Saturday, July 09, 2005

Another victory for the Discovery Institute: The Catholic church church attacks the enlightenment

Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution - New York Times

I must doff my cap to the Discovery Institute. Not since the dark ages has reason, science, and enlightenment had such an effective and implacable foe (update: ok, so maybe Stalin/Lysenko, Mao, and a few hundred others were even more effective in their time). In the Benedict era the Discovery Institute has brought the Catholic church into their fold.
An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be incompatible with Catholic faith.

The cardinal, Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday, writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not...

...Mark Ryland, a vice president of the [Discovery] institute, said in an interview that he had urged the cardinal to write the essay. Both Mr. Ryland and Cardinal Schönborn said that an essay in May in The Times about the compatibility of religion and evolutionary theory by Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, suggested to them that it was time to clarify the church's position on evolution.

The cardinal's essay, a direct response to Dr. Krauss's article, was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute.
I would have opposed George Bush's election for his opposition to reason alone; I consider the Discovery Institute's progress a side effect of Bush's election. GWB has often declared himself as ingorant of science in general, and opposed to biology and climate science in particular.

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