observatory
http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/VO.html

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[Mrs. Don-o]

I myself am no Augustine scholar; I can't even read Latin. But this is what I have:

William Greenough Thayer Shedd's Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 1: "Respecting the length of the six creative days, speaking generally, for there was some difference of views, the patristic and mediaeval exegesis makes them to be long periods, not days of twenty-four hours. The latter interpretation has prevailed only in the modern church. Augustine, teaches (De Genesi ad literam, IV.xxvii.) that the length of the six days is not determined by the length of our week-days."

More recently Oliver Barclay, wrote in a conclusion to a published creation/evolution debate that:

"...many on both sides of the discussion will agree that the most natural reading of Genesis 1 is in terms of creation in six 24-hour periods. That, after all, is how it has normally been understood in the history of the church until quite recently. There are exceptions, like Augustine who thought it referred to a long process, and he had considerable influence, but at least since the seventeenth century most people have understood it in terms of six periods of 24 hours, until modern geology got going in the early nineteenth century (before Darwin)."

Bernard Ramm writes:

"...The point Augustine actually makes is that the creation days are so great, so majestic, so profound that we cannot consider them as mere sun-divided days but as God-divided days. They are creative days, not solar days, and so he calls them natures, growths, dies ineffabiles."

Here's the three sources:

William G.T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 1. (Edinburgh: T.& T. Clark, 1889), 475-476.

O.R. Barclay, “Summary and Conclusion,” Derek Burke, ed. Creation and Evolution. Where Christians Disagree, 1985. (Leicester: IVP 1986), 269-270.

Bernard Ramm, The Christian View of Science and Scripture. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954), 147.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Nothing in the entire book defines what an "hour" is.

[wideawake]

Thank you for the references. I will consult the citation from Shedd, since he gives a specific locus.

I will post any findings to the thread.

[Mrs. Don-o]

I've puzzled through a couple of books and many articles on the Galileo controversy.

One school has it that Galileo was not condemned for heliocentrism, which he, like Copernicus, was free to hold as a hypothesis, but because he claimed an untrammeled right to the private interpretation of Scripture, which the Church rejected, and rejects.

Another author insists that Galileo got into trouble, not because he disagreed with theology, but because he disagreed with Ptolemy; and that since almost all University professors at that time subscribed to a Ptolemaic cosmology, they finagled Galileo's persecution by the Roman Curia for reasons of professional rivalry.

A few things did strike me as having a certain piquancy:

(1)In the whole lengthy wrangle, Galileo had the support of a lot of bishops, carinals, and even Pope Urban VIII, his longtime friend--- whose support Galileo lost when he mocked him (maybe inadvertently, probably without malice) by putting Urban's words in the mouth of a character he called Simplicius ("the Simpleton") in an imaginary dialog about celestial models.

(2) The Church never had a doctrine on geocentrism; but most churchmen at the time (like almost all scientists at the time) had an underying paradigm of geocentrism. As such, the Cardinal-judges made a wrong judgment, one which wasn't based on doctrine. For that, the Church (very belatedly!) formally apologized.

(Everyone knows that Church tribunals ---as a function of politics, and not doctrine--- can be in error. One need only think of St. Joan of Arc, who was executed by an illegitimate ecclesiastical tribunal dominated by her political enemies, and later not only "apologized to" but canonized a saint.)

[Mrs. Don-o]

You're right about the Church rejecting the scientific hypothesis of polygenism. The Church definitively teaches monogenism: that the whole human race belongs, physically, to one family.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Did the Pope apologize to Copernicus? I thought it was to Galileo. I don't think Copernicus himself was ever condemned.

[tacticalogic]

(Everyone knows that Church tribunals ---as a function of politics, and not doctrine--- can be in error. One need only think of St. Joan of Arc, who was executed by an illegitimate ecclesiastical tribunal dominated by her political enemies, and later not only "apologized to" but canonized a saint.)

I'm not Catholic, or partiularly familiar with the inner workings of the Church's bureaucracies. From the outside looking that explanation seems to be something of an exercise in hair-splitting.

[meandog]

I believe both were issued apologies... Remember, Copernicus was castigated for heliocentric theory and Galileo for backing him up. Nevertheless, both were devout RCs!

[wideawake]

Here is the original text of De genesi ad litteram IV, xxvii:

Quapropter quoniam illum diem vel illos dies, qui eius repetitione numerati sunt, in hac nostra mortalitate terrena experiri ac sentire non possumus, et si quid ad eos intellegendos conari possumus, non debemus temerariam praecipitare sententiam, tamquam de his aliud sentiri congruentius probabiliusque non possit; istos septem dies, qui pro illis agunt hebdomada, cuius cursu et recursu tempora rapiuntur, in qua dies unus est a solis ortu usque in ortum circuitus, sic illorum vicem quamdam exhibere credamus, ut non eos illis similes, sed multum impares minime dubitemus.

I translate:

"Concerning that day or those days which are counted in their repetition, [St. Augustine is presumably referring to the way the days of creation are counted off repetitively in Genesis] we are not able to sense or experience in this mortal earth of ours, and if we are able to achieve some understanding of them we ought not to have the temerity to rush to a judgment, for in such matters it is not possible for someone to make assumptions about what is more fitting or more probable. Those seven days which make a week, whose course and recourse occur in time, which we believe are sustained by such a sequence, in which a day is measured from the rising of the sun until its return, - that they are just the same as these days [i.e. the days of creation] we are not to doubt at all that they are quite different."

That doesn't really suggest at all that Adam took millions of years to create through a succession of intermediary forms.

It basically says that we can't assert that the days of creation are just the same in their nature as a standard week.

It's a far cry from this passage to Darwinism.

[wideawake]

Copernicus never needed apologizing to, since he was never censured. He lectured on heliocentrism in Rome before the papal court a generation before Galileo began teaching and was complimented on his research.

Galileo was placed on trial on trumped-up charges by political enemies and placed under an unenforced house arrest. Basically his career was ruined since he was barred from being licensed to teach or publish.

Pope John Paul II officially cleared his name of these charges and apologized for the injustice.

[wideawake]

I apologize for the inelegance of my translation - I was trying to be as literal as possible.

[orionblamblam]

> go stuff it

Award winning.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Aieeee! The Devil's Language! [Just kidding! ;-)]

It's funny how people who so confidently assert that the days of creation couldn't be days as we know them nevertheless insist that the fifteen billion years were years exactly like ours. Did the earth circle the sun fifteen billion times while the universe was being created??? That is, if you believe that nonsense about the earth circling the sun! ;-)

[meandog]

Thank you, wideawake, now you may go back to bashing McCain NOT!

[Mrs. Don-o]

The distinction between a errors of clerical bureaucracy and errors of doctrine is important. Clerical bureaucracies, like any other human institutions, can be slack, unjust, ignorant, corrupt, scandalous, in error, etc. Catholic doctrine cannot be erroneous because it flows from divine revelation.

2 Corinthians 4: 7 "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us..."

And the error is "of us" and not "of God" or of the things that God guarantees. Our own failures are all too obvious.

[tacticalogic]

Okay, but these errors of "clerical bureaucracy" were made by Catholics.

"Catholics have felt themselves quite free to speculate on this and thousand other questions since the founding of the Church, for they have always understood that strictly scientific questions are a matter of liberty, not dogma. "

[Mrs. Don-o]

OK, I went back and checked. Copernicus was never censured by officials of the Catholic Church; in fact, he himself was an "official of the Catholic Church" and his book on celestial motion was not published until the very end of his life. In this regard, David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Department of History of Science, U of Wisconsin at Madison) note:

"If Copernicus had any genuine fear of publication, it was the reaction of scientists, not clerics, that worried him. Other churchmen before him — Nicole Oresme (a French bishop) in the fourteenth century and Nicolaus Cusanus (a German cardinal) in the fifteenth — had freely discussed the possible motion of the earth, and there was no reason to suppose that the reappearance of this idea in the sixteenth century would cause a religious stir."

This quote comes from a article dealing in great detail with Copernicus and Galileo and the general polemic around church/science relations. It's good history, well worth a read, posted here:

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1987/PSCF9-87Lindberg.html

[Mrs. Don-o]

Thank you very much! I'll have to remember to go to you when I need a quick Latin translation. ;^)

So, all Augustine says is that the days of Creation could have been "quite different" from 24-hour solar days.

Wonder if there's more in that context? Anything in related paragraphs fore and aft which sounds interesting?

[Mrs. Don-o]

Yes! Catholic clerical bureaucracy, sometimes a real pain in the (Asinus asinum fricat.)