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

[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.