Evolution and the Vatican, an odd twist
In a recent release by the director of the Vatican's Observatory (who knew!) said that teaching intelligent design in schools as science was wrong. This is quite surprising, but definitely welcome. The last pope also weighed in, accepting evolution (officially making intelligent designers heretics :-)
posted by Eddie | 4:49 PM
3 Comments:
Like all faith based issues, it all depends on who is doing the believing. Interestingly enough, I remember reading that the second vatican council concluded that one should not literally interpret the bible. Whether its true or not I don't know, nor do I care as it is all flimflammery to me. But what it leads to is that the virgin mary was not a virgin and the term is just used to imply some significance to the birth. And this is from the catholic church of all places. But this also concerns evolution as Eddy pointed out, as genesis would no longer be as is written in the bible. There are high ranking religious types who realize that dogma can not trump modern science. Some people like to forward, others like to look backwards and others just close their eyes and do as they are told.
I don't think the last pope said anything that amounted to declaring non-belivers in evolution to be herectics. He said that's it's more than just a theory and that believing it is not in contradiction with Catholic faith.
But accepting science has been a church policy for a very long time, although they haven't always been very good at actually sticking to it. I think it goes all the way back to St. Thomas of Aquinas and is often quoted as "truth cannot contradict truth". In other words, since the natural world is God's work and science studies it, the church's teaching should never contradict science.
Here's something from 1930s about the church looking at evolution:
http://www.unm.edu/~bioanth/Anth150/papal.htm
Konrad, you are right. They aren't heritics since he never clearly endorsed it. My mistake.
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