Catholic World News : Con­tro­ver­sial Jesuit astronomer replaced at Vat­i­can obser­va­to­ry:

Pope Bene­dict XVI has named a new direc­tor for the Vat­i­can Obser­va­to­ry. Father José Gabriel Funes will suc­ceed a con­tro­ver­sial Amer­i­can, Father George Coyne.

Father Funes, an Argen­tine Jesuit, is already a mem­ber of the Vat­i­can Obser­va­to­ry team. The out­go­ing Father Coyne, also a Jesuit, has been direc­tor of the Obser­va­to­ry for more than 25 years, and now steps down at the age of 73.

Last year Father Coyne drew world­wide atten­tion for his pub­lic com­ments on the top­ics of evo­lu­tion and the the­o­ry of intel­li­gent design. In an August 2005 col­umn for the Lon­don Tablet the Jesuit astronomer crit­i­cizes argu­ments put for­ward by Car­di­nal Christoph Schön­born ques­tion­ing the Dar­win­ian the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion. A few weeks lat­er, speak­ing at a con­fer­ence in Flori­da, Father Coyne said that “intel­li­gent design isn’t sci­ence, even if it pre­tends to be.”

Coyne has been a strong force for san­i­ty in the Church’s rela­tion­ship with sci­ence, a voice which seems increas­ing­ly over­whelmed. As Beliefnet reports:

In ear­ly Sep­tem­ber, Bene­dict will con­duct a week­end sem­i­nar on the impact Dar­win’s the­o­ry has on the church’s teach­ing of Cre­ation. Schon­born, who has described evo­lu­tion as “incom­pat­i­ble” with church teach­ings, will speak at the event, along with evo­lu­tion advo­cate Peter Schus­ter, pres­i­dent of the Aus­tri­an Acad­e­my of Sciences.

Oth­er speak­ers at the event include the Rev. Paul Erbrich, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich, who has described evo­lu­tion as a “fun­da­men­tal­ly inad­e­quate” expla­na­tion of the ori­gins of life; and Robert Spae­mann, a con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man philoso­pher who has chal­lenged “evo­lu­tion­ism,” or the philo­soph­i­cal appli­ca­tions of Dar­win’s theory. 

Not the most bal­anced of line­ups, alas.

There is a still hope though, as the new direc­tor pre­vi­ous­ly said:

“When I teach at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, I tell stu­dents, I am a priest, a Jesuit, but my class is a sci­ence class … and Sci­ence is about nat­ur­al, not super­nat­ur­al causes.”

The Church is ful­ly enti­tled to pro­mote super­nat­ur­al frame­works for under­stand­ing why cer­tain things ought to be as they are, but to claim that sci­ence is wrong because it does­n’t match reli­gious dog­ma is a path that has lead to too much strife and error by reli­gious groups.