Focused Link: Finding Design in Nature

Here's an article by Cardinal Christoph Schonborn on the idea of human evolution and why the Church will never accept that idea that evolution is an unplanned and unguided process of random variation. Quite interesting since this article didn't have the approval from Vatican, but Cardinal Schonborn was encouraged later on by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (before his election as Benedict XVI) to continue with this thesis. Before becoming Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger was the Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.

http://catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0060.html

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The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense — an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection — is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.