{"id":5026,"date":"2005-07-22T09:56:48","date_gmt":"2005-07-22T09:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/evolving-words.html"},"modified":"2005-07-22T09:56:48","modified_gmt":"2005-07-22T09:56:48","slug":"evolving-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/evolving-words.html","title":{"rendered":"Evolving words"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do go check out The Word from Rome for snippets of various interviews related to the evolution flap<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

I also had the chance to speak with Jesuit Fr. George Coyne, an American astrophysicist who has served as director of the Vatican observatory since 1978. It’s one of the oldest observatories in the world, whose roots in some sense go back to astronomical observations commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII as part of his reform of the calendar in 1582. <\/p>\n

I reached Coyne in Tucson, Arizona, where he spends part of each year. <\/p>\n

Coyne said he was disappointed in the way Sch\u00f6nborn dealt with a 1996 message of Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, in which the pope referred to evolution as "more than a hypothesis." In his New York Times<\/em> piece, Sch\u00f6nborn called this text "rather vague and unimportant." <\/p>\n

Coyne said the pope’s 1996 message was carefully considered. <\/p>\n

"The academy had brought together the world’s best researchers to study the origins and early development of life, along with some philosophers and theologians," Coyne said. "Moreover, the circumstances were dramatic. Just a week before, an announcement had been made of the discovery of possible bacterial life on Mars. That turned out to be wrong, but it created an atmosphere of great interest." <\/p>\n

In that context, Coyne believes, what John Paul II said in 1996 "is very important." <\/p>\n

Coyne said he’s never understood why some people associate evolution with atheism. <\/p>\n

"Why God cannot work with purpose through an evolutionary process that has stochastic features, I don’t know," he said, invoking a term from mathematics that essentially means "random." <\/p>\n

"Chance is the way we scientists see the universe," Coyne said. "It has nothing to do with God. It’s not chancy to God, it’s chancy to us." <\/p>\n

Coyne said phrasing the debate over evolution as a contest between necessity and chance is misleading. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

ow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. 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