Cardinal says atheist's theories 'absurd'

ROME — The Vatican sought Tuesday to show that it isn't opposed to science and evolutionary theory, hosting a conference on Charles Darwin and trying to debunk the idea that it embraces creationism or intelligent design.

Some of the world's top biologists, paleontologists and molecular geneticists joined theologians and philosophers for the five-day seminar marking the 150th anniversary of Darwin's "The Origin of Species."

Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the Catholic Church doesn't stand in the way of scientific realities like evolution, saying there was a "wide spectrum of room" for belief in both the scientific basis for evolution and faith in God the creator.

"We believe that however creation has come about and evolved, ultimately God is the creator of all things," he said on the sidelines of the conference.

But while the Vatican did not exclude any area of science, it did reject as "absurd" the atheist notion of biologist and author Richard Dawkins and others that evolution proves there is no God, he said.

"Of course we think that's absurd and not at all proven," he said. "But other than that ... the Vatican has recognized that it doesn't stand in the way of scientific realities."

The Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI has been trying to stress its belief that there is no incompatibility between faith and reason, and the conference at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University was a key demonstration of its efforts to engage with the scientific community.

"The false contraposition between Darwinism and the Church," is how the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, headlined its story on the conference.

Church teaching holds that Catholicism and evolutionary theory are not necessarily at odds.

Pope John Paul II articulated the church's position most clearly in a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy for Sciences, in which he said the theory of evolution was "more than a hypothesis."

He noted the results of several independent discoveries across several disciplines, saying that convergence alone "constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory."

But the Vatican's position became somewhat confused in recent years, in part because of a 2005 New York Times op-ed piece signed by a close Benedict collaborator, Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn.