Vatican backs Darwin, according to an article in News.com.au 7 Nov 2005. The Vatican has issued a statement condemning “fundamentalists who reject the theory of evolution and interpret the Bible literally”. Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, stated that Genesis and Darwin’s theory are perfectly compatible because Genesis is theology and “the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm – science.” According to the Cardinal the real message of Genesis is that “the universe didn’t make itself and had a creator” and it is “perfectly compatible” with evolution. He added, “The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim.”
Editorial Comment: The above only shows that Darwin (the theological graduate), knew more about the Bible than a Catholic cardinal. Darwin wrote “But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian.” (Extract from Nora Barlow, The autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882: with original omissions restored. New York, W.W. Norton, 1969. pp. 85-96.)
When will Theistic evolutionist theologians admit that the foundational belief of evolution is that the universe did make itself, and is therefore incompatible even with Cardinal Poupard’s view of Genesis. The idea that God created the universe and all living creatures through a process of struggle, disease and death is totally incompatible with Genesis 1, which says many times that God created the world to be good. It was only after man sinned and God cursed the ground, life became a struggle, “survival of the fittest” at the expense of the unfit commenced, and death prevailed. (Ref. church, Catholicism, compromise)