"Intelligent design" not science: Vatican paper

Reuters via Yahoo! ^ | 01/19/06 | Tom Heneghan

[peyton randolph]

PARIS (Reuters) - The Roman Catholic Church has restated its support for evolution with an article praising a U.S. court decision that rejects the "intelligent design" theory as non-scientific.

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said that teaching intelligent design -- which argues that life is so complex that it needed a supernatural creator -- alongside Darwin's theory of evolution would only cause confusion...

A court in the state of Pennsylvania last month barred a school from teaching intelligent design (ID), a blow to Christian conservatives who want it to be taught in biology classes along with the Darwinism they oppose.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[gopgen]

Is that so bizarre? If our Creator wanted to test people's faith--there is no better way to have designed it than this.

Genesis is mythology. I say that with fully-held Christian beliefs.

[Quick1]

I didn't need to give it thought. Macro Evolution is a canard term thought up by creationists, and it basically asks for a single person to stand around and wait a few billion years to observe a tube of chemicals changing into humans. It's a term that is parroted by creationists, and no matter how many times it is explained, it keeps coming up.

[atlaw]

The entire evolution vs ID debate is an aberration caused by the fact that freedom of speech, or any other kind of freedom, has been eliminated in government schools.

Set our teenagers free! Oh, wait . . . .

[Aquinasfan]

Reuters is full of it. According to Reuters, "The Roman Catholic Church has restated its support for evolution..."

Yet, it turns out that "The Roman Catholic Church" is a professor at (not coincidentally) Bologna University.

"Intelligent design does not belong to science and there is no justification for the demand it be taught as a scientific theory alongside the Darwinian explanation," said the article in the Tuesday edition of the newspaper.

Evolution represents "the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth" and the debate in the United States was "polluted by political positions," wrote Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at Italy's Bologna University.

[From many - one.]

Were there no God and no Creation, there would be no evil.

[DarkSavant]

As I said, for telling theologians that their interpretation of scripture was incorrect before he adequately could back it up. At that time many Jesuit astronomers actually supported the Copernican model, but didn't change their theology based on it just them because there wasn't a consensus. At one point he was even told he could research whatever he wanted, but to "stay out of the sacristy".

[phantomworker]

Schoenborn [Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna] later made it clear the Church accepted evolution as solid science ..."

The Church, which has never rejected evolution, teaches that God created the world and the natural laws by which life developed. Even its best-known dissident, Swiss theologian Hans Kueng, echoed this in a recent book in Germany.

This literal reading of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is a tenet of faith for evangelical Protestants, a group that has become politically influential in the United States.

Many U.S. Catholics may agree with evangelicals politically, but the Church does not share their theology on this point. Intelligent design has few supporters outside the United States.

While not an official document, the article in L'Osservatore Romano had to be vetted in advance to reflect Vatican thinking.

Did you read the entire article? Catholicism is one of the largest mainstream religions in the world.

[DarkSavant]

I can't get your links to work.

There wasn't much of an established practice of publication and peer review back in those days. Most often, people like Galileo just corresponded with like-minded people.

Is that why he shunned Kepler, who tried his utmost to get a good correspondence with him?

As for the tides, yes, he was off a bit there, but that's not what got him convicted for heresy.

Correct, he told theologians that the interpretation of scripture was wrong. He showed that Venus revolved around the sun, and that moons orbited around Jupiter, but that still did not prove that the Earth moved around the sun, though it definately made a pretty decent point about the possibility. The Church was already moving to a point of reinterpreting even before Galileo, but they refused to be bullied into the all-or-nothing demends of Galileo.

Essentially, the Church's stance since Aquinas wrote on it was to keep the current interpretation of scripture unless overwhelming evidence said the interpretation was incorrect. Galileo did not have enormous evidence, he was just trying to replace one horribly bulky system for another,and ignored Kepler's very elegant model completely. He was tried for heresy for trying to be a theologian and reinterpreting scripture based on evidence that he simply did not have.

There are many heroic people in the history of science, but that man is not one of them.

[phantomworker]

Macro evolution... Someone was saying he believed in dry evolution the other day. Even the word evolution is evolving! LOL

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The entire evolution vs ID debate is silly, an artifact of the fact the freedom of speech has been banned from public schools, and pompous idiots like you who take it so seriously are hilarious.

[DarkSavant]

He still shouldn't have had to fear legal reprisals for daring to challenge accepted views, scientific or religious.

He wasn't. He feared ridicule, not legal reprisals. Copernicus was a very quiet recluse and the last thing he wanted was to bring unwanted attention and ridicule to himself.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

" He wasn't. He feared ridicule, not legal reprisals."

If Copernicus had published while he was alive, and if he claimed the Earth really moved (which was his position; the disclaimer in the intro wasn't written by him), he would have most definitely faced legal reprisals.

[Aquinasfan]

Did you read the entire article?

Cardinal Schoenborn didn't make the comments. The professor from Baloney University did. Regardless, the Cardinal's opinions in this matter are simply that.

The evolution/creation/ID debate is a largely open question for Catholics, since scientific pronouncements are beyond the Church's competence.

However, the Church is competent to delimit scientific theories which regard faith and morals. With regard to human origins, the most authoritative Church statement to date is Pope Pius XII's statement regarding polygenism, from the Encyclical, Humanae Generis, which he declares to be an impermissible position for Catholics.

37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that 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 or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which through generation is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

Humanae Generis
Pope Pius XII

[Aquinasfan]

The nuns that taught me back in the day really DID tell the girls about the hazards of wearing black patent leather shoes...I kid you not.

And today most of the teenage girls I see dress like whores. That's progress, I guess.

[PatrickHenry]

He showed that Venus revolved around the sun, and that moons orbited around Jupiter, but that still did not prove that the Earth moved around the sun, though it definately made a pretty decent point about the possibility.

Actually, his evidence was stronger than that. Certainly, the visible evidence of the phases of Venus was an extremely powerful confirmation of part of the Copernicus model. That evidence made it undeniable that Venus orbited the sun. But, as you say, that didn't show anything about the earth's movement. Specifically, the phases of Venus didn't rule out hybrid models that allowed for the planets to orbit the sun, while the sun and everything else still orbited the earth. There were such models at the time.

Galileo's observations, however, took away yet another argument for a stationary earth -- one which has been largely forgotten. It had been argued that the earth must be fixed in place because if it moved, it would leave the moon behind! That sounds goofy now, but Galileo flourished a generation before Isaac Newton, and in Galileo's day, no one realized that gravity held the moon in its orbit around the earth.

What Galileo argued here was a deduction that followed from his discovery that Jupiter had moons. Those moons clearly orbited Jupiter, and somehow they didn't get left behind, even though it was obvious to all that Jupiter was moving. Thus, although then inexplicable, our moon's similar behavior couldn't be advanced as "proof" that the earth was stationary. Therefore, Galileo's work left no argument remaining that the earth was stationary -- except the then-current interpretation of scripture.

[phantomworker]

Don't understand why you cannot argue rationally? What you are saying makes no sense. It must be because you accept the fact that the Catholic church does support evolution and are trying to convince yourself otherwise?

[js1138]

On what basis was Galileo placed under house arrest? What was his crime?

[Blzbba]

"Same way they reconcile that Mary was sinless and only had one child Jesus."


What - by making things up?