Via Slashdot, comes this article from The Age in Australia that gives the Catholic response to the “intelligent design” theory favored by many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians.
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.
(….)
“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”.
In other words, there is not an inherent incompatibility between being a believing Christian and accepting the modern scientific world and the conclusions it has quite emphatically made about the evolution of humans from lower life forms.
Stephen Bainbridge recently posted on this issue twice a few weeks back (links here and here) and provided a link to this article by Physicist Stephen Barr about the Catholic view of the ID vs. evolution controversy as well as this post by Mark Kleiman recounting a talk by Domincan priest Francisco Ayala.
This is not entirely surprising, nor is it a radical development for Catholic theology. The Church has never been an adherent of the “literal truth of the Bible” philosophy that is prevalent in some Protestent sects. This is as true of the Book of Genesis as it is of the Book of Revelation, in both cases the Catholic Church rejects the fundamentalist interpretation of scripture for something that is, for lack of a better word, more nuanced.
Whether this will have any influence on the ID debate here in the United States remains to be seen. However, as a Catholic, I am happy to see my Church not following the evangelicals into the fantasy land of Intelligent Design.
Linked with Basil’s Blog and Outside The Beltway
