MindOverMatter, I don’t believe advancements in scientific knowledge undermine Catholic belief – that is the view of our secular enemies. Theology is a living dialogue between the Christian faith community and the various cultures in which it is embedded. Once it has ceased to be such a living dialogue, theology becomes a dead relic of a once-living tradition. I believe that God as author of the universe would not be at all displeased that rational creatures have evolved in one corner of it and have grown in moral and spiritual awareness and in relationship with God.
The nearly five centuries since Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium have seen a vast sea change in the way humans view their world. instead of the small, young, static and immutable cosmos of the Hebrew Bible, we now inhabit an immense, ancient, dynamic and evolving universe. A theology that rejects what the science has show about the world – and that clings to a literal interpretation of old cosmogonic stories written in a prescientific culture – is a theology doomed to be discarded in the intellectual dustbin.
I have chosen not to throw theology away, and not to make Christians a laughing stock of the educated world. That is why I studied for a doctorate in theology, and why I am spending my career defending the credibility and intelligibility of religious belief in the face of rampant and advancing atheisms of various sorts. Like most other theologians, I regards the story of Adam and Eve as too important to Christian theology to be threatened by an out-dated interpretation that insists on its literal historicity.
StAnastasia
