Posted on 02/11/2009 10:07:55 AM PST by wafflehouse
Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said while the Church had been hostile to Darwin's theory in the past, the idea of evolution could be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Santa Croce University in Rome, added that 4th century theologian St Augustine had "never heard the term evolution, but knew that big fish eat smaller fish" and forms of life had been transformed "slowly over time". Aquinas made similar observations in the Middle Ages. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Considering how little the Vatican knows about either, this is not surprising.
I guess there are no rhetorical limits for a zealot.
Is astronomy compatible, too? What about theoretical physics?
Evolutionary thought, even if proven, does not shake my faith in the least. 500 years ago the notion that the earth was not the center of the universe was supposed to be a dire challenge to faith yet it wasn’t. Neither is this. Evolution, true or not, has no bearing whatsoever on the truth of God and His Only Begotten Son.
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for a non-believer to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn."
--St. Augustine
The priests at the Jesuit high school I attended in the '60s said the same thing.
THIS IS NOT NEWS FOLKS!!! WHy are people so ignorant, the Vatican has held that Evolution is not in conflict with the faith for a LONG time now.
Yet it keeps getting reported as its something cataclysmic that just happened.
As pointed out in this article, St. Thomas Aquinas’s proof of God relies on change as a fundamental proof of God’s existence. Simply stated, nothing changes or moves without an outside force acting on it, if you trace all change and movement back you eventually come to the first mover, which is God.
This is a Brit paper. Do you expect them to actually work at a report instead of regurgitating whatever pops into their heads?
Which leaves me to wonder if the good Archbishop actually said this, “the Church had been hostile to Darwin’s theory in the past”.
The Church (Catholic Church) has never been hostile to Darwin’s theory. Various Protestant churches have been hostile to Darwin’s theory.
So did God create man in his own image or not? If he didn’t, then, is Jesus a liar?
“Evolution does not explain creation” - Charles Darwin
True! "Evolution is not in conflict with the faith" is exactly what was taught in at least one Catholic high school classroom, by a priest, in 1961. It was clearly a lecture of more than normal importance. To the best of my recollection, "Evolution is not in conflict with the faith", is probably an exact quote from the lecture.
Well, DUH, Darwin!
Evolution essentially implies the material universe already existed. Hence, some sort of...origination (if someone were to deny God’s existence) or creation had taken place already.
You really shouldn't put quotation marks around statements that aren't quotations.
I'm sure I don't look like you, and neither of us look like George Clooney, so it's pretty clear that God did NOT create us in his own physical image...
If they want to be Baal-worshippers, so be it. But a God who presides over countless eons of death and suffering and proclaims it all "very good" is not the God of the Bible. Genesis teaches a perfect beginning with no death before the Fall, while the death of the less fit is necessary and central to Darwinism.
This is pathetic kowtowing on the part of the Catholic church, and it will work for them as well as it has worked for the "mainstream" Protestant churches that have accepted evolution and watched their pews empty out.
Meanwhile, the science of evolutionary biology continues to discover daily evidence of the hypertechnological nature of life and the degenerative trend it is on, starkly contradictory to Darwinian expectations. If I was an evolutionary biology prof today I can't imagine giving a passing grade to a student who espouses Darwinism. It's just so ignorant.
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