Pope Benedict admits evidence for evolution

[rossum]

However, what on earth would cause an animal after so much work becoming a land creature, with lungs, and live young go back to living underwater?

I realize this is overly simple, but it does seem challenging to explain.

First, many mammals have taken wholly or partially to life in water. Mink swim very well, otters are better, seals and sealions better still. Manatees and walrus are also at home in water as are dolphins.

Whales are artiodactyls and so are hippos. If hippos can go back to a partly aquatic lifestyle, then it is not impossible for whales’ ancestors to have done the same, though perhaps a crocodile would be a better example as whale ancestors were carnivores. From that, something like a seal, then a whale with four fins and then a whale with two fins as now.

Just because you find something difficult to believe does not make it false. I have always found the three-in-one concept of the Trinity very difficult to believe - does that make it false?

rossum

 

[rossum]

Evolution has no purpose. Evolution is explainable without God.

You are not objecting to evolution here, you are objecting to all of science. It is equally correct to write:Gravity has no purpose. Gravity is explainable without God.
Quantum mechanics has no purpose. Quantum mechanics is explainable without God.
All of science is “explainable without God” because science is in the business of providing natural, not supernatural, explanations.

Perhaps meteorology is a scientific atheist naturalistic attempt to remove the God of the Bible from weather forecastingPsalms 78:26) He caused the east wind to blow in the heavens And by His power He directed the south wind.

(Psalms 107:25) For He spoke and raised up a stormy wind, Which lifted up the waves of the sea.

(Psalms 135:7) He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth; Who makes lightnings for the rain, Who brings forth the wind from His treasuries.

(Psalms 148:8) Fire and hail, snow and clouds; Stormy wind, fulfilling His word;

(Proverbs 30:4) Who has ascended into heaven and descended? Who has gathered the wind in His fists? Who has wrapped the waters in His garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is His name or His son’s name? Surely you know!

(Mark 4:39) And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm.
I hope you are not supporting atheist materialist science like meteorology. “Meteorology has no purpose. Meteorology is explainable without God.”

It’s asking us to believe God used a means by which there’s no reason to believe God used that means.

There are many reasons to believe that God used the means of evolution, because the evidence present in the world which God made supports evolution. I am sure that you will agree that the correct interpretation of God’s word must agree with the correct interpretation of God’s world. When the two disagree, it could be that it is the particular interpretation of God’s word which is incorrect.
“In discussing questions of this kind two rules are to be observed, as Augustine teaches. The first is, to hold to the truth of Scripture without wavering. The second is that since Holy Scripture can be explained in a multiplicity of senses, one should adhere to a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it if it be proved with certainty to be false, lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing.”

Summa Theologica

rossum

 

[rossum]

This is circular logic. I’m a primate, because you call me that! Wow! Someone classifies me in an animal group, therefore I am one.

You do me too much honour. Homo sapiens was classified as a primate by Linnaeus in 1735.

We are primates because we meet the definition of primate: if it looks like a primate, walks like a primate and talks like a primate then it is a primate.

I have a soul. I was created to be with God.

Possibly, but that is outside the domain of science. I am Buddhist so I do not have a soul and I will attain nirvana eventually. That also is not science.

rossum

 

[rossum]

What problem with over-crowding? Man didn’t start to have babies until after the fall. There was over-crowding of two? (Adam

• Eve) ?

Rabbits breed like rabbits. Flies breed like flies and bacteria breed even faster - they can double in numbers every 20 minutes in good conditions. Death is required for a properly functioning ecology.

rossum

 

[rossum]

A good book for them would be “Darwin’s Black Box”

That is the book where Behe says that he accepts common descent and the evolution of man from earlier apes isn’t it - read the introduction. He repeats his support for common descent in he latest book, The Edge of Evolution.

rossum

 

[Montalban]

You are not objecting to evolution here, you are objecting to all of science. It is equally correct to write:Gravity has no purpose. Gravity is explainable without God.

Except no one’s claiming that I came into being because of algebra.

All of science is “explainable without God” because science is in the business of providing natural, not supernatural, explanations.

Depends which form of science you’re intent on using. I noted much earlier that one could observe Jesus turning water into wine and from observation, and testing conclude as a possibility that no natural process was involved. Catholics do this all the time when they use a panel of scientists to determine if a miracle can truly be attributed to a saint.

Perhaps meteorology is a scientific atheist naturalistic attempt to remove the God of the Bible from weather (Psalms 78:26) He caused the east wind to blow in the heavens And by His power He directed the south wind.

Perhaps. Perhaps the Psalms are poetry

I hope you are not supporting atheist materialist science like meteorology. “Meteorology has no purpose. Meteorology is explainable without God.”

Do you think that Jesus, in calming the winds performed a miracle or used natural processes?

There are many reasons to believe that God used the means of evolution, because the evidence present in the world which God made supports evolution.

No. Evolution might have happened, but to prove God used it, is by your very argument impossible - due to the limits YOU put on science.

I am sure that you will agree that the correct interpretation of God’s word must agree with the correct interpretation of God’s world. When the two disagree, it could be that it is the particular interpretation of God’s word which is incorrect.

“In discussing questions of this kind two rules are to be observed, as Augustine teaches. The first is, to hold to the truth of Scripture without wavering. The second is that since Holy Scripture can be explained in a multiplicity of senses, one should adhere to a particular explanation only in such measure as to be ready to abandon it if it be proved with certainty to be false, lest Holy Scripture be exposed to the ridicule of unbelievers, and obstacles be placed to their believing.”
Summa Theologica
rossum
​

I’ve already dealt with the issue of multiple interpretations. Just because there are doesn’t mean they’re all correct. The Church Fathers , there’s not just one, say we were created. Jesus says this.

Jesus saying it is enough for me. You think otherwise.​

 

[Montalban]

That is the book where Behe says that he accepts common descent and the evolution of man from earlier apes isn’t it - read the introduction. He repeats his support for common descent in he latest book, The Edge of Evolution.

rossum

This is the book where he disagrees with the materialistic interpretations put to show speciation. Read past the introduction

 

[Montalban]

Rabbits breed like rabbits. Flies breed like flies and bacteria breed even faster - they can double in numbers every 20 minutes in good conditions. Death is required for a properly functioning ecology.

rossum

Not in a perfect world. This thread is about the Pope. We’re dealing with Catholic concepts of the world, not Buddhist.

Catholics believe Adam’s sin introduced death into the world. By that measure (not your own) death was not around. Whether this is true or not, per se, is for the moment, irrelevant. What is important, however is it’s incompatible with an idea of the earth being millions of years old with 1,000 of generations of species breeding and dying.

 

[Montalban]

You do me too much honour. Homo sapiens was classified as a primate by Linnaeus in 1735.

We are primates because we meet the definition of primate: if it looks like a primate, walks like a primate and talks like a primate then it is a primate.

So what? If I said “Primate is all creatures that have a nose”, we’d meet the definition of primate. You’ve still not escaped from this.
Your site has him saying…
It is not pleasing that I place Man among the primates, but man is intimately familiar with himself. Let’s not quibble over words. It will be the same to me whatever name we use. But I request from you and from the whole world the generic difference between Man and Simian, and this from the principles of Natural History. I certainly know of none. If only someone might tell me just one! If I called man a simian or vice versa I would bring together all the theologians against me. Perhaps I ought to, in accordance with the law of the discipline [of Natural History].
Therefore he might have called us Simians. That he didn’t is simply because he structured his categories a certain way. You may think I’m a primate. I don’t. I believe I’ve a soul and because of this am quite different from animals.

Possibly, but that is outside the domain of science. I am Buddhist so I do not have a soul and I will attain nirvana eventually.

My apologies, I assumed you coming into this thread about the Catholic viewpoint would mean you were Catholic -as your saying that evolution and their viewpoint are compatible

That also is not science.

rossum

Cool. Do primates have souls? (according to you)? If they do, are they defined as having such by Linneus? If not, then you’ll understand my objection to your non-point about insisting on calling me a primate, because you’ll note that it’s an insufficient descriptor for me.

 

[steveandersen]

Firstly, I don’t believe he said science was normative.

He implied it when he brought up the Nazis and the Marxist et al. I may have jumped the gun but that old chestnut is a common argument I have heard against evolution. “yeah you have all this evidence but Nazis used it so it must be wrong.”

Noting that the fit survive does not necessarily mean that they ought to survive or that non-natural processes like eugenics should be used.

almost by definition evolution indicates that you can’t make a prior selection of what is “fit”

Secondly what constitutes a miss-use of science?

Eugenics, social Darwinism, the paranormal, …. Flood geology
The world is unfortunately full of folks who will try to use a little bit of science-like stuff here and there to their own ends.

If science is truly ‘descriptive’ then it is very old.

Yes, parts of it can be old
There were exceptional men like Archimedes who may have followed the process and modern science is a direct descendant of the scholarship of the middle ages but in general the scientific method is a fairly recent.

Nazism is scientific-racism. Whilst racism did pre-date evolution, evolution made it respectable… even in a ‘moderate’ form, such as the eugenics envisioned by left-wingers, such as Fabian socialists.

There were people a century of so ago who used the Bible to justify slavery. Is that the fault of the Bible or Christianity? Of course not.

Nazism was never respectable. Just because someone couched things in pseudo scientific terms doesn’t make it science.

And even if what you say is somehow true how would that in any way disprove the theory?

Another point you seem to have missed. Much of the ‘evidence’ of fossils is simply lining them up in a speculative order to describe a possible path of evolution - based on a startling number of assumptions - including that species become more complex.

(a) There is nothing wrong with comparative anatomy. It is as good a place to start as any
(b) While maybe the earliest work was done merely by visually comparing specimens, modern work is much more rigorous than merely “lining them up” and molecular biology independently correlates the paleontology (as do other sciences)
(c) Evolution does not specify that “species become more complex” merely that isolated populations will genetically diverge from each other over time
(d) What does this have to do with what I said?

Many palaeontologists can’t discern between fabricated and natural things.

a citation would be nice

That’s simply false and indeed shows how little you know about evolution. I suggest you start with looking at Darwin himself and how he speculated a complex eye might have evolved, all the way back from a photo-sensitive ‘spot’.

a) it isn’t false
b) Do you mean that part where Darwin said “then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real”?
c) The evolution of the eye is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. All vertebrate eyes have a blind spot due to the placement of nerve tissue in the retina. This is not present in the eyes of the octopus but you will never see a new model vertebrate come out with new and improved octopus eyes.

So we still have gills?

As a matter of fact, yes we do during our fetal development (just like snakes have limbs during theirs)
ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny and all that

your eustachian tubes are remnants of them
And just like the bone structure in your limbs they are a gift from your lobe-fined fish ancestors

Maths is a science, as well as a tool of science, such as English is studied as a liberal art, as well as used as a tool in liberal arts (et al).

Tell me what kind of proofs they have for the whole body of theoretical sciences?

As I said, we don’t have proofs in science. We just have evidence, models, and degrees of certainty.

 

[Contarini]

Intelligent Design is NOT a scientific theory and it has already been proven to be a load of crock.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

I knew I’d get in trouble for that! It may be a bad scientific theory, but it makes arguments about physical reality which it claims to support with empirical evidence. I think it’s a mistake to use “scientific theory” evaluatively–I am simply saying that ID is not in fact a religious doctrine. That is all I am qualified to evaluate. The scientific arguments pro and contra ID go way over my head. Since I know scientifically educated people (such as my colleague the biology professor at Huntington University) who support it, I am not going to dismiss it just because most scientists say it is bunk. But because that scientific majority includes other scientifically trained Christians of my acquaintance who have no particular ideological bias against ID, I am very dubious about its scientific merits. Without spending a lot of time on the matter, that’s as far as I can go.

Edwin

 

[rossum]

Do primates have souls? (according to you)?

According to Buddhism nothing whatsoever has a soul. It is the third of the three characteristics:* all compound things are impermanent.

• all compound things are suffering.
• all things are soulless.

Three common errors are to look for permanence in the impermanent, pleasure in what is suffering and a soul in what is soulless.

If they do, are they defined as having such by Linneus?

Linnaeus was Christian. I presume that he belived that humans had souls and other primates did not.

If not, then you’ll understand my objection to your non-point about insisting on calling me a primate, because you’ll note that it’s an insufficient descriptor for me.

Primate is a valid descriptor of some of your physical characteristics - five fingered hands, fingernails, binocular vision and so forth. Other characteristics are due to you being a mammal - hair, warm blood. Yet others are due to you being one of the Hominidae - no tail, a large brain and a tendancy to upright walking as well as some details of your teeth.

The various biological categories are defined in terms of physical characteristics because science deals with the physical. Souls are theology, not science.

rossum

 

[rossum]

Not in a perfect world.

How do you know how fast rabbits bred before the fall? Where does it give the pre-fall breeding rate of rabbits in the Bible? Do any of the Church Fathers discuss pre-fall rabbit breeding rates? You have your own idea of what a perfect world was like. What authority can you provide to support it beyond your own opinion?

This thread is about the Pope. We’re dealing with Catholic concepts of the world, not Buddhist.

I am not presenting a Buddhist opinion, I am presenting a scientific one. The truth or not of my statements does not depend on my religion.

Catholics believe Adam’s sin introduced death into the world.

Some Catholics believe that Adam’s sin introduced only human death, not animal death; animal death being already present. As far as I am able to tell, the Catholic Church has not definitively ruled on this matter, so both opinions on the nature of the death are valid.

By that measure (not your own) death was not around. Whether this is true or not, per se, is for the moment, irrelevant. What is important, however is it’s incompatible with an idea of the earth being millions of years old with 1,000 of generations of species breeding and dying.

The earth is older than life on earth, so to that extent the age of the earth is irrelevant to the age of life on earth. Your interpretation of the effects of Adam’s sin is incompatible with animal death before Adam. Other interpretations of Adam’s sin are not so imcompatible.

rossum

 

[Montalban]

How do you know how fast rabbits bred before the fall? Where does it give the pre-fall breeding rate of rabbits in the Bible? Do any of the Church Fathers discuss pre-fall rabbit breeding rates? You have your own idea of what a perfect world was like. What authority can you provide to support it beyond your own opinion?

It’s covered by the fact that Adam brought sin into the world.

I am not presenting a Buddhist opinion, I am presenting a scientific one. The truth or not of my statements does not depend on my religion.

The problem is this thread’s about Catholics reconcilling their position with evolution, making much of your opinion irrelevant, such as the attempt at a point re: a rabbit.

Some Catholics believe that Adam’s sin introduced only human death, not animal death; animal death being already present. As far as I am able to tell, the Catholic Church has not definitively ruled on this matter, so both opinions on the nature of the death are valid.

Some Catholics may well believe that. That’s a truism. Again another non-point. As for ‘death’, it’s always death per se.

The earth is older than life on earth, so to that extent the age of the earth is irrelevant to the age of life on earth.

Not if it’s only a few days older - see again the difference between your position and that of the Bible -v- evolution.

Your interpretation of the effects of Adam’s sin is incompatible with animal death before Adam.

Based on your opinion that it is so?

Other interpretations of Adam’s sin are not so imcompatible.

Great, start a thread on all of them

 

[Montalban]

"Montalban:

Firstly, I don’t believe he said science was normative.

He implied it when he brought up the Nazis and the Marxist et al. I may have jumped the gun but that old chestnut is a common argument I have heard against evolution. “yeah you have all this evidence but Nazis used it so it must be wrong.”

How did he imply it.
Here’s what was said…
"abu kamoon:

Post Modern thought is predicated on Evolutionism, including Marxism, Nazism and of course, racism. The world has come to believe a lie. Well, not the whole world.

To which you responded…

Science is not normative it is descriptive. If someone wants to misuse science for political ends it is not the fault of the science.

Noting that the fit survive does not necessarily mean that they ought to survive or that non-natural processes like eugenics should be used.

The idea of fitness to survive is based on a tautology. All that is fit to survive survives. Why is a non-natural process wrong? We use medicine to fight disease.

almost by definition evolution indicates that you can’t make a prior selection of what is “fit”

And this is why evolution’s not like most other sciences. You can only look at something retrospectively granting that it was ‘fit’ simply because it survived. It’s useless.

You’re differentiating between ‘natural’ selection and ‘artificial’ selection. Why you think one’s not right, when breeders do it all the time.
"Montalban:

Secondly what constitutes a miss-use of science?

Eugenics, social Darwinism, the paranormal, …. Flood geology

Why is this a miss-use? Do you have any science to show that it’s not proper use of science?

The world is unfortunately full of folks who will try to use a little bit of science-like stuff here and there to their own ends.

You mean like pharmaceutical companies making money out of developing cures? You’ve a strange idea of miss-use
"Montalban:

If science is truly ‘descriptive’ then it is very old.

Yes, parts of it can be old
There were exceptional men like Archimedes who may have followed the process and modern science is a direct descendant of the scholarship of the middle ages but in general the scientific method is a fairly recent.

No! I’m going even earlier still. People used ‘science’ to develop spears, etc. Using fire, etc.
"Montalban:

Nazism is scientific-racism. Whilst racism did pre-date evolution, evolution made it respectable… even in a ‘moderate’ form, such as the eugenics envisioned by left-wingers, such as Fabian socialists.

There were people a century of so ago who used the Bible to justify slavery. Is that the fault of the Bible or Christianity? Of course not.

That’s not the point I made. There’s a clear miss-use of Christianity to oppress people; we can judge this by using Jesus’ words as a benchmark. You think Eugenics is a miss-use, based on what?

Nazism was never respectable.

That’s simply false. It was in Germany. Even in America there was a pro-Nazi “German-American Bund”. And in Britain too, under Moseley (and his British Union of Fascists)

Just because someone couched things in pseudo scientific terms doesn’t make it science.

You keep repeating this claim. Prove to me that it’s not science?

And even if what you say is somehow true how would that in any way disprove the theory?

That’s not the point I’m making. My point here is to dispute your ‘retort’ that it’s a miss-use; your retorts are not based on evidence, but common opinion. Look, I’ll make it easy for you. You make claims with no evidence. I’ll give you evidence to show that Nazi science is science…

For starters; when Nazis did experiments on live humans - for example, to see how tolerant we are of extremes of heat and cold, these were done very scientifically. The Nazi ideology, however was what caused these scientific experiments to be undertaken in the first place - that a Christians might not have performed an experiment knowing that the subject would die.
remember.org/educate/medexp.html

It was such ‘good’ science that the data is still applicable, but only because of ethics, it is debatable whether we should ever use it
see jlaw.com/Articles/NaziMedEx.html

 

[Montalban]

"Montalban:

Another point you seem to have missed. Much of the ‘evidence’ of fossils is simply lining them up in a speculative order to describe a possible path of evolution - based on a startling number of assumptions - including that species become more complex.

(a) There is nothing wrong with comparative anatomy. It is as good a place to start as any

However people can assume that things develop from simpler to complex forms

(b) While maybe the earliest work was done merely by visually comparing specimens, modern work is much more rigorous than merely “lining them up” and molecular biology independently correlates the palaeontology (as do other sciences)

Not according to Behe.

(c) Evolution does not specify that “species become more complex” merely that isolated populations will genetically diverge from each other over time

Most assume simpler to more complex.

(d) What does this have to do with what I said?

It was a refutation of this ‘objection’

Modern cars have components in them (such as electronic ignition) that bare no relation to the parts that preformed similar functions in older models. Whole new systems were put in. Not so with living things. We share designs (including the faults in those designs) with our remote ancestors

"Montalban:

Many palaeontologists can’t discern between fabricated and natural things.

a citation would be nice

My comments relate to scratches on rocks, where there’s disputes if they’re signs the rocks have been worked, or if its just random scratches.
"Montalban:

That’s simply false and indeed shows how little you know about evolution. I suggest you start with looking at Darwin himself and how he speculated a complex eye might have evolved, all the way back from a photo-sensitive ‘spot’.

a) it isn’t false
b) Do you mean that part where Darwin said “then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real”?
c) The evolution of the eye is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. All vertebrate eyes have a blind spot due to the placement of nerve tissue in the retina. This is not present in the eyes of the octopus but you will never see a new model vertebrate come out with new and improved octopus eyes.

Darwin had no idea of how the eye came into being. But he supposed that one way of showing this was by lining up a series of eyes from the photo-sensitive spot, to our own complex eyes. The problem with this is that the spot is an ends in itself. It’s not waiting to transform into our eye. And to get to the stage of our eye is immense. Even the next ‘stage’ of having a small cup around the eye so that at least light direction can be ascertained is immense. Read Behe. The molecular-chemical changes simply to form the cup are immense.
"Montalban:

So we still have gills?

As a matter of fact, yes we do during our foetal development (just like snakes have limbs during theirs)
ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny and all that

your Eustachian tubes are remnants of them
And just like the bone structure in your limbs they are a gift from your lobe-fined fish ancestors

ROFL. Another indicator you’ve no idea what you’re talking about. We DO NOT HAVE GILLS at any stage. What some scientists did is they observed small lines in the embryo and called them ‘gill slits’. They’re not part of gills at all. They don’t develop into gills. They’ve nothing to do with gills.
“In the 19th century, gill slits of vertebrate embryos were erroneously thought to be actual gills, and thus evidence for the recapitulation theory”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gill_slits
That’s the sort of stuff that was thrown out of evolutionary books more than 100 years ago!
Ernst Haeckel used his imagination to draw ‘similarities’ in embryos.
See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel#.22Infamous.22_embryo_drawings

 

[Montalban]

"Montalban:

Maths is a science, as well as a tool of science, such as English is studied as a liberal art, as well as used as a tool in liberal arts (et al).
Tell me what kind of proofs they have for the whole body of theoretical sciences?

As I said, we don’t have proofs in science. We just have evidence, models, and degrees of certainty.

So 2+2 doesn’t equal 4? Maybe you think one day 4 will be *better *expressed as 3.99999999999999

In summary, your refutations are based on opinion of what science is generally, and evolution is specifically. You casually label some forms of science a miss-use of science without saying why.

The gaps between the stages of Darwin’s eye-developing-model is immense.

You make claims about evolutionary theory that were thrown out a century ago.

 

[rossum]

It’s covered by the fact that Adam brought sin into the world.

I note that you can provide no justification for your opinion on the pre-Fall breeding rate of rabbits.

The problem is this thread’s about Catholics reconcilling their position with evolution, making much of your opinion irrelevant, such as the attempt at a point re: a rabbit.

At least from the time of Augustine the Catholic Church has acknowledged that secular knowledge is valid. In a discussion on the Catholic position, secular (name removed by moderator)ut is a valid contribution.

Some Catholics may well believe that. That’s a truism. Again another non-point.

I note that you acknowledge that the “Adam’s sin only introduced human death, not animal death” is a valid Catholic position.

Not if it’s only a few days older - see again the difference between your position and that of the Bible -v- evolution.

It is a difference between my position and your interpretation of the Bible. There are different interpretations of the Bible allowed within the Catholic Church. Other allowed interpretations do not conflict with my position.

rossum

 

[Montalban]

I note that you can provide no justification for your opinion on the pre-Fall breeding rate of rabbits.

I did, by noting that according to Genesis, the earth wasn’t that old. Rabbits weren’t around ‘generations’

At least from the time of Augustine the Catholic Church has acknowledged that secular knowledge is valid. In a discussion on the Catholic position, secular (name removed by moderator)ut is a valid contribution.

So you’re saying that because secularists might believe that there’s no reason to believe Jesus was the son of God the Catholic church is bound to consider it valid? Of course not. When secularism collides with faith, faith should be ruling.

I note that you acknowledge that the “Adam’s sin only introduced human death, not animal death” is a valid Catholic position.

I make no such acknowledgement

It is a difference between my position and your interpretation of the Bible. There are different interpretations of the Bible allowed within the Catholic Church.

Really? On issues central to Catholicism?

Other allowed interpretations do not conflict with my position.

rossum

Great. However Jesus says we were created. Evolution does not.

 

[wildleafblower]

wild << Perhaps PhilVaz could give me a website to that quote until that time I’m left wondering if Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote the above mentioned quote you have in your article, though I do think he “endorsed” it. >>

Ratzinger might not have actually penned the ITC statement, but as president of this theological Commission he had to “OK” the document. At the bottom it says “the present text was approved in forma specifica” which means (I had to look this up)

“An act approved by the pope in forma specifica becomes an act of the pontiff. It cannot be attacked before an administrative jurisdiction, for there is no appeal or recourse possible against a sentence or a decree emanating from the Roman Pontiff…” (SOURCE: The Papacy: An Encyclopedia under “Papal Abbrobations” by Philippe Levillain, page 96)

“The decrees of a national council may not be promulgated until they have received the approval of the pope. The decrees of a provincial synod have no force until they have been approved by Rome. This approval is twofold: ordinary (in formâ communi), and specific (in formâ specificâ). The former means that there is nothing which needs correction in the decrees of the synod, and they thereby have force in the province. This is the approval generally given to such decrees. If approval is given in formâ specificâ the decrees have the same force as if they emanated from the Apostolic See, though they are binding only in the province for which they are made.” (SOURCE: Catholic Encyclopedia under “Decree” volume 4, page 670)

Sounds pretty authoritative to me, although the ITC document may not have been approved “in forma specifica” by the Pope himself (JPII at the time). It says by the ITC, then by Cardinal Ratzinger. Another version is on my site without the fancy background. Phil P

Phil, in my opinion you seem to be admitting that you are in agreement with my msg. 144 though you fail to acknowledge that you quote mined a segment of a larger article then gave it to Alec for his article. I asked for a link when it was first published and you never provided me one. I had to go searching forever to find it myself!

Phil, you apparently helped Alec with his article (1) by supplying him this quote within his article which hasn’t changed since 28th Jan 2006 "Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, recognised this when he wrote [HE DIDN"T WRITE THIS!!!] in the July 2004 Vatican Statement on Creation and Evolution: "But it is important to note that, according to the Catholic understanding of divine causality, true contingency in the created order is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence. Divine causality and created causality radically differ in kind and not only in degree. Thus, even the outcome of a truly contingent natural process can nonetheless fall within God’s providential plan for creation.”

Now, as far as … "*“In forma specifica documents have deliberate papal approbation, and so the documents, even though issued by a Vatican office, take on the character of speaking to a papal concern. … In forma communi documents, in contrast, have been reviewed by the pope as one aspect of the pontiff’s daily activities. They do not indicate the pope’s explicit approval, even though they might have it.” *. http://www.usccb.org/laity/dpc3.shtml[Please review my msg. 144 to get the full gest of what I am referring to. Thank you.]

I left a message for you on another subject. THX By the way, I got wind that you deal with loans Sorry, I don’t want to look at your website.

1. evolutionpages.com/Schoenborn_critique.htm