[asa] Vatican Astronomer Replaced

Good riddance! ~ Janice

<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1687772/posts>Vatican
Astronomer Replaced
Evolution News and Views ^ | August 21, 2006 | Bruce Chapman
Posted on 08/21/2006 11:16:59 PM EDT by johnnyb_61820
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1687772/posts [refresh browser]

Pope Benedict XVI has replaced an evangelizing Darwinist, Dr. George
Coyne, as director the Vatican Observatory, according to Zenit News.
A Jesuit with a doctorate in astronomy, Dr. Coyne in recent years
made himself the public scourge of Darwin critics and scientific
proponents of intelligent design. Increasingly his theology resembled
that of "process theologians" who believe that God is still learning
and could not have known what his world was becoming.

While media tended to avoid the pro-design statements of the pope
over the past year (see
"<http://www.evolutionnews.org/2006/05/is_the_pope_catholic.html>Is
the Pope Catholic?"), they frequently sited the hostile remarks of
Dr. Coyne, sitting at his office at the University of Arizona, as
supposedly representing those of "the Vatican." That could not have
been well-received at the Vatican in Rome. Rumors that Coyne might be
replaced have circulated for months.

In the past year since he criticized the pro-design essay of Austrian
Cardinal Schoenborn in the NY Times, Dr. Coyne has been feted at a
number of unlikely gatherings where his job was to express Church
support for Darwinism. At a meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, Coyne pronounced in favor of a "fertile
universe" where "chance and destiny embrace." The notes handed out
for a talk given by Coyne by that title state:

If we take the results of modern science seriously, it is difficult
to believe that God is omnipotent and omniscient in the sense of the
scholastic philosophers. Science tells us of a god who must be very
different from God as seen by the medieval philosophers and
theologians. Let us ask the hard question. Could, for instance, God
after a billion years in a fourteen billion year old universe have
predicted that human life would come to be? Let us suppose that God
possessed the theory of everything, knew all the laws of physics, all
the fundamental forces. Even then could God know with certainty that
human life would come to be? If we truly accept the scientific view
that, in addition to necessary processes and the immense
opportunities offered by the universe, there are also chance
processes, then it would appear that not even God could know the
outcome with certainty. God cannot know what is not knowable.

(<http://www.aei.org/docLib/20051027_HandoutCoyne.pdf>The Dance of
the Fertile Universe by George V. Coyne, S.J.)

However, what even Fr. Coyne himself apparently could not know is
that the Catholic Church, while endlessly tolerant of theological
deviations these days, can't really have someone whose views
contradict those of the Church representing himself around the world
as "the Vatican."

The new director of the Vatican Observatory is Dr. Jose Gabriel
Funes, also an astronomer and a Jesuit--an Argentine rather than an
Arizonan like Fr. Coyne.

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Received on Mon Aug 21 23:58:19 2006