http://student-iat.ubalt.edu/sde/students/allen/COSC330/GameLog/geico-cavemen.jpg
"Oh. Really?"
Posted on 01/07/2007 1:28:33 PM PST by Coleus
One of the things that most appeals to me about Catholicism is that they have recognized their previous errors and injustices in the field of scientific inquiry, tried to make amends, and made a sincere effort to reconcile the plain facts of Science with their trust in God. I hope that under Benedict they are not returning to the obscurantist ways of the past. We have enough ignorant young-Earth holy rollers already, many of them here on FR.
-ccm
Rubbish. While it is not perfect, it is qualitatively and quantitatively less wrong than the geocentric model, which in turn is less wrong than the flat-Earth model, which itself is less wrong than the notion that the Earth is the shell of a giant tortoise standing upon an infinite pillar of giant elephants.
Just as relativistic kinetics and dynamics are indistinguishable from Newtonian mechanics at low velocities, and quantum mechanics indistinguishable from Newtonian mechanics for masses larger than subatomic particles, so do all scientific theories approach better and better models of reality.
It is an asymptotic effect. We will never know the mind of God exactly, but through science we come ever closer and closer to perfect knowledge of His creation.
-ccm
I thought humans were MOLDED from mud... like snowmen being molded from snow.... or sand castles, you know.
I thought the point of the story was that first/primitive organisms emerged from clay or similar substances... and human beings evolved from single celled organisms over billions of years. Yes, apes being somewhere in between the evolutionary tree.
The Official teaching of the Church is that a person can believe in the Theory of Evolution if they so choose but the Church teaches against any sort of theory involving the evolution or change of the soul.
The heliocentric model, as explained by Copernicus, was that the planets, of which the Earth was one, orbited in perfect circles around the Sun, as did the stars.
While recognizing that the Earth was not the center of the universe was an advance, moving that center to the Sun was not really that much of an advance.
Not to mention that planetary orbits are not perfect circles.
It's about time that Rome joined the church.
Strange resume. - One might think that being an occultist would be his most notable sin...
And their tacit endorsement of Macroevolution.
.... and with the mainstream scientists of the era.
.... and with the mainstream scientists of the era.
My popint was that evolution is totally at odds with our Lord's word. One simply cannot believe the lie of evolution,and claim a biblical relationship with the redeemer.
BTW, (according to most if not every source) Ptolomy wasn't a Jew or a Christian.
"Once upon a time, a sun-centered solar system was incompatible with [Roman] Catholicism."
..... the scientists of the era.P.S. Sorry about all the pings.
Obviously these people didn't read the Bible.
"It's a historical fact that reading Copernicus' book would earn you death at the hands of the Church."
Now I'm having quite a bit of difficulty believing that the entire Church advocated putting people to death for reading the book.
link?
It's just an opportunity for shallow-thinking Darwinists, reductionists, and materialists yet again to display profound ignorance.
Thought itself is immaterial. Darwinists can neither prove nor disprove its existence let alone explain it. But exist it does.
Galileo's proposal involved circular heliocentric orbits. (Kepler would later improve Galileo's theory by switching to elliptical orbits instead of circular ones.) The orthodox geocentric or Ptolemaic theory of the day involved "epicycles" to explain retrograde motion, and actually did fit the data better than Galileo's theory.
As far as the Catholic church is concerned, what got Galileo in trouble was not heliocentrism per se, but Galileo's tendency to insult anyone who disagreed with him, and some remarks of his which seemed to say that, if his theory disagreed with the Bible, then the Bible was wrong. Heliocentrism was never formally condemned as heresy. (Actually, Galileo was never formally condemned as a heretic, either.)
From the POV of modern science, it's really making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill. The earth doesn't rotate around the sun, and the sun doesn't rotate around the earth. They both rotate around their common center of gravity. "Heliocentric" and "geocentric" refer to where the origins of coordinate systems are placed, but those are just arbitrary conventions selected to simplify the math. For example, when NASA computes the trajectories for earth satellites, they use geocentric coordinates. When they compute the trajectory for a Mars mission, they switch to heliocentric ones.
Giordano Bruno was burned for witchcraft, not heliocentrism.
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