Pope Benedict visit

President Camacho · Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 9:08 am Post subject:

72% of all statistics are made up on the spot Laughing

Evolution, in the sense of common ancestry may be true, the Cardinal wrote, but he sees neo-Darwinism, what he describes as “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” as completely false in the eyes of the Church.

“Any system of thought”, he clarifies, “that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.”

Source: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=4340

This reads to me like: monkeys ok, absence of deity bad.
I don't know what the other religions are doing these days. Probably too busy worrying about how they're going to fill up the collection plate now that gas prices have gone up.

DWill · Sophomore Joined: 31 Jan 2008 Posts: 250 Gender:

I haven't been following closely enough what the Pope has been saying about the clergy sex abuse scandal. I know he's said "profound regrets," etc. etc., but anything that indicates some awareness of a systemic problem and what to do about it? I saw a figure published recently that 5,000 priests have been accused since 1950 and 12,000 victims have come forward. (Can't the actual umbers be assumed to be much higher?) There has been incalculable harm done to these thousands of children.

An interesting comparison provided by the concurrent tours of the Pope and the Dalai Lama: The Pope speaks of the need for the different faiths to live peacefully together. He says he has "deep respect" for Islam, for example. But what does this supposed respect rest upon? Is it that he grants that Islam has its own truth? No, he can't say that; to do so would open him to the charge of the terrible heresy of relativism. He must always maintain that the church holds the one truth, a truth that history has actually borne out. So I ask what this respect of his is, that Muslims are sincere but still misguided?

The Dalai Lama states that all religions can provide their believers with the means to inner peace and enlightenment. No religion possesses the one, transcendent truth. This gives a road to peace that can actually be traveled.
DWill

DWill · Sophomore Joined: 31 Jan 2008 Posts: 250 Gender:

I guess I could have looked it up myself, but thanks! This sounds like "theistic evolution," which accepts (though uneasily ) the process and time scale of evolution but insists that it is a tool of God and is purposeful.

This idea of the randomness of evolution disturbs many people. I think scientists don't see the process as thoroughly random, though. Mutations do crop up randomly, but whether those mutations turn out to have survival value and are passed on is not a random process, but strictly determined by the environment.
DWill


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