FIORENZO FACCHINI, PROFESSOR of evolutionary biology at the University Of Bologna, has kicked up a storm in the Vatican by playing second fiddle to Charles Darwin. Facchini says that intelligent design in the evolutionary context is not science and only creates confusion when taught in classrooms, especially in the US. Facchini is not the first Vatican individual to question the official position of the Church. The Vatican’s chief astronomer, Rev. George Coyne, too, argues that intelligent design is not science and has no place in education.

Whereas Facchini and Coyne are diplomatic in their criticisms, Richard Dawkins, a charismatic crusader for scientific outlook at Oxford University, has savagely taken the religious establishment to task. In his forthcoming book, The God Delusion, Dawkins criticises the concept of religion in the US and states cogently that creationists are pushing the country back “to the dark ages”.

Dawkins, who was selected for the post of Charles Simonyi Professor Of the Public Understanding Of Science, extols the virtues of Darwinism by describing religion as a virus and God as delusion. He adds that believing religion is like “believing in a teapot orbiting Mars” and quotes the philosopher David Hume to back up his arguments. He says, “The relevance of evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.”

Decrying human chauvinism, Dawkins argues, “The most important reason is that if you tell the evolution story forward and end up with humans, as is normally the case because people are interested in themselves, it makes it look as though the whole of evolution was somehow aimed at humanity, which of course it wasn’t. One could aim anywhere, like kangaroos, butterflies or frogs. We’re all contemporary culmination points, for the moment, in evolution.”

Dawkins, however, is ready to make a concession. He points out that genetically manufactured or engineered animals could be the products of intelligently designed evolution caused by humans.

The ongoing debate still holds fascination even 120 years after Darwin’s death. Keeping in mind the rigid criticism of evolutionists by the late Pope John Paul and now Pope Benedict, it remains to be seen if the debate gets as acrimonious as when it first took place when Thomas Henry Huxley, widely known as “Darwin’s bulldog” and Bishop Wilberforce Of Oxford thundered at each other in a lecture at the British Association meeting at the Oxford University Museum one-and-a-half century ago.