Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the Catholic Church doesn't stand in the way of scientific realities like evolution, saying there was a "wide spectrum of room" for belief in both the scientific basis for evolution and faith in God the creator.
"We believe that however creation has come about and evolved, ultimately God is the creator of all things," he said on the sidelines of the conference.
But while the Vatican did not exclude any area of science, it did reject as "absurd" the atheist notion of biologist and author Richard Dawkins and others that evolution proves there is no God, he said.
What?! When did Dawkins say evolution proves there is no God/gods? Firstly, science is not in the business of offering proofs. Can't they (and journalists) get that into their skulls? Secondly, the worst or best (depending on your perspective) that evolution can say is that the various extant species came to be via natural processes--that the "some deity zapped plants, animals, and humans directly into existence" hypothesis has been dealt a coup de grace.
The Catholic Church might be finally learning. It's shoving its deity into those regions where science cannot follow it (the Church, that is). Sure, you can be Deistic and say "God is the creator of the universe." For now--and perhaps a long time to come--it's nonfalsifiable and nontestable. But those Vat boys better cross their fingers and pray that scientists don't take that away from them as well. There are already alternative naturalistic hypotheses, you know.
3 comments:
You said, "Firstly, science is not in the business of offering proofs."
So, science never proved gravity? Relativity? The transformation principle??
If you want people to read more than one sentence, don't write lies.
Gravity per se is a fact, but the theory of what gravity is and how it operates is an explanation. Theories and models are not proved in the sense of mathematical or logical proofs. The inductive method does not permit the certitude that deduction allows. Be that as it may theories do gain acceptance and substantiated to model reality faithfully on the basis of how much observational/experimental evidence confirms them, how little disconfirming evidence there is against them, how good and how much they can predict, and how better a job they do than rival explanations.
Ha ha, 'evolution proves' that there aren't any gods... Nice. If only that were true, right?
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