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Sunday, May 27, 2007

"Reasonable Science, Reasonable Faith"

SEE THE ARTICLE, Reasonable Science, Reasonable Faith, by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna.
In the traditional view, the Creator endows nature with a kind of quasi-intelligence: Like an agent, nature “acts for an end,” with immanent principles of self-unfolding and self-operation. Newton, by contrast, is already seized by the early modern “mechanical philosophy,” in which nature is seen as a kind of unnatural composite of passive, unintelligent, preexisting matter, on which order has been extrinsically imposed by a Supreme Intelligence.
The modern division between faith and reason leads to our current debates about evolution, where it seems, you must choose to be either a fundamentalist religionist or an atheistic scientist. Traditional Catholic philosophy sees things differently.

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