c. 2006 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ The Vatican has moved to clarify its position in the intelligent design debate, publishing an article in its official newspaper that dismisses the theory on scientific grounds and embraces a recent court ruling in Pennsylvania keeping the theory out of classrooms.

After months of mixed messages from Pope Benedict XVI and his aides, the Vatican directly addressed the issue in the Tuesday (Jan. 17) edition of L’Osservatore Romano by reaffirming Catholic support for the science behind Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

In an editorial by Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, Italy, the newspaper said proponents of intelligent design improperly blurred the lines between science and faith to make their case that certain forms of biological life are too complex to have evolved through Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“If the model proposed by Darwin is held to be inadequate, one should look for another model. But it is not correct methodology to stray from the field of science pretending to do science,” Facchini wrote.

Views expressed in L’Osservatore do not affect church doctrine, but the newspaper is thought to reflect Vatican thinking because its content is published with official approval.

Intelligent design is a theory that says observation of life forms reveals they are so complex they could only be the product of a designer. Noting that the debate over intelligent design’s merits has recently spread beyond the United States to Europe, Facchini said the theory’s reliance on a “superior cause,” or designer, ultimately undermined its validity as sound science.

He also lauded a recent ruling by a federal judge in Pennsylvania that kept intelligent design from being taught as science in public schools. That ruling is not binding beyond Pennsylvania, but it is expected to have a ripple effect, perhaps influencing school boards across the country considering intelligent design as a theory that should be taught.

“Intelligent design does not belong to science and there is no justification for the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside the Darwinian explanation,” wrote Judge John Jones, a Republican appointee.

Pope Benedict XVI has at times appeared to favor intelligent design, describing the natural world as an “intelligent project” one day after the Kansas Board of Education voted in November to adopt new standards that cast doubt on evolution. His ambivalence has opened a rift between some conservative prelates and members of the Vatican’s scientific community.

The Rev. George Coyne, an astronomer who heads the Vatican Observatory, has emerged as a vocal opponent of intelligent design, describing support for the theory as a “religious movement” rather than science.

In voicing his criticism, however, Coyne has clashed with Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, a former student and close adviser of Benedict, whose support of intelligent design has been instrumental in introducing the theory into Catholic discourse.

Proponents of intelligent design helped Schonborn place a high-profile 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.”

Schonborn’s 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.”

Lawrence Krause, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western University in Cleveland wrote the pope seeking clarification after Schonborn’s article appeared. He said the Osservatore editorial was “definitely positive progress” and expressed hope that the pope would add his voice to the newspaper’s critique.

“At the proper venue he could come out and hopefully make a statement that could clarify things, so that we don’t have to read between the lines,” Krause said.

Schonborn has made several attempts to clarify his own position amid a torrent of criticism that resulted from his article in The New York Times, arguing that Darwin’s theory has been used to mount ideologically driven attacks aimed at disproving the existence of a creator-God.

Facchini’s article in Rome appeared to assuage those concerns, explaining that “science as such, with its methods, can neither demonstrate nor exclude that a superior design has been carried out.”

MO/JL END RNS