Why is there creation/ religion talk about the guy getting killed? was the guy even catholic? did he go there to teach them creationism?
just wondering
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and yes, pope francis has taken a decidedly dubious middle ground on the issue
the catholic church will not fight evolution and they will not "push" creationism. catholics are taught that the bible is allegory and metaphorical not literal
i graduated from catholic high school in 1984 and we were taught evolution in biology and earth sciences classes
it is the fringe Christians like evangelicals ,etc, that absolutely believe the world is only 6000 yrs old. the catholic church never taught that the world was flat as church doctrine or that 'caveman' lived with dinosaurs. the catholic church is perfectly fine with the big bang theory and accepts that the universe is billions or more, yrs old.
Francis ( it is too early even for the pope to not use the word 'creation'), IMO, is leaning towards this old universe as being "shaped", not made, by some powerful being- God. on these GF's pages many of us have admitted that it would be the height of arrogance to say that there is absolutely no "higher power". no, imo, not 'god' but some force or perhaps far older race of beings
as they say, when science advances, religion/faith shrinks. mankind will never know everything, so blind faith will always exist in some form to some degree to explain the things still not understood.
in the case of Galileo, his 'trial' and execution is attributed to the Popes ego and not any anti science stance. Pope Urban was a Florentine and Galileo was from Pisa. Urbans' ego as a Florentine -not to mention Pope- alone would not allow him to have a Pisan 'school him' on anything. Florence had made Pisa a vassal by conquest about a century earlier. Urbans' stance to punish galileo as a heretic was purely a means to achieve a personal vendetta (galileo had also previously condemned a scientific work by a another man who was given permission to do research by Urban making him look bad) Galileo was guilty of not knowing when to shut up
a quote from Nature.com the website for the long standing scientific NATURE journal
"
Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.
Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries..."
from
http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscie...much-to-both-christianity-and-the-middle-ages