Religious Faith and the Debate about Evolution

This is something, I think, that will be of interest to many MOJ readers:

The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 16, 2008

Vatican Sets Conference on Evolution

The Roman Catholic Church has long held that the theory of evolution is compatible with the Bible, a Vatican official said today in announcing a church conference on the topic for next March, the news agency Reuters reported.

The official, Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, who is the Vatican’s culture minister, cited papal statements in 1950 and 1996 acknowledging evolution as a valid scientific approach to the development of human beings, and said that the Catholic Church owed no apology to Darwin. Earlier this week, a leading Anglican churchman, the Rev. Malcolm Brown, said the Church of England did owe Darwin an apology for the way his ideas were received by Anglicans in Britain.

Next year’s gathering of scientists, theologians, and philosophers in Rome is timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Phillip R. Sloan, a professor of philosophy and the history of science at the University of Notre Dame, which is holding the conference with Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, said the meeting would be an important contribution to explaining the Catholic stand on evolution.

“In the United States, and now elsewhere, we have an ongoing public debate over evolution that has social, political, and religious dimensions,” he told Reuters. “Most of this debate has been taking place without a strong Catholic theological presence, and the discussion has suffered accordingly.” —Charles Huckabee