Schönborn again

[mmcirvin]

Orac has another take on Cardinal Schönborn's evolution op-ed: he thinks that this is an attempt to sway church policy on the part of one or a few Intelligent Design-movement-influenced cardinals, but one that he doubts will succeed in, say, getting ID taught in Catholic schools, which have typically done better at teaching evolution in biology classes than American public schools do. I do hope he's right.

(I say "typically": I vaguely recall a former student of one Ontario Catholic school telling me that, a few decades ago when he was there, the nuns there never got the memo about faith being compatible with Darwin.)

Comments

[pantom.livejournal.com]

This is a ridiculously stupid tempest in a teapot.
The Catholic Church is, not to belabor the obvious, a church. To say that they believe in Intelligent Design is like saying that Einstein believes in relativity or something. This Cardinal may have gone a bit overboard in his enthusiasm, but obviously the Church figures that a faithful Catholic will take away from evolution the idea that humans are the pinnacle of evolution, ergo that the whole point of the process was to make humans, ie, Intelligent Design.
This is as far as you're going to get any church to go, ever. Trying to get the faithful to go farther is idiotic, ignorant, and counterproductive. I'm still trying to figure out why this is controversial, and I still haven't been able to come up with an answer.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It's because Schönborn used specific language suggesting (and this later turned out to be the case) that he was not just talking about theology, but had been influenced by a pseudoscientific pressure group (the Discovery Institute of Seattle) seeking the teaching of miraculously guided evolution as science in science classes. The church runs schools that have science classes, which currently often do a pretty good job of teaching science. So, in the wake of the election of a new pope known to be even more culturally conservative than the previous one, people are trying to figure out whether or not this policy is going to change. From my point of view, that's the key question.

Of course the church has the right to teach any damn thing it believes, and my arguing with them on points of theology is like adherents of Euclid and Lobachevsky arguing whose postulates are better, a pretty pointless activity. But their educational system has some reputation for quality beyond the church, and if that's going to change it would be interesting to know it. I suspect and hope that Orac's right and this is not going to happen.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, I think you might be slipping into the semantic trap that I mentioned in an earlier post. The question is not whether the church believes in intelligent design; of course they do. The question is whether the church is embracing Intelligent Design with a capital I and D, the specific bit of pseudoscientific tosh advocated by William Dembski and Michael Behe, which is something else again. Lots of people and churches believe in an intelligent designer but do not accept this stuff about how eyes and flagella could not have evolved naturally because of their Specified Complexity, etc.

[pantom.livejournal.com]

Ah, some Catholic conservatives will follow him, which isn't exactly surprising. It's a big institution, and there are going to be some reactionaries in there. The Kansas BOE is a bigger threat, and the danger here is in alienating an institution that up until now has had no problem with all this by overreacting to this Cardinal.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

There's an odd little related thread at NPR on Morning Edition. It started last Friday with a story about how how scientists don't like to debate creationists/IDers (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4734942). There's a little followup, in this morning's letters (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4753595).

They covered Schonborn Tuesday here (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4749724) on NPR's west-coast show Day to Day, the midday show that can't easily be distinguished from Slate Magazine because of all the material they trade. But this one is an interview with a Georgetown theology prof, not a navelgazing thumbsucker.

[Links don't go direct to audio]