Humanity continues its slide from reason to darkness. A cardinal close to Pope Benedict XVI “has published an essay detailing what might be the Catholic Church’s refined view of the Theory of Evolution”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/science/09cardinal.html?ex=1278561600&en=0c183426986e5e77&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss.
Leave it to the Catholic church to bring down the hammer of dogma upon the long and hard-forged chain of reason in a modern attempt to shatter its hold on the world.
It sounds like the Cardinal, Schönborn, may be siding with the so-called “intelligent designers”, who posit that the complexity of the universe cannot have arisen from the laws of nature without the guiding hand of an unnamed intelligence. According to the above article, “he believed students in Catholic schools, and all schools, should be taught that evolution is just one of many theories.”
I would remind the Cardinal that while one of the facets of science class is the presentation of competing theories, the *core principle of science education* is that truth is discerned from fiction by the time-tested and powerful framework of the scientific method. Applied to the hypothesis of evolution, wherein elements of a system develop adaptations to their surroundings over undeterminable periods of time (the underlying cause of which is mutation and survival of those with favorable mutations), the scientific method renders testable predictions born out in the laboratory. No such attempt to apply the scientific method to the hypothesis of intelligent design has yet been made.
I would caution the Cardinal to remember the words of Galileo Galilei, who privately cautioned the Church in his copy of the “Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World”:
“Take note, theologians, that in your desire to make matters of faith out of propositions relating to the fixity of sun and earth, you run the risk of eventually having to condemn as heretics those who would declare the earth to stand still and the sun to change position – eventually, I say, at such a time as it might be physically or logically proved that the earth moves and the sun stands still.”
His warning is no less relevant today than it was when you condemned him as a heretic for his efforts to demonstrate the Copernican system. Do not forget that reason prevailed in a matter where faith had no place sticking its nose.
