GERMANY:Pope Benedict has rejected speculation that he could be moving in favour of the controversial "intelligent design" theory of life over Darwin's theory of evolution, saying that researching the origins of life is an interplay between faith and science.
However in a new book, Schöpfung und Evolution (Creation and Evolution), published yesterday, the German pontiff had critical words for evolutionary theory, calling it "not a complete, scientifically verified theory".
"Evolution theory is in large part not experimentally verifiable because we cannot bring 10,000 generations into a laboratory. That means there are considerable gaps in experimental verification . . . as a result of the incredible timeframe which the theory addresses," he said in the book, based on a symposium with former doctoral students in 2006.
Church watchers had speculated that the conservative pontiff might have friendly words for intelligent design and its claim that many life forms have elements too complex to be explained by the random process of evolution, proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, and must instead have a creator.
A former student of the pope, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, wrote in the New York Times in 2005: "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not."
This appeared to align the influential cardinal with a theory that has widespread acceptance among fundamentalist Christians in the US. However the pope did not appear to go as far as Cardinal Schönborn, saying that sciences had opened up "large dimensions of reason" previously unconsidered and undiscovered.
"But the joy of the discovery tends to take away the dimensions of reason we still need. Its results lead to questions that go beyond the methodological canon and cannot be answered within it."
He said the evolution debate was about "reclaiming a dimension of reason we have lost" and "the great fundamental questions of philosophy - where man and the world came from and where they are going."
The pontiff said he dismissed the idea of "nature" or "evolution" as an active subject in itself. He said that evolutionary progression, which could be interpreted as a rational development, suggested a pre-evolutionary "creative rationality" or God.
"Evolutionary theory implies questions that have to be addressed by philosophy which go beyond the realm of natural sciences," he said.
Among Prof Ratzinger's former doctoral students at the discussion was Fr Vincent Twomey, professor emeritus of theology at St Patrick's College, Maynooth. Fr Twomey said the discussion was lively, but that no one mentioned "intelligent design".
"Unlike the fundamentalist Protestant churches in America, the Catholic church does not have a serious problem with the scientific theory of evolution," he said. "These are American problems we don't even enter into."