The Catholic Church and ID Theory

A fascinating debate is taking place within the Catholic hierarchy. On one side is the Austrian born Cardinal Schonborn, who recently took the position that ID theory was compatible with Catholic teaching (in a reversal of position from the late John Paul II who explicitly endorsed the validity of evolutionary theory) .

Now, at the time I suspected that Schonborn's position was likely politically motivated. ID theory was gaining ground in the US, and even GW Bush endorsed it as a being reasonable to teach in schools (which should be a warning bell in and of itself).

Well, along comes the Director of the Vatican Observatory (the Catholic church has a long, long history of being involved in Astronomy as well as science in general. The Jesuits are just the best example), and he is quite blunt about what he thinks about Schonborn's ID theory position;

" He criticizes Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna for instigating a “tragic” episode “in the relationship of the Catholic Church to science”

and

"Cardinal Schonborn “is in error,” the Vatican observatory director says, on “at least five fundamental issues.”

“One, the scientific theory of evolution, as all scientific theories, is completely neutral with respect to religious thinking; two, the message of John Paul II, which I have just referred to and which is dismissed by the cardinal as ‘rather vague and unimportant,’ is a fundamental church teaching which significantly advances the evolution debate; three, neo-Darwinian evolution is not in the words of the cardinal, ‘an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection;’ four, the apparent directionality seen by science in the evolutionary process does not require a designer; five, Intelligent Design is not science despite the cardinal’s statement that ‘neo-Darwinism and the multi-verse hypothesis in cosmology [were] invented to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science,’”

So at least for the moment, the Catholic Church has retreated from the brink of total insanity. Now if only we could get them to endorse condoms as a preventative for AIDS, it might even be worth calling them 'sane'.