While the statement doesn’t come directly from the Pope, the official Vatican newspaper this week denounced “intelligent design” as unscientific, proving that not all religious believers are complete ninnies.
Intelligent design (ID) is the model favored primarily by U.S. Christians of a more conservative stripe over the predominant theories of evolution and the Big Bang. Proponents of ID hold that living organisms and the universe in general are too complex to have developed by mere chance. Rather, they insist that a designer of some sort arranged the universe to favor such complexity.
“If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another,” Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, writes in L’Osservatore Romano.
“But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science,” he continues. “It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious.”
Or in other words, if you do not like or accept a scientific theory, don’t go around inventing new explanations from whole cloth, and calling them “scientific” when there is no scientific evidence to support them.
ID proponents clearly base their arguments from their faith in a divine Creator. Since they already presume there is a Creator, their insistence that the complexity of the universe supports the concept of a Creator is a circular argument. In addition, no one, including Catholics, has ever been able to find scientific evidence for a Creator. That’s a matter of faith.