The Vatican

This is so refreshing. I feel like I'm in one of those Zest commercials with the enormous towels.

Some highlights, if you don't care to read:

"VATICAN CITY- A 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.

...

'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,' Cardinal Paul 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.

...

Monsignor Gianfranco Basti, director of the Vatican project STOQ, or Science, Theology and Ontological Quest, reaffirmed John Paul's 1996 statement that evolution was 'more than just a hypothesis.'

'A hypothesis asks whether something is true or false," he said. "(Evolution) is more than a hypothesis because there is proof.'"

I wasn't aware of the 1996 statement before...may have to go look it up.