As some of you may know I recently was more or less forced to leave my church home of eight years because I publicly via this blog said I believe that the earth is more than 6,000 years old. The leadership of the denomination insists that this idea is heresy. In that light it was interesting to note the article today about the Catholic church very publicly professed that they are no longer teaching creationism. Here is an excerpt from that article and the URL to the source.
Benedict and his predecessor John Paul have been trying to shed the Church’s image of being anti-science, a label that stuck when it condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, challenging the words of the Bible.
Galileo was rehabilitated and the Church now also accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.
The Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism — the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible — and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way Godcreated the world.
The Galileo thing has been a constant millstone around the church’s neck in regard to science. It is nice to see that the biggest Christian denomination in the world has finally embraced God given scientific revelation. It is too bad that my previous church still stubbornly clings to the seven twenty four hour day theory. Of course the Bible story is an allegory for what actually happened just as many of the other stories in the Bible are allegories. The people at the time these stories were written were just not ready for the full truth. With the stories being allegorical take nothing away from the message presented. To take a literal view of these stories is myopic and hurting God’s kingdom on earth.
