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Evolution and faith complementary: Levada

Published: March 04, 2009

Cardinal LevadaCongregation for the Doctrine of the Faith head, Cardinal William Levada, has said that there is a "wide spectrum of room" for belief in both the scientific basis for evolution and faith in God the creator.

Newsday reports that some of the world's top biologists, paleontologists and molecular geneticists joined theologians and philosophers for the five-day seminar marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin's "The Origin of Species."

"We believe that however creation has come about and evolved, ultimately God is the creator of all things," Cardinal Levada said on the sidelines of the conference.


But while the Vatican did not exclude any area of science, it did reject as "absurd" the atheist notion of biologist and author Richard Dawkins and others that evolution proves there is no God, he said.

"Of course we think that's absurd and not at all proven," he said. "But other than that ... the Vatican has recognized that it doesn't stand in the way of scientific realities."

The Vatican under Pope Benedict has been trying to stress its belief that there is no incompatibility between faith and reason, and the conference at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University was a key demonstration of its efforts to engage with the scientific community.

Francisco Ayala, a former priest and professor of biological sciences and philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, told the conference that intelligent design and creationism are "blasphemous" not only to science but to the Christian faith.

"It is not only not compatible with Christian faith, it is just blasphemous because it predicates from the creator attributes that we don't want to have from the creator," he said.

He cited as an example the fact that the human jaw is too small for all its teeth, requiring wisdom teeth to be extracted. "An engineer who designed the human jaw would be fired the next day. Are we going to blame God for that?"

In his remarks, Levada referred to both Dawkins and those Christians who have a "fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible which they want to see taught to their children in the schools alongside evolution or instead of it."

But he declined to pinpoint the Vatican's views on intelligent design, saying merely: "The Vatican listens and learns."

More at Newsday

 

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Recent Comments

  1. Now perhaps, just perhaps, it is time for the Powers that be in the Vatican and the Jesuits to apologize for the way they treated Teilhard de Chardin for so many years -
    Here was a faithful Jesuit and a faithful Catholic in the best sense of the word, who was treated shabbily and excluded from the conversation due to the fears of those in authority.

    Posted By: Charles Bolser, C.S.V.

  2. It gives me great pleasure to read that common sense, good theology and mature science live in at least one religious body.

    You'd have to be a 19th century biblical literalist to believe there is any conflict between faith and facts.

    Eight centuries ago St. Francis of Assisi by his discerning intuition understood that the entire universe is connected. Wolves, birds, sun, stars, planets and all of us are brothers and sisters.

    Science and theology have just filled in the blanks on what he understood by faith. He would have loved the sciences of chemical evolution, cosmology, bioscience, Mendelian and Darwinian theory.

    I agree that backdoor attempts to make bad science respectable -- like creationism and intelligent design -- are disrespectful and ultimately obstructionist.

    Posted By: Ron Bohr

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