Vatican: Faithful Should Listen to Science

Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into 'fundamentalism' if it ignores scientific reason. Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the 'mutual prejudice' between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States. The Vatican project was inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1992 declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from 'tragic mutual incomprehension.' Galileo was condemned for supporting Nicolaus Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun; church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe. 'The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future,' Poupard said. But he said science, too, should listen to religion. 'We know where scientific reason can end up by itself: the atomic bomb and the possibility of cloning human beings are fruit of a reason that wants to free itself from every ethical or religious link,' he said. 'But we also know the dangers of a religion that severs its links with reason and becomes prey to fundamentalism,' he said."