Pat versus the Vat

[This one is via SepiaMutiny]

Pat Robertson has struck terror in the hearts of people in the little town of Dover, PA. Now that the debauchers in New Orleans and Houston have been appropriately chastised by God for dodging taxes, cheating on their wives and in general causing the sort of mayhem that would do any frat-house foam-party proud, the good folks of Dover know that Mr. Robertson does indeed have a direct line with the Man Upstairs. Everyone in and around Dover is just waiting for the disaster to strike in their area.As far as I think, FEMA should start scrambling and getting choppers and relief trucks and disaster management personnel to Dover already.

But the worst affected are the meteorologists in and around PA. Ungodly men and women of science, these folks have hunkered down on their computers and their elaborate weather models ever since Robertson spoke on his ‘700 Club’ and have been trying their best of convince themselves that nothing bad can happen. But they know that those weather models are mere scientific constructs that happen to work most of the time. They know that they have nothing against a Divine Design to, say, strike them with a plague of locusts or some such.

Equally worried are the neighboring school district boards. Since they have not committed the infraction against God yet, they are indignant that they should be spared. So we are guessing that anything as wide-reaching as a hurricane can be ruled out. Because as we all know God, like Don Corleone, loves to play tit for tat. You screw with Him and He screws you back. You play nice and He plays nice with you.

But some relief has come in from a quarter as unlikely as the Vatican itself. Cardinal Paul Poupard who leads the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, like the darned Frenchman that he is, said that the Genesis description of how God created the universe is “perfectly compatible” with Darwin’s theory of evolution. In an ecclesiastical slap on Pat’s wrist, the Cardinal of over twenty years went on to say that "taking something never meant to be a scientific explanation and calling it science" is downright silly. The Pope, who is the official voice of the Big Man in the Sky down here, weighed in on the matter saying that there was “creative reason” behind the natural world and that must be understood as a “creative project” as a matter of faith. U.S. Jesuit Father George Coyne, director of the Vatican Obervatory offers that the Pope was alluding to God as a creator that nurses his creation along, but does not delve into the nitty gritty.

Lemme break this down for ya’ll. In the modern lexicon of business therefore, the Vatican thinks that God is more Intelligent Manager than Intelligent Designer and that the non-imposing business of figuring out how to make things work has been outsourced to Science. Fr. Coyne thinks that calling God a ‘designer’ belittles Him and his awesomeness. To stretch our analogy, it is like saying Michael Dell handles complaints about laptop malfunctions from a phone-line in his garage.

Now we are waiting for Pat Roberston to make ominous noises about how the pillars of St. Peter’s are getting shaky and Rome is along a geological fault line.