Catholic Intelligence On The Universe's Design.

The Roman Catholic Church must be confusing for the secular modern. Regressive on issues of personal choice, yet progressive on many social justice issues. Now the Church has spoken on the Intelligent Design versus Evolution debate and come down on the side of the evolution.

An article in the Vatican newspaper says that Intelligent Design is not science and lays out a sensible position for people of faith as reported here.

The author Fiorenzi "Facchini wrote that scientists could not rule out a divine 'superior design' to creation and the history of mankind. But he said Catholic thought did not preclude a design fashioned through an evolutionary process.

'God's project of creation can be carried out through secondary causes in the natural course of events, without having to think of miraculous interventions that point in this or that direction,' he wrote.

'In a vision that goes beyond the empirical horizon, we can say that we aren't men by chance or by necessity, and that the human experience has a sense and a direction signaled by a superior design.'

The popular view of Catholicism's relationship with science is skewed by the Church's ill treatment of Galileo centuries ago. But the Church has come a long way since then and has come to terms with science and modernity in ways that some Protestant sects still haven't and never will. Those Protestant sects that view the Bible as word for word true will always have a problem reconciling the world with the Bible.

Mister Americano has never respected the approach to the Bible that maintains each word is literally true, in no small part because it diminishes the Bible. Under that approach, while God may have blessed human authors with the skills of using metaphor, allegory, mythmaking, storytelling, etc. in their writing, God apparently can do no more than write literal descriptions of what happened. Catholic tradition rejects this approach. The Church's more intellectual and sophisticated approach to scripture enables it to adjust to new scientific discoveries more readily. And that enables the Church to be more at home in the modern world.

-tdr