A celebration of the 150th anniversary of On The Origin Of Species will be held next year at The Vatican:
The Vatican is planning a special conference in 2009 to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking theory of evolution.
First printed in November 1859, Darwin’s evolutionary theories rocked the faith of Victorian Christians and are stoutly contested today by Creationists. The Vatican has traditionally backed a more nuanced approach. Three years ago, Cardinal Paul Poupard, the then president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said Darwin’s theory of Evolution and the Old Testament book of Genesis were “perfectly compatible” if the Bible were correctly read, saying: “The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim,” explaining that the real message in Genesis was that “the universe didn’t make itself and had a creator.”
Next year’s conference will be held in Rome and organised by Poupard’s former office, the Pontifical Council for Culture as well as by the University of Notre Dame and six pontifical universities. The event, claim its organisers, is a milestone in the rapprochement between science and the Church. They say it is time for the Church to look at Evolution again, “from a broader perspective”, explaining “appropriate consideration is needed more than ever before.”
The Catholic Church has proven itself to be far more open to the science of evolution than other more fundamentalist versions of Christianity — both Benedict XVI and, before him, John Paul II have said that there is no inherent contradiction between the idea that human beings evolved from lower forms of life and the religious doctrine that the human soul was created by God — so the fact that this is happening isn’t really that much of a surprise.
Nonetheless, considering the fate of Galileo, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that the Holy See has come a long way when it comes to accepting the reality of scientific fact.
I love the way people interchange fact and theory. Evolution is called a fact. Global warming is called a fact.
There are currently three theories concerning the ultimate fate of the Universe. One holds that it will continue to expand forever, letting entropy and the ever increasing distance between celestial bodies eventually kill the Universe. Another holds that the growth will eventually stop and everything will stay, more or less, in the same place. The last suggests that gravity will pull everything back together in a “Big Crunch”. But clearly, since theory and fact are the same, all three will hold true, right?
With all due respect, your question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific method and the role of theory in science.
No time to go into detail right now, but I’ll get to it.