c. 2005 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Ever since the Roman inquisition condemned Galileo for observing that the Earth revolved around the sun, the Vatican has held back from making sweeping challenges to scientific thought for fear of overstepping its bounds.

So it’s understandable that Pope Benedict XVI raised eyebrows when he recently described the universe as an “intelligent project that is the cosmos.” Not only did he echo the language of the intelligent design movement, he also waded into a controversy that has blurred the boundaries between faith and science in the United States and beyond.

The debate echoing through Vatican corridors these days, however, is whether the pope has given the Catholic Church’s tacit support to intelligent design advocates and their ongoing campaign to debunk Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“These allusions are fine, but I hope the pope doesn’t take a stand,” the Rev. George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory, said in an interview.

Coyne, an astronomer and outspoken critic of intelligent design, said that Benedict “doesn’t have the slightest idea of what intelligent design means in the U.S.”

“Intelligent design in America is not science. It’s a religious movement,” he said.

But it is unclear if the Vatican’s theological ranks share Coyne’s criticisms.

In staunchly defending the scientific merits of evolution, Coyne has frequently crossed swords with Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, a former protege of Benedict and a prominent member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Schonborn has widely indicated he agrees with the intelligent design argument that life is too complex to have merely evolved through natural selection.

In a interview with Reuters published Sunday (Nov. 20), Schonborn said state schools in Austria should permit science classes to mention the “intelligent project that is the cosmos,” echoing Benedict’s remarks.

“What I would like to see in schools is a critical and open spirit, in a positive sense, so we don’t make a dogma out of the theory of evolution but we say it is a theory that has a lot going for it but has no answers for some questions,” Schonborn was quoted as saying.

Schonborn, who sits on the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education, has said there are no plans to issue guidelines adding intelligent design to the curriculum at Catholic schools and universities.

But the cardinal has played a crucial role in introducing the intelligent design debate into Vatican discourse.

Last July, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think tank, helped Schonborn place an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times that rebuffed as “rather vague and unimportant” remarks by John Paul II in 1996 that called evolution “more than a hypothesis.”

The article also underscored the presence of “purpose and design in the natural world” and stated that Catholic teaching was “incompatible” with evolution “in the neo-Darwinian sense: an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.”

Schonborn’s attack on “unguided” evolution appeared to resonate in Benedict’s remarks on creation, which came in early November, one day after the Kansas Board of Education voted to adopt new standards that cast doubt on evolution.

“How many people are there today who, fooled by atheism, think and try and demonstrate that it would be scientific to think that everything is without direction and order?” Benedict said.

According to Coyne, these remarks do not indicate that Benedict believes in a designer God that is constantly “tinkering with the universe.”

“He doesn’t explain much of the science, but his reflections make it clear that he understands the universe is by its fundamental nature evolutionary,” Coyne said.

Coyne and other prominent Catholic scientists, including Nicola Cabibbo, president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, have dismissed Schonborn’s criticism of “unguided” evolution as simply misguided.

They note that evolution is still compatible with religious conviction even though it functions according to laws that are random and directionless.

As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger approved the 2004 document “Communion and Stewardship,” which argues that “true contingency,” or unpredictable events subject to chance, “is not incompatible with a purposeful divine providence.”

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The paper also noted that the debate between evolution and intelligent design “cannot be settled by theology.”

Schonborn has gone to great lengths to explain that his criticism of “neo-Darwinism” is not a challenge to science itself but an expression of deep concern felt by him and the pope over the spread of materialism, which claims that no reality exists beyond matter.

According to the Vatican, such views exceed the competence of scientific thought.

In early November, Schonborn’s archdiocese released remarks from a lecture he delivered in October at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, announcing plans to make “creation and evolution” the theme of his upcoming catechetical talks.

Citing persistent “border violations” between the worlds of science and faith, Schonborn quoted Sir Julian Huxley who in 1959 wrote that “the evolutionary pattern of thought” leaves no “need or room for the supernatural.”

“I am convinced that this is not a claim within the realm of the natural sciences, but rather the expression of a worldview,” Schonborn concluded.

Mending relations between science and religion was the focus of a recent international conference held at the Vatican. Speaking to reporters, Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, found himself inundated by questions related to intelligent design.

“The faithful have the obligation to listen to that which secular modern science has to offer just as we ask that knowledge of the faith be taken in consideration as an expert voice,” Poupard said

MO/PH END RNS