First, I do not personally care what the Pope says on anything. I do not derive truth from what the Pope says.
However, what I said is that believing that God used evolution is incompatible with an understanding of the Christian God.
But human beings are perfectly capable of being inconsistent.
A person who is truly a Christian can — and almost always does — believe many things that are inconsistent or confused or inaccurate. That does not mean the person is not trualy a Christian. It measn they are simply WRONG about many things.
Being wrong about any number of things doesn’t mean one is not truly a Christian. It simply means they are wrong.
The trouble with Christians, including the Pope, is that they are not specialists in science enough to know they are being buffaloed by charlatan scientists. So when a Christian, including the Pope, feels unable to refute the hoax of evolution, that does not make evolution true. It merely means that those Christians are ill-equipped to recognize and expose the hoax.
You are tripping over the word “accept.” The Pope does not in any way believe or declare that evolution is true. The Pope says that evolution is a possibility, and if you want to believe in it, that’s okay. The Pope did not say that the Pope or the Catholic Church believes evolution is true.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2007-04-12-pope-evolution_N.htm
I say that evolution cannot be reconciled with Christianity.
But most genuine Christians will enter eternity still confused, uncertain, or misunderstanding a great many things. We woll only know fully on the other side of eternity. So it does not invalidate one’s salvation to say that they are confused or wrong about some thing or some things.
I should clarify this a little better:
Is the Pope or someone else who feels the need to knuckle under to the hypothesis of evolution half-believing? Yes, his faith is weak — or else he just doesn’t want to fight about it, in order to gather up as many people as possible to the essential question of salvation.
Does that mean he or other people aren’t saved, or aren’t real Christians? No, not necessarily.
The act of salvation is something that God does to us in our weakness, need, and confusion. Being saved by God through Jesus Christ is like drowning in the middle of a vast ocean with nothing around, and a Coast Guard helicopter (God) comes along and plucks you out of the water.
So we often have imperfect understanding. God is the one doing the saving. We are just being hauled up out of the ocean to safety by God, our Savior.
So someone who is TRULY a Christian, genuinely saved, may nevertheless have weak faith about many questions, be confused about many things, and just “wrong” about many things — yet will still go to heaven.
St. Paul himself said that we know in part and see in part, that we see dimly as if through a dark glass. If even St. Paul acknowledged not knowing or understanding everything clearly or perfectly, we should not think anyone has to know all truth exactly right in order to be a Christian (to be saved).
So, yes, I would say that the Pope if he believes that God used evolution to create the world as we know it would believe that because his faith is WEAK and does not have the faith in an all-powerful God necessary to reject the shadows and appearances of the world.
Faith OFTEN requires us to look at the world which APPEARS to be one thing, but isn’t. Again, the Bible tells us that we walk by faith AND NOT BY SIGHT. The Bible tells us that what we see or think we see is often NOT TRUE.
But claiming that Christians must accept what we THINK we see as evolution is t oreject what the Bible tells us: NO, we do not nee to accept what we THINK we see. On the contrary, we are admonished repeatedly that what we THINK we see around us turns out NOT to be true. The world often presents us with false appearances, which I think are for the very purpose of giving you the opportunity to CHOOSE whether to believe the shadows and stage props and false images or to believe in God.
AND I WILL SAY THIS: I suspect that if we got into the question of whether Jesus was (is) God and whether Jesus actually performed miracles and actually rose from the dead, we would very quickly discover that your problem with evolution is that you reject the supernatural.
You, like many people, insist that you are a Christian.
Yet I am astonished at how many people who profess to be Christian, violently reject the core reality of Christianity that Jesus was and is God who entered the world in the form of a man, died, and rose again from death.
The objection is often the same: Many have joined the “Christian club” for social reasons, but violently reject the concept of a SUPERNATURAL God, who has the power to snap His fingers and turn the sun blue in the very next second, who could snap His fingers and make all the world’s oceans jump up a mile above the Earth and hang there, who could change the speed of light with just a thought, and who can create a new species out of thin air instantly on a whim.
“The Pope does not in any way believe or declare that evolution is true.” Moseley
“there is much scientific proof in favor of evolution, which appears as a reality that we must see and which enriches our understanding of life and being as such.” Pope Benedict XVI
I think the Pope has a plenty good understanding of Christianity and God. He certainly has a better understanding of his stance on evolution than YOU do. But it is amusing that you cannot mount an argument against a scientific theory without pulling out the TRUMP card - “My theology is correct and every other theology is wrong - because I say so!”.