Posted on 01/07/2007 1:28:33 PM PST by Coleus
On July 7, after years of media-generated confusion, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, a theologian who helped author the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, wrote in the New York Times clarifying the Church’s understanding of human origins. Since 1996, the world’s secular media have claimed that Pope John Paul II endorsed Darwinian evolution as being “more than a hypothesis.” The remark, taken out of context, established in some minds that the Catholic Church was ready to abandon its adherence to the notion of a personal God who created life, the universe and everything. In his article, Schonborn said, that the “defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance - or at least acquiescence - of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.”
“This,” the Cardinal says bluntly, “is not true.”
Schonborn unequivocally establishes that the Catholic Church does not endorse Darwinism. “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not.” Cardinal Schonborn, a close associate of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, continued, saying, “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”
The New York Times, never missing an opportunity to bash prominent Catholic prelates, has suggested that Schonborn has changed his tune regarding the legitimacy of Darwinian evolution. But Darwinism, the idea that life sprang and developed into its myriad forms by means of “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” has never been supported by Catholic teaching.
As early as 1950, Pope Pius XII wrote that it is Catholics teaching that all human beings in some way are biologically descended from a first man, Adam. “The faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all,” Pius wrote in his encyclical Humani Generis. Two days after the Cardinal’s article appeared, the New York Times followed up with an interview with Schonborn in which he reiterated that he had been encouraged by Pope Benedict XVI to continue to refine Catholic teaching on evolution.
Read Cardinal Schonborn’s essay:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/07/opinion/07schonborn.html
Read New York Times coverage of scientific reaction (free registration may be required):
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/science/09cardinal.html?pa...
It's a historical fact that reading Copernicus' book would earn you death at the hands of the Church. The book was on the Church's prohibitted books list.
Well, if it's even slightly less ridiculous then it can't be just as innacurate. :)
In fact, we can probably approximate it as less innacurate by an order of 332,946 magnitudes. ;)
I've read two or three statements which look like claims that the evolution/creation debate should have been over the day DNA was discovered, i.e. game, set, and match to the creationists.
Slight modification. It appears that Galileo believed the sun to be one of many stars. I believe Copernicus taught true heliocentrism, that all heavenly bodies, including of course the stars, orbited the Sun.
Whatever answer works for the Trinity works just as well for the universe.
DNA the unit that evolutionary biology measures.
Whether you like this science or not is irrelevant. You slander the Church when you claim it's anti-science. The church has no problem with evolutionary biology and never has.
Only if the adherents of scientism admit to being faithful.
Golly, you must have been reading Dawkins. Actually the notion of evolution by blind chance is essentially agnostic about the intellligibility of the universe. Neither you nor Dawkins recongizes that Darwin posit a demiurge, called Evolution, to produce the evidence we have in hand. The early stages of the earth as as remote to human beings as the remotest galaxies. More remote, because we can through telescopes faintly see them. The earth of earliest times we can see only with our imaginations.
Your's is a correct statement but id certainly doesn't address the thesis of the article.
"“Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not.”
Umm, no. My own answer is the correct answer: I don't know. Most people simply can't handle that truth and prefer to make up fairy tales.
But regardless, no matter what answer one finds satisfactory for the origin of the Trinity then from a rational standpoint that same answer will always be equally satisfactory for the origin of the universe, which is why the false dilemma that was set up by OK is a meaningless argument, and a fallacy.
" an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."
Nobody is saying entirely "random." Mutations can be caused by many things. There are scientific laws governing things.... except, perhaps, at the quantum level.
Anyone who believes a magical deity created decided to create human out of mud is certainly not following modern science.
Um yes. Catholicism is faith based. When you state " Whatever answer works for the Trinity works just as well for the universe." I take that at it's face value. The answer that works for the Trinity is faith. Feel free to edit your statement.
As for fairy tales, I have no opinion or interest in what you do or do not consider to be fairy tales.
It had slipped my mind that the original heliocentric model also posited a stationary sun at the center of the universe. Thanks for reminding me! I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that, although he did hold that the sun was one of many stars, Galileo was at most vague about the centrality of the sun. Whatever the case, it was not until the period between Kepler and Newton that it was widely accepted that the sun as well was neither fixed nor central.
"Vatican Policy: Not Evolving (ScienceMag, Sept. 2006)
Don't look for a big change any time soon in the Catholic Church's views on evolution. Although supporters of evolution had feared that the Pope would embrace so-called intelligent design, Pope Benedict XVI gave no sign at a gathering last week as to how he thought the topic should be taught.
The pope said little during the meeting, which included his former theology Ph.D. students and a small group of experts near Rome. Peter Schuster, a chemist at the University of Vienna and president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, attended the meeting and gave a lecture on evolutionary theory. "The pope … listened to my talk very carefully and asked very good questions at the end," he says. And the Church's most outspoken proponent of intelligent design, Cardinal Schönborn, seemed to distance himself from the theory."
Uh, yeah, and as you yourself pointed out when you incorrectly thought that would be my answer, that answer works equally well for the universe.
Darwin is. Darwinian evolution theorizes RM/NS/heritability.
Mutations can be caused by many things.
Certainly.
There are scientific laws governing things.... except, perhaps, at the quantum level.
I think there are no exceptions to scientific laws, just scientific laws that are not well understood.
Uh yeah, which is what I said that you took exception to. Why? I have no idea.
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