A RIFT has opened up within the Catholic church over the compatibility of the theory of evolution with Christian faith.
The Vatican’s chief astronomer, the American Jesuit priest George Coyne, has rebuffed controversial comments made by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn in The New York Times on 7 July that Darwinism is incompatible with a belief in God (New Scientist, 23 July, p 5). “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science,” Schönborn wrote. He also dismissed as “rather vague and unimportant” a 1996 statement by Pope John Paul II that seemed…
