Vatican says Evolution does not prove the non-existence of God
Vatican says Evolution does not prove the non-existence of God
Evolution and the Biblical account of Genesis are “perfectly compatible” claims the Catholic Church
The Vatican has rejected the claim by Richard Dawkins, the biologist and campaigning atheist, that evolutionary theory proves that God does not exist, proclaiming that on the contrary Darwinian evolution and the account of Creation in Genesis are “perfectly compatible”.
At a five day conference held to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species this week, Vatican theologians said while Christians believed that God “created all things”, the Vatican “does not stand in the way of scientific realities”.
Vatican officials joined biologists, paleontologists, molecular geneticists and philosophers for the conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University, which ends tomorrow. Rafael Martinez, professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Santa Croce Pontifical University in Rome, said although the reaction of Catholic theologians, intellectuals and priests to Darwinian theory had been “generally negative” in the 19th century, “recent declarations by Popes have asserted the full accordance of Catholic doctrine and evolutionary biology”.
He said, however, that this was not widely known, and the false impression had arisen “that the Holy See is opposed to evolution”. Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, which co-organised the conference with Notre Dame University in Indiana and support from the John Templeton Foundation, said there was “no a priori incompatibility between evolution and the message of the Bible”.
He noted that Darwin had never been condemned by the Catholic Church, and that On the Origin of the Species had never been placed on the Index of forbidden books. Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the assertion by Richard Dawkins and others that evolution proves there is no God was “absurd”.
RTWT