Need to evolve our understanding of religion

 

Michelangelo-Sistine Chapel-Creation of the Stars and Planets

With all due respect to a Christian author who has sold a lot of books, he’s out of his….element.

Ray Comfort is used to arguing against atheists. Now he’s criticizing the Catholic Church.

In challenging a report by Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, saying Darwin’s theory is compatible with Christianity, Ray Comfort, author of the hottest Christian book on Amazon, “You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence But You Can’t Make Him Think,” points out Jesus himself backed up the Genesis account of Creation when he said, “In the beginning God created them male and female.”

Here’s where he gets confused, himself. 

“But the Vatican has chosen to officially believe Darwin rather than Jesus,” added Comfort.

What?! 

“That belief reveals a shallow understanding of the claims of atheistic evolution. God gave us six senses, and the sixth one is common sense. That one doesn’t get used when it comes to Darwin’s theory. And that’s the problem – its devoted believers don’t think too deeply. That’s why I wrote the book. It shows that Darwin’s theory is a fantasy – a ridiculous and unscientific fairy tale for grownups.”

This is incoherent.

“The Vatican, in essence, is saying, ‘Don’t believe Jesus or Genesis. Believe Darwin instead,'” Comfort said. “God made man in his own image, and God is not a primate. In the name of diversity, the Vatican is encouraging atheism, and that’s a terrible betrayal of Christianity.”

What to say…..? This man is very uninformed. He should have done some research before launching into his written and verbal criticism of the Vatican and evolution.

For starters, he should have looked up theistic evolution.

Some information I hope proves helpful: The Church is observing the 2009 Darwin Year as a compelling opportunity to communicate to the world its understanding of the relationship of faith and science, and redirect the noxious public debate over a fictitious tension between the two. That debate has been destructive to both faith and science, and to everyone listening in.

As I’ve said in a few posts here in the Forum, the Church and the Pontifical Council for Culture’s STOQ (Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest) Project are reaching out to the same world that gets captivated by celebrity atheists and conversely, religious extremists, to engage the culture in the rich teaching of “the new humanism”. Lost in those divisive, uninformed arguments is the view the Church holds of how God relates to the world in creation and providence, a view cultivated by the Catholic tradition for many centuries. It’s a view that respects the competence of science to explain the world, while at the same time allowing us to treat the scientific understanding of the world as partial knowledge of a much deeper mystery of creation and providence.

Pope Benedict XVI has said:

The Christian picture of the world is this, that the world in its details is the product of a long process of evolution but at the most profound level it comes from the Logos. Thus it carries rationality within itself.

Let’s go a bit further…

In Creation and Evolution, the proceedings from a 2006 conference Pope Benedict conducted, we have a book filled with his thought and writings, questions and explanations about…well….creation and evolution. I highly recommend it.

Here are a few snips…

The question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and necessity…and, thus, from what is irrational; that is, whether reason, being a chance by-product of irrantionality and floating in an ocean of irrationality, is ultimately just as meaningless; or whether the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and of its philosophy remains true…at the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason.

Stated another way in the same book…

Ultimately, it comes down to the alternative: What came first? Creative Reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason, which, lacking any meaning, strangely enough brings forth a mathematically ordered cosmos, as well as man and his reason. The latter, however, would then be nothing more than a chance result of evolution and thus, in the end, equally meaningless. As Christians, we say: I believe in God  the Father, the Creator of heaven and earth. I believe in the Creator Spirit. We believe that at the beginning of everything is the eternal Word, with Reason and not Unreason.

However, some creatures in the world operate quite successfully without applying reason.