I was a little surprised to see this on Slashdot before seeing it here. The Vatican has issued a statement rejecting the whole Intelligent Design "theory".
You can read the whole story here.
Here's a quote I found particularly compelling:
"The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim," he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that "the universe didn't make itself and had a creator".
This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to "understand things better".
I'm a Catholic, but I also strongly believe in the scientific method. My Catholic study bible actually spells out in the notes about the book of Genesis that the story of creation was not meant to be taken literally and that it in fact derived from multiple creation stories. I've had my differences with the Church on other issues, but I respect their informed understanding of the Bible and the fact while it is divinely inspired, its human authors have always been a limiting factor in passing on God's message to us.
I've never understood why evangelicals inist on a literal reading of the Book of Genesis (or any of the other books, for that matter). To me, the possibility that God created the universe in such a way that intelligent beings evolved after billions of years to be able to wonder at the beauty of Creation (and investigate it) is more awe striking than the thought of everything being magically created from nothing in exactly 144 hours.
What do you guys think?