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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.

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.

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Poupard and others at the news conference were asked about the religion-science debate raging in the United States over evolution and "intelligent design."

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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." in Wired

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Bachelier (1870-1946 right) was the first one to study the Brownian motion in his PhD thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris and applied it as a possible model for the stock market. He was well ahead of his time not only for its application to the stock market, but also because he derived a lot of the properties of this stochastic process. Unfortunately his notation was a little bit sloppy. In particular, the dependence of a2 with N and T in the limit N → ∞ was omitted in most of his books and papers but always assumed by Bachelier. This "minor" omission and a careless reading of Bachelier's work was the origin of Paul Lévy's strong criticism to his work. It was so strong, that Levy wrote a very critical and negative report about Bachelier's work when the latter was trying to get an appointment at Dijon. Bachelier of course didn't get the position and moved then to a small university at Besançon and kept on working without much impact in the field.

It was after Kolmogorov's 1931 citation of Bachelier work that Lévy went back to his work and realized that he made a misjudgment of Bachelier's work. Apparently Levy didn't even read Bachelier's papers and books in the very first place and, even so, he disregarded Bachelier's findings as erroneous. Quite a strange behavior for one of the best mathematicians of all times. After that, in 1931, Lévy wrote to Bachelier a letter apologizing for his behavior. It was a little bit late since Bachelier retired in 1937 although Bachelier was quite happy to receive Lévy's letter. At last his work was read by someone, and by the best! in Esteban Moro's weblog

More information
Biography of Bachelier
Bachelier and his times: A conversation with Bernard Bru, an article by M.S. Taqqu, published in Mathematical Finance - Bachelier Congress 2000