Evolution Is More Than a Theory, Pope Tells Scientists

Pope John Paul II, who four years ago acknowledged that the 17th century scientist Galileo was right in saying the Earth orbits the sun, said this week that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is “more than a hypothesis.”

While endorsing evolution at a meeting in Rome of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the pope said believers must continue to acknowledge God as the creator of all things, and to understand that humans have a soul in addition to a physical side.

The pope’s brief words are likely to trouble fundamentalist Christians, who believe in the literal truth of the Genesis creation story--that God created the Earth in seven 24-hour days and that humans were created independently of other creatures.

But John Paul’s statement was not viewed with surprise in many Catholic circles, coming as it does from a pope with a long interest in the sciences.

“This was the pope that rehabilitated Galileo. Now he’s rehabilitating Darwin,” said Father Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow at Washington’s Woodstock Theological Center.

“We don’t see him taking this occasion to break some new ground,” said William Ryan, a spokesman for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In 1950, Pope Pius XII said Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine was “a serious hypothesis.” On Wednesday, John Paul told the academy that new knowledge has confirmed that evolution is more than that. He did not specify the new knowledge.

In 1992, John Paul said the church was wrong when it condemned Galileo in 1633 for saying that the Earth was not at the center of the universe.

The pope’s statement comes as some in the religious right in the United States have been attempting to force public schools to teach creationism as well as evolution, which they belittle as “just a theory.”

The issue was made famous in 1925 by the so-called Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee. That year, the Tennessee Legislature passed a law making it illegal to teach “any theory which denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man is descended from a lower order of animals.”

Scopes, a young biology teacher, defied the law and was put on trial. He was convicted and fined $100. The conviction was later reversed.