Seeking Papal support

Christian Century, Sept 20, 2005

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Caption: SEEKING PAPAL SUPPORT: Physics professor Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, shown next to a 3.2-million-year-old humanoid skeleton, wrote to Pope Benedict XVI in July asking that the Catholic Church not "build a new divide, long ago eradicated, between the scientific method and religious belief" and asking the pope to clarify the church's position on evolution. Cosigning the letter with Krauss, a popular science author, were two Catholic biologists, Kenneth Miller of Brown University and Francisco Ayala of the University of California-Irvine. They are among scientists worried about a revised Catholic stance on evolution as expressed by Vienna cardinal Christoph Schonborn in the July 7 New York Times. Schonborn wrote: "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense--an unguided, unplanned process ... is not."