Another Blow for Intelligent Design

This time from the Vatican:

The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as “correct” the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.

“If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another,” Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L’Osservatore Romano.

“But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science,” he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. “It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious.”

The article was not presented as an official church position. But in the subtle and purposely ambiguous world of the Vatican, the comments seemed notable, given their strength on a delicate question much debated under the new pope, Benedict XVI.

Advocates for teaching evolution hailed the article. “He is emphasizing that there is no need to see a contradiction between Catholic teachings and evolution,” said Dr. Francisco J. Ayala, professor of biology at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Dominican priest. “Good for him.”

While ID and its silly proponents are being smacked down everywhere, the fact that a few flat-earthers and a bunch of propagandists at the Discovery Institute were able to waste so much of our damned time on this crap is still, to me, appalling.

*** Update ***

Several of you have emailed that the Catholic church has always been ‘comfortable,’ if you will, with evolution. I do not disagree, but with the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI, there were some rumblings that this might change:

The cardinal, Christoph Schnborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, “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.”

In a telephone interview from a monastery in Austria, where he was on retreat, the cardinal said that his essay had not been approved by the Vatican, but that two or three weeks before Pope Benedict XVI’s election in April, he spoke with the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, about the church’s position on evolution. “I said I would like to have a more explicit statement about that, and he encouraged me to go on,” said Cardinal Schnborn.

He said that he had been “angry” for years about writers and theologians, many Catholics, who he said had “misrepresented” the church’s position as endorsing the idea of evolution as a random process.

***

One of the strongest advocates of teaching alternatives to evolution is the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which promotes the idea, termed intelligent design, that the variety and complexity of life on earth cannot be explained except through the intervention of a designer of some sort.

Mark Ryland, a vice president of the institute, said in an interview that he had urged the cardinal to write the essay. Both Mr. Ryland and Cardinal Schnborn said that an essay in May in The Times about the compatibility of religion and evolutionary theory by Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, suggested to them that it was time to clarify the church’s position on evolution.

The cardinal’s essay, a direct response to Dr. Krauss’s article, was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute.

That is why I found the statement today encouraging- because of the previous successes of the wingnut Discovery Institute in mainstreaming their BS.