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In a press conference yesterday, Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, made it perfectly clear that the Catholic church does not consider Genesis and Evolution to be mutually exclusive. Instead, he underscored the church’s belief that a Creator is responsible for orchestrating the universe, and that the specifics of how fall into the realm of science.

From the article:

“The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim,” he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that “the universe didn’t make itself and had a creator”.

This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm – science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to “understand things better”.

His statements were interpreted in Italy as a rejection of the “intelligent design” view, which says the universe is so complex that some higher being must have designed every detail.

Article on news.com.au

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