I’ve written too much about intelligent design on this blog. That will slow down soon, if only because I don’t feel much like wrestling with a pig. That which is barely worth discussing is almost not worth mocking. Almost.
A friend sent along an AP article about the Roman Catholic position on ID, elucidated in their official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano.
The author, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, laid out the scientific rationale for Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying that in the scientific world, biological evolution “represents the interpretative key of the history of life on Earth.”
[snip]
“This isn’t how science is done,” he wrote. “If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it’s not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science.”Intelligent design “doesn’t belong to science,” he wrote.
“It only creates confusion between the scientific and philosophical and religious planes.”
Don’t have to get much clearer than that. I went to Catholic schools for 12 years, and while I have problems with some church teachings, my education was top notch. And I remember one very, very crazed priest–the kind whose very intensity and mania made you physically afraid to be near him–with a very 17th century mind, who told us impressionable freshmen, flat out, “The Bible is not a book of science, or of history. It is a book of faith.” Then he’d start acting out scenes from British POW movies, doing all the parts himself. His point was clear, and maybe our fear helped us remember it.
My favorite part of the article, though, was this:
The article echoed similar arguments by the Vatican’s chief astronomer, Rev. George Coyne, who said intelligent design isn’t science and has no place in school classrooms.
Who’d’ve thought the Vatican had a chief astronomer? Is that strictly a sinecure, left over from the days of Galileo? Does the Vatican need an astronomer for more practical purposes, say, a space program? Does the Vatican have eyes on space?
A word to the wise: when Mel Brooks filmed “History of the World” and the segment on “Jews in Space”, it was fiction.