(January 11, 2016 at 1:50 pm)TrueChristian Wrote: Pope "saint' John Paul II was a very intelligent, learned man. He spoke something like 10-15 languages,
I don't see it and intelligent design is present in Chatolic church which it was very visible when Pius XII gave that enciclica "humani generis". So in 1996 Paul 2nd said something that made people think that Church is OK now with evolution but it's not. Catholic Church insists that God intervened at least once in the human lineage to insert a soul (soul has no evidence that it actually exists). This remains church dogma, expressed by Pope John Paul II in 1996 message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences:
With man, we find ourselves facing a different ontological order—an ontological leap, we could say. But in posing such a great ontological discontinuity, are we not breaking up the physical continuity which seems to be the main line of research about evolution in the fields of physics and chemistry? . . . But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-consciousness and self-awareness, of moral conscience, of liberty, or of aesthetic and religious experience—these must be analyzed through philosophical reflection, while theology seeks to clarify the ultimate meaning of the Creator’s designs.
It’s hard to see this “ontological discontinuity”—the endowment of humans with a metaphysical soul—as anything other than creationism. Granted, it may have been a one-time intervention, but it still mixes science with religion, weakening the claim that Catholicism is compatible with evolution.
Or what about his claims on euthanasia: I confirm that euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium. . . . Depending on the circumstances, this practice involves the malice proper to suicide or murder.
(“Natural law,” of course, does not refer to the scientific “laws of nature,” but to the innate morality supposedly vouchsafed to Catholics by God and understood by reason.)
And how many languages he spoke is questionable. If he comes to some country and yells at people few phrases on their language it doesn't mean that he actually speaks that language.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"