Vatican convenes event on Darwin
ROME — The Vatican sought Tuesday to show that it isn’t opposed to science and evolutionary theory, hosting a conference on Charles Darwin and trying to debunk the idea that it embraces creationism or intelligent design.
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.”
Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the Catholic Church doesn’t stand in the way of scientific realities such as evolution, citing a “wide spectrum of room” for belief in both the scientific basis for evolution and faith in God the creator.
“We believe that however creation has come about and evolved, ultimately God is the creator of all things,” he said.
But while the Vatican did not exclude any area of science, he said it did reject as absurd and unproven the atheist notion of biologist and author Richard Dawkins and others that evolution proves there is no God.
The Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI has been trying to stress its belief that faith and reason are not incompatible, and the conference at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University was a key demonstration of its efforts to engage with the scientific community.
Church teaching holds that Catholicism and evolutionary theory are not necessarily at odds.
Pope John Paul II articulated the church’s position most clearly in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, in which he said the theory of evolution was “more than a hypothesis.”
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