Vatican Trashes 'Intelligent' Design
Wednesday January 25, 2006
Supporters of Intelligent Design like to claim that Darwinian evolution is incompatible with their religious beliefs - by which they mean Western monotheism generally, but especially Christianity. The fact that most Christians accept evolution is ignored; it will be harder to ignore the strongly-worded condemnation of Intelligent Design that was recently issued by the Vatican.
Associated Press reports on an article that appeared in L’Osservatore Romano:
The author, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution “represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth.”
He lamented that certain American “creationists” had brought the debate back to the “dogmatic” 1800s, and said their arguments weren’t science but ideology.
“This isn’t how science is done,” he wrote. “If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it’s not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science.”
Intelligent design “doesn’t belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin’s explanation is unjustified,” he wrote.
“It only creates confusion between the scientific and philosophical and religious planes.”
This isn’t technically an official statement from the Vatican, but an article like this wouldn’t appear in this newspaper without official approval of the sentiments being expressed.
Pay careful attention to the words Facchini uses: he describes the Intelligent Design movement as one being pushed by “creationists,” as “dogmatic,” and as not being genuine science. He makes all the same basic criticisms which scientists in America offer and which Intelligent Design proponents refuse to accept.
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