Shaoni Bhattacharya, "Creationism rift opens within The Vatican" (2005)

A deep rift has opened within the Catholic church over the theory of evolution and its compatibility with the Christian faith.

The Vatican’s chief astronomer, George Coyne, has rebuffed controversial comments made by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn in The New York Times on 7 July that evolution is incompatible with a belief in God.

“The waters have again been darkened” writes Coyne in the latest issue of the UK Catholic weekly, The Tablet. His article follows another flare-up in the debate, when US president George W Bush commented on Monday that schools should teach children about “intelligent design”. Proponents of this idea believe that science can be used to find evidence of a creator’s design in nature.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

In his article, Schönborn dismissed as “rather vague and unimportant” a statement made by Pope John Paul II in 1996 which seemed to indicate the church’s acceptance of evolution. “Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science,” Schönborn wrote.

But Coyne, a Jesuit priest from the US, slammed these comments. He writes that the “nagging fear” that a universe explained by scientific concepts “escapes God’s dominion” is “groundless”.

He calls for an extensive dialogue. “But we should not close off the dialogue and darken the already murky waters by fearing that God will be abandoned if we embrace the best of modern science,” he urges.

Read more on evolution in New Scientist's Special Report.