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*spaf*
"Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." (viaToday must be Opposite Day, or something. I just can't make my brain bend that way.tnr_feed)
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It's got more of a ring to it.
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But he used a monkey to do it!
(Sorry, it seemed like a nice time for a Devo quote.)
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If Benedict and Schönborn now believe that it's the Catholic Church's job to repudiate modern science overtly, and the Catholic schools that currently teach natural selection are going to stop doing it, well, I guess the fight is on again, then. One thing I believe is that it's almost impossible to kill science; swim against it and you mostly end up hurting yourself by promoting your own ignorance.
I do think it's interesting that he sticks to papal statements and doesn't start quoting Michael Behe. As a non-Catholic I can't really argue with statements about what the Pope thinks, I can just declare them irrelevant.
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So most theologians who are not stupid tend to reject that idea, and see God's hand in the workings of the world-as-it-is, natural forces or no. I don't believe this, but I have no big problems with other people believing it, though that itself raises hard questions about divine justice and benevolence.
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I think that a minimum of thought can lead a theist to see that science lets us know how God created us. To get as close as possible to his methods should bring more glory to God. Or maybe i'm just a deist sympathizer.
Divine justice, benevolence... ha. Just ha.
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ID in biology, the notion that there had to be miraculous interventions in evolution, is pretty much 100% crackpot. The anthropic principle (that the parameters of our universe were somehow determined by the need to produce intelligent life, either by divine design, or just because there are lots of universes and this is ours, or for some other reason) is taken seriously by many legit cosmologists but it is highly controversial, far from a consensus view. Nobody disputes that if the physical constants were very slightly different (with fantastically low tolerance), people like us couldn't have come about. But nobody really knows what kinds of intelligence might be able to thrive in all those bizarre kinds of universe with different physical constants and, say, no stars or planets, though people often pretend to know that none can.
Saying that the universe must have been designed because it's so finely tuned to produce the kind of beings we are is just circular reasoning; one needs a proof that there's something inherently special about the kind of beings we are over all the possible kinds of things that could exist in possible worlds. If you're Catholic, you've got something that more or less says that in the Bible, but it's not scientific evidence.
Finally, the various concepts of multiple universes in physics were certainly not invented by spiteful atheists simply as a way of weaseling out of accepting overwhelming scientific evidence for God. They're sometimes invoked as a way of explaining the anthropic principle, but that assumes that you accept the anthropic principle in the first place. If anything, their first legitimate insertion into physics was as a possible way of making sense of quantum mechanics—though I suppose that if you are an archbishop on a fishing expedition for spiteful atheist notions in physics, you could say that that itself was intended to deny a direct physical role for the soul in collapsing wave functions.
Next week...
"We're falling off the edge of the world"
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apropos this discussion,