»Evolution in the Bible, says Vatican«

The Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution were "perfectly compatible" if the Bible were read correctly.

His statement was a clear attack on creationist campaigners in the US, who see evolution and the Genesis account as mutually exclusive.

"The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator".

This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to "understand things better".

A deep rift has opened within the Catholic church over the theory of evolution and its compatibility with the Christian faith.

The Vatican’s chief astronomer, George Coyne, has rebuffed controversial comments made by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn in The New York Times on 7 July that evolution is incompatible with a belief in God.

“The waters have again been darkened” writes Coyne in the latest issue of the UK Catholic weekly, The Tablet. His article follows another flare-up in the debate, when US president George W Bush commented on Monday that schools should teach children about “intelligent design”. Proponents of this idea believe that science can be used to find evidence of a creator’s design in nature.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

In his article, Schönborn dismissed as “rather vague and unimportant” a statement made by Pope John Paul II in 1996 which seemed to indicate the church’s acceptance of evolution. “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science,” Schönborn wrote.

But Coyne, a Jesuit priest from the US, slammed these comments. He writes that the “nagging fear” that a universe explained by scientific concepts “escapes God’s dominion” is “groundless”.

He calls for an extensive dialogue. “But we should not close off the dialogue and darken the already murky waters by fearing that God will be abandoned if we embrace the best of modern science,” he urges.

A deep rift has opened within the Catholic church over the theory of evolution and its compatibility with the Christian faith.

The Vatican’s chief astronomer, George Coyne, has rebuffed controversial comments made by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn in The New York Times on 7 July that evolution is incompatible with a belief in God.

The teaching authority of the church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter– for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. [emphasis added]

Public perceptions of science and the questions that scientists are willing to ask are strongly influenced by religion. Crick has discussed the relationship between science and religion in his earlier book What Mad Pursuit. Crick's view of this relationship is that religions can be wrong about scientific matters, and that part of what science does is to confront the errors that exist within religious traditions. For example, the idea of a mechanism for the evolution of life by natural selection conflicts with some views on creation of life by divine intervention. Crick's subtitle for The Astonishing Hypothesis is The Scientific Search For The Soul . Crick argues that traditional conceptualizations of the soul as a non-material being must be replaced by a materialistic understanding of how the brain produces mind. The publicity generated by opposition to scientific ideas such as natural selection or the scientific study of the soul brings such topics into more widespread debate.