Kristos
Servant
perhaps i misunderstood you. when you said: "It's a confusion of fundamental categories, of science and of scripture and no matter how close we get the two, no matter how many incremental step they take toward each other, they can never be the same" i thought you were speaking of the idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" -- this is what i was disagreeing with.
Is the earth the center of the universe? Theologically it could be argued as such and many people took this very literally. When scientific observation showed that this could not be true, would it be right for the Church to reject the hypothesis that the earth is not the center of the universe based purely on the theological understanding? And it didn't, despite the revisionist history of many "anti-church" apologists. Why then did the Pope reject Galileo's scientific hypothesis? Quite simply his rejection was based on observation - that Galileo's system of circular orbits could not accurately predict the movement of the planets. It had nothing to do with anything theological. When Kepler came along, he got it right, and the Church did not reject his system, that like Galileo's had the Sun vice the earth at the center. There was no intrinsic problem for the Church in this change to our understanding of the physical world.
While evolution is much more complicated the basis is the same. The Church really has no standing based on any physical observation to reject the scientific hypothesis. The rejections are not based on observation, yes? So what is the rejection based on? And there is your pleonastic fallacy.
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