Bad news for Governor Sarah Palin this early on in her bid for the Presidency in 2012.
Yeah I know it's early to start thinking about the next run at the White House. But the Pope has come out and said that Darwin may have been on the right lines ahead of the 200th anniversary of his birth. Indeed Papal Scholars were falling over themselves yesterday to tell us that creation and evolution were wholly compatible. Even citing St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas as precursors to Darwinian thought.
Personally it is an issue I have not had an issue with since my teenage years. The scientist in me and the poet didn't conflict over the two merely saw the biblical account as a way of explaining the stages of what happened (how else would man end up on the last day, and beasts of the deep before those of land) to people who would not yet be able to grasp the scientific concept. You must not also forget that the Bible mentioned the curvature of the earth long before the church denied the flat earth society.
3 comments:
Wouldn't it be lovely if the poetry of Genesis was actually right. But of course it isn't.
God creates light on day one, the sky on day two and the sun on day four. Er, okay…
HE also creates birds on day five before land animals on day six (wrong, sorry, they're famously descended from dinosaurs) and fruit tree on land, day three, before fishes in the sea, day five, (also wrong, flowering plants are actually rather late in evolutionary terms, also post-dating the ol' thunder lizards). Also, trees and plants before the Sun?!?!?!
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=1&chapter=1&version=31
HE then goes and creates it all over again in Genesis 2, only this time he creates man before he creates plants (and arguably before animals, at least it certainly reads that way.)
You're right to say it's a "way of explaining" to pre-scientific cultures things they don't understand (and that we barely understand) but it gets it wrong. Which is fine if it's just a story; but if it's the infallible word of god then… at the very least there's something wrong with your definition of "infallible".
Well my Pachyderm friend I think I've never claimed those particular passages were an exact representation of what happened.
I do wish that some of my fundamentalist brethren would stop being...well so "fundamental" and actually look at what is starring them in the face. Look at what has been interpreted down through the years a wake up and smell the coffee. I'm personally glad that there are Christians who are also scientists who argue the case for both.
Yes there are discrepencies but this would have been oral account until somebody wrote it down.
I'm stunned that Benedict (or Beppo as I call him) managed to say somthing in touch with as late as the 19th Century. Poor old Galileo's statue seemed to indicate a return to roughly AD 150.
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