Re: [asa] Vatican Policy: Not Evolving

Karl -

I agree - but. The RC tradition does have that requirement from Vatican I of the possibility of a natural knowledge of God & by implication a natural theology independent of revelation. Of course that doesn't mean that one has to reject evolution or accept anything like ID but there is an opening there for the type of theological argument used by some ID proponents.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: cmekve@aol.com
  To: rich.blinne@gmail.com
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 12:14 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Vatican Policy: Not Evolving

   I find it hard to believe that a Catholic continental intellectual such as Benedict would have any problem with biological evolution (descent with modification). Evolutionism as a naturalistic philosophy - yes; but not evolution as biology. Catholicism hasn't had a problem with evolution for many decades, especially in Europe. And seeing some of Schoenborn's follow-up comments to his original essay, it seems unlikely that he meant what Americans (an especially IDers) took him to mean. The Pope is way too philosophically and theologically sophisticated to be taken in by ID.

  Karl
  ****************
  Karl V. Evans
  cmekve@aol.com

   
  -----Original Message-----
  From: rich.blinne@gmail.com
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 5:58 PM
  Subject: [asa] Vatican Policy: Not Evolving

  From tomorrow's Science journal:

  Vatican Policy: Not Evolving

  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.

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Received on Fri Sep 8 12:44:38 2006