Pope's statement about evolution was mistranslated

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Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Responses 4 Fallacies contained in this claim 5 External Links 6 References 7 Further Reading 8 Related claims 9 See Also 10 Acknowledgments

Claim

Pope John Paul II's statement that evolution is "more than a hypothesis" is a mistranslation; it should be "more than one hypothesis," implying a lack of unanimity among scientists.

Source

• add source

Responses

1. The pope's beliefs about evolution will not make the principles of natural selection any more or less true.
2. It would be strange that Pope John Paul II's statment would be mistranslated, given as how the Pope was fluent in several languages, including English.
3. The claim that the Pope's statement was mistranslated is not supported by the Catholic Church itself. The translation supported by the Church and its Italian translation of the comments is: "Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis." (http://www.cin.org/users/james/files/whatsaid.htm) This is not to say the Pope or the Catholic Church is saying evolution is true. It is only to say that the Catholic Church has determined that evolution is not incompatible with Catholic doctrine. See the Catholic Information Service link below for a nice discussion. If the Catholic Church thought that the Pope's statement was mistranslated, Vatican officials, and the Pope would have said so by now.
4. The Pope is not a scientist and thus, while he may influence the views of many people, he is not necessarily an authority on scientific theories.
5. The claim is beside the point: JP2 absolutely never made any endorsement, direct or otherwise, of creationism, or Intelligent Design.

Fallacies contained in this claim

• Appeal to Authority (Just because the Pope said it doesn't make it true)
• Suppressed Evidence (The Pope never said that he was mistranslated in the first place)

External Links

• Mark Isaak's page for this claim [1]
• James Akin, 1996. Evolution: What the Pope Said, [2]
• Thomas, Cal, 1997 (Jan. 25). We're all fallible: The pope, evolution, and the importance of good translation World on the Web 11(33) [3]
• Response to the rebuttal to the claim at CreationWiki [4]

References

1. NCSE, n.d., Voices for Evolution: Statements from Scientific and Scholarly Organizations, [5]

Further Reading

1. Pope John Paul II, 1996, Magisterium Is Concerned with Question of Evolution For It Involves Conception of Man: Message to Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 22, 1996. [6]
2. Gould, Stephen J., 1998. Non-overlapping magisteria. In: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, Harmony Books, New York. See esp. footnote on pg. 279.

Related claims

• It is not true that the church used to teach a flat earth
• The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built

See Also

• Why is Creationism not a Scientific Theory?

Acknowledgments