The headline of this article declares that "The Pope Slams Evolution", but this is not quite accurate. What the Pope seems to be slamming is the idea that the universe and life can be explained in purely naturalistic terms without any reference to God. The headline might more accurately have read, "The Pope Slams Darwinism" because Darwinism holds evolution to be a purely mechanistic process with no explanatory need for any intelligent input from any non-physical source.
Pope Benedict XVI on Monday issued his strongest criticism yet of evolutionary theory, calling it "unreasonable".
Speaking to a 300,000-strong crowd in this German city, the former theological watchdog said that, according to such theories derived from Charles Darwin's work, the universe is "the random result of evolution and therefore, at bottom, something unreasonable".
The homily appeared to throw the Catholic Church's full weight behind the theory of intelligent design (ID) - a subject of massive controversy in the United States. The Catholic Church has for over 50 years accepted Darwin's theory of random selection as the most probable cause of development, but has alway stressed God's role.
Recently, however, top theologians have clashed with Catholic scientists over so-called 'evolutionism' - that is, attempts to make evolution explain everything. Vatican theologian Christoph Schoenborn made headlines with a New York Times article a year ago which endorsed the ID theory that has roiled US academic debate and appeared to back full-fledged Creationism, the core Bible story....
Schoenborn [clarified] his position, saying that evolution as a body of scientific fact was compatible with Catholicism, but that evolution as an ideological dogma that denied design and purpose in Nature was not.
[The Pope] told his young audience in St Peter's that "science supports a reliable, intelligent structure of matter, the design of Creation".
"Accounts about Man don't add up without God, just as accounts about the world, the vast universe, do not add up without Him".
Evolutionary theories, he said, posit that "the Irrational, without reason, strangely produces a cosmos controlled by mathematical rules, and even man and his (powers of) reason".
There's more to the article, including, unfortunately, some irritating misunderstandings about the theory of intelligent design. For instance, in one of the above paragraphs the writer says that:
Vatican theologian Christoph Schoenborn made headlines with a New York Times article a year ago which endorsed the ID theory that has roiled US academic debate and appeared to back full-fledged Creationism, the core Bible story.
This is misleading. It gives the impression that Intelligent Design is Creationism, but this is simply not correct. Creationism is a theory of origins based on the Genesis account in the Bible. ID is a theory based upon the empirical evidence for design that we see in biology and cosmology. Creationism uses the raw material of science to make a number of theological claims, and it rests on theological assumptions about the existence of God and the literal truth of Genesis. ID, as a theory, makes no theological claims and rests on no theological assumptions.
The article also errs at the end where it states that:
Supporters of ID hold that some features of the universe and living things are so complex they must have been designed by a higher intelligence.
This is not exactly true. No IDer thinks that complexity alone implies a creative intelligence. What they do assert is that there is both irreducible complexity and specified complexity (information) in the biosphere and that it is these kinds of complexity which point to an intelligent provenience. Not all examples of complex systems display the properties of irreducibility and specificity, but those which do, if in fact they do, cannot be explained in terms of any purely physical, non-sentient mechanisms that we know of. In other words, complexity that is irreducible and/or specified (i.e. it constitutes information - like DNA does) strongly suggests an intelligent origin and cause.
The big question that both critics and advocates of ID are wrestling with is whether there really are unquestionable, indubitable instances of irreducible complexity in the world and whether it's true that those obvious examples of specified complexity, like the genetic code, really cannot be plausibly be explained apart from intelligence.
