Thursday, June 18, 2015

The Pope's dogma gets in the way

From this article:

"Whenever religious figures enter into a debate on policy issues that have a strong scientific basis there is a slippery interplay between the desire to do good by addressing real problems, and the constraints that ideology and dogma impose upon the ability to do so objectively. Pope Francis’s encyclical follows this pattern."


"An encyclical wouldn’t be an encyclical without theology however, and that is where problems arise. In a chapter entitled 'Gospel of Creation' Francis ruminates poetically on the nature of man, the mystery of the cosmos (my own area of study) and the special duty Christians have to respect nature, humanity and the environment. It’s beautifully presented and sounds good in principle. However, his biblical analysis leads to the false conclusion that contraception and population control are not appropriate strategies to help a planet with limited resources. Here, ideology subsumes empiricism, and the inevitable conflict between science and religion comes to the fore."

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