After purifying Galileo in the early nineties, John Paul saw fit to purify Darwin as well. The Protestant churches in the USA are not convinced of this
Avi Blizovsky
Pope John Paul II passed away (Motash 2.4.05). In social matters he was conservative, but for some reason, precisely his long term of office in an era where the means of communication are very important, led him to make historical decisions regarding the relationship between science and religion: he acquitted Galileo who was tried in 1633 by the Inquisition for his claim that the earth revolves around the sun And he even gave legitimacy to the theory of evolution, provided that he states that the entry of the soul into the body is an event that science cannot investigate with its own tools and that it is a matter of divine intervention, but everything else is acceptable to him, including the gradual development of man.
Galileo
In 1979, Pope John Paul II decided to investigate the whole matter in order to purify the atmosphere between science and religion. In a speech he delivered before a conference on behalf of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he stated that the Church now agrees with Galileo's opinion that both in religion and in science there are truths that can never come into conflict. In 1981, the Pope appointed a committee to determine the current position of the Church towards Galileo.
In October 1992, Cardinal Paul Poppard presented to Pope John Paul II the results of the commission of inquiry activated by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to investigate the famous trial of Galileo from 1633.
He reported in the study's conclusions that at the time of the trial, the theologians refused to grasp the deep non-literal meaning of the Holy Scriptures, when they (the Holy Scriptures) described the physical state of the universe. This led them unnecessarily to turn a question of interpreting observations into a question of faith and a practical decision that Galileo should be punished.
The members of the committee clarified that in light of the new information, the church had already revised its position regarding the movement of the earth in the 19th century.
The commission admitted that the church authorities in the 17th century erred by turning astronomical facts into religious matters, but in light of the knowledge that existed in those days, they acted in good faith.
Darwin and the theory of evolution
On October 23, 1996, Pope John Paul II, in the hearing of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, published a document entitled "Truth cannot contradict truth". This is what the late Steven J. Gold tells us in his book "Leonardo's Oyster Mountain and the Diet of Worms" (pp. 298-308 in the Hebrew edition (Dvir Publishing 2002, Hebrew: Noa Yuval).
Among other things, Gold writes that at first he was suspicious of the press headlines in this regard, such as this one from the New York Times: "The Pope backs up the Church's support for the scientific concept of evolution." Gold decided to investigate the issue and it turned out that the article was published in an official document of the Vatican.
John Paul begins by summarizing Pius's older reading voice from 1960 (which recognizes human evolution as belonging to the magisterium (subjugation domain) of science, on the condition that believers recognize the divine soul because it belongs to the magisterium of religion)." My predecessor, Pius XII, had already read in his reading voice Because there is no contradiction between evolution and the doctrine of belief in man and his destiny."
However, Gold writes, in order to emphasize the power of the non-overlapping magisterium, Yohanan Paul raises a potential problem and a logical solution: how can science's claim to physical continuity in human evolution be reconciled with the Catholic religion's insistence that the soul must enter the body at the moment of divine infusion?
"With man, then, we find ourselves in the midst of an ontological difference, one might even say an ontological leap. However, doesn't the raising of such an ontological discontinuity go against that physical sequence, which seems to be the main trend in the study of evolution in the fields of physics and chemistry? Examining the method used in the various branches of knowledge makes it possible to reconcile two points of view that seemingly could not be reconciled with each other. The observational sciences describe and measure the multiple manifestations of life with increasing precision, and find the correlation between them and the timeline. The background of the transition to the spiritual cannot serve as an object for this type of observation."
Unlike Pius, who accepts evolution as if it were a demon and he wishes for evidence against it, John Paul says that there has been such an increase in the amount of data, such a completeness of the theory that people of good will and sharp minds can no longer doubt evolution.
"Pius the Twelfth added... that this view should not be adopted as if [evolution] were a certain and proven doctrine... Today, almost half a century after the publication of the Calling Voice, the new knowledge has led to the recognition that the theory of evolution is more than a mere hypothesis. It is particularly worth noting that this theory was increasingly accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The unsolicited and uninvented merger of the results of studies that were conducted separately from each other is in itself an argument for the theory's merit."
It's just a shame that in the matter of life and death these days he was unable to decide - the AIDS epidemic. The Vatican refuses to this very day to allow the use of contraceptives, even though they prevent the most terrible epidemic (see the attached link)
