Darwin’s bicentennial: The Vatican asks about “smart design”

The Vatican will question the controversial theory of “intelligent design” that claims to scientifically prove divine intervention in the evolution of species, during a conference it is organizing in March on Darwin’s bicentennial.

The symposium’s organizers explained at a press conference on Tuesday that this symposium will bring together scholars and religious scholars from March 3-7 in Rome on a “critical approach” to Charles Darwin’s legacy.

The “Minister of Culture” of the Vatican, Bishop Gianfranco Ravassi, considered that “the demand for dialogue between science and faith is increasingly important, because neither of them can exhaust the complexity of the mystery of“ man ”.

However, Bishop Ravasi refused to comment on the “intelligent design” theory, which is popular in some Christian circles because it has the advantage of not rejecting scientific discoveries about natural evolution as does creationism.

He allowed the Italian theologian Giuseppe Tansela Neti to speak, who spoke “in his own name” criticized “this theory which seeks to infer from empirical observation the existence of an innovative force that would direct evolution.”

The theologian noted that “there is confusion between two levels, the scientific and the religious.

For the Catholic Church, “Evolution is fundamentally the way in which God creates”, but one cannot infer this conviction from a purely empirical observation, “just as one cannot extrapolate a divine plan to fall. Of a flower on the head of a passerby. He explained.

He emphasized that the Church is convinced that “none of the mechanisms of evolution are against asserting that God wanted and created mankind” and that man is “the crown of creation.”

The symposium is organized by the Pontifical Gregorian University as this year the global scientific community celebrates the bicentenary of Darwin, the founder of modern biology.