By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor Thu Jan 19, 10:52 AM ET
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....
..."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.
"So the decision by the Pennsylvania judge seems correct."
Actually they aren't saying that they don't believe in intelligent design, they are saying it is not science. And it is not, it is faith. If the press reported things in the proper context, which they rarely do, you wouldn't get confused.
warsloth wrote:What E-bo has just demonstrated for us all to see is called, "hitting the nail on the head."
/cough
not quite
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.
I think what the Catholics (not Skor) are saying is that they believe in Genesis. Intelligent Design is an interpretation of what is found in the pages of Genesis, retooled to give god some personality and to say he was clever and cloy.
The Vatican does not believe in interpretation, clever, or cloy. They go for omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, and absolute. The Vatican doesn't really even follow the King James version of the Bible (like most American Catholics do, commonly considered to be the oldest proper "English" version), they read the Latin one (2nd version), as most people don't know Greek or Aramaic, which is probably what the first version was written in.
So no, they don't support Intelligent Design. They support Genesis.
Safia wrote:Not sure but I believe the first was written in Hebrew?
Well, the old testament was. But just the Old Testament isn't the Bible. It's the Torah. New testament was in Aramaic, or Greek, according to Yahoo (and I've read similar from other Biblical scholars).
So what we consider to be the Bible (Old and New Testament combined) was written in Aramaic or Greek.
