The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future.
The, er, wise words of Cardinal Paul Poupard, who warns that “religion risks turning into ‘fundamentalism’ if it ignores scientific reason,” according to Wired.
The words fish and barrel spring to mind, but the fact is that the Wired article gives one hope. It’s just that religionists of all kind have a way of ignoring the bits that don’t suit them. How else could Catholic Italy's birthrate have fallen so far so fast?
And there’s more.
Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or Science, Theology and Ontological Quest, reaffirmed John Paul’s 1996 statement that evolution was “more than just a hypothesis”.
“A hypothesis asks whether something is true or false,” he said. “(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof.”
Papal infallibility rocks!
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