Do go check out The Word from Rome for snippets of various interviews related to the evolution flap

I also had the chance to speak with Jesuit Fr. George Coyne, an American astrophysicist who has served as director of the Vatican observatory since 1978. It’s one of the oldest observatories in the world, whose roots in some sense go back to astronomical observations commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII as part of his reform of the calendar in 1582.

I reached Coyne in Tucson, Arizona, where he spends part of each year.

Coyne said he was disappointed in the way Schönborn dealt with a 1996 message of Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, in which the pope referred to evolution as "more than a hypothesis." In his New York Times piece, Schönborn called this text "rather vague and unimportant."

Coyne said the pope’s 1996 message was carefully considered.

"The academy had brought together the world’s best researchers to study the origins and early development of life, along with some philosophers and theologians," Coyne said. "Moreover, the circumstances were dramatic. Just a week before, an announcement had been made of the discovery of possible bacterial life on Mars. That turned out to be wrong, but it created an atmosphere of great interest."

In that context, Coyne believes, what John Paul II said in 1996 "is very important."

Coyne said he’s never understood why some people associate evolution with atheism.

"Why God cannot work with purpose through an evolutionary process that has stochastic features, I don’t know," he said, invoking a term from mathematics that essentially means "random."

"Chance is the way we scientists see the universe," Coyne said. "It has nothing to do with God. It’s not chancy to God, it’s chancy to us."

Coyne said phrasing the debate over evolution as a contest between necessity and chance is misleading.

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