More from the Vatican conference

It seems like the take home message from the conference in the Vatican that I wrote about yesterday is that evolution does not prove there is no God:

The Vatican has rejected the claim by Richard Dawkins, the biologist and campaigning atheist, that evolutionary theory proves that God does not exist, proclaiming that on the contrary Darwinian evolution and the account of Creation in Genesis are "perfectly compatible".

Why, pray tell, didn't the Catholic Church proclaim years before Darwin that Genesis 1 is not to be read literally? Since the Pope is God's hand on Earth, why didn't the theory of evolution come from the Vatican many, many years before Darwin?

Obviously evolutionary theory does not prove the non-existence of God. What it does prove is that a literal reading of the Bible is not merely an exercise in reconciling inconsistencies (e.g. Jesus' genealogies: Matthew 1:2-16 vs. Luke 3:23-38), but also utterly at odds with science. That the Catholic Church is willing to preserve what they have by not flat out denying evolution is the most sensible thing to do, if not even commendable. But, as people have asked before me, how is that they know which parts to take literally and which to read as allegory? And, again, why do they wait for science to tell them, and not the other way around?