April 11, 2007
the pope weighs in on evolution
Continuing along the same obfuscatory path carved out by his former pupil Chistoph Cardinal Schönborn, the Pope has set forth a series of contradictory edicts on the creationism v. evolution 'debate':
The Pope also says the Darwinist theory of evolution is not completely provable because mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.The article is careful to point out that the Pope did not endorse creationism or ID, but in essence, that's precisely what he did. Both creationism and ID are almost entirely comprised of negative arguments against evolution. Creationism's only affirmative argument is the Book of Genesis, which evolution effectively either disproves or renders into an abstraction. ID's affirmative argument is that God must exist and be the cause of life because 'life is complex,' an argument that science renders unscientific. In short, the affirmative arguments for ID and creationism can be written with a sharpie on a matchbook. The vast swath of babble in support of either proposition is comprised merely of negative arguments against evolution, and so both arguments instead concentrate on undermining the scientific underpinnings of evolution. The canard that "evolution can't be proven because it can't be demonstrated in a laboratory setting" is trotted out daily by the Pope's fellow travelers, such as Ann Coulter, who quoted David Berlinski in her most recent published screeching:But Benedict, whose remarks were published on Wednesday in Germany in the book "Schoepfung und Evolution" (Creation and Evolution), praised scientific progress and did not endorse creationist or "intelligent design" views about life's origins.
This notion that there is somewhere a computer model of the evolutionary development of the eye is an urban myth. Such a model does not exist. There is no such model anywhere in any laboratory. No one has the faintest idea how to make one.By the time anyone reads this (does anyone read this?) Panda's Thumb will no doubt supply a list of ways that evolution is proven in laboratory settings, after which, no doubt, someone will note that this falls short because the Pope's statement set the bar a tad higher: "...mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory." The Pope's statement, read as literally as His Followers might prefer, seems to lament the lack of thousand plus year old laboratory experiments, which is kind of like criticizing astronomy for identifying galaxies no one has ever visited.
Also worth noting about the Pope's sudden high threshold for certainty is the utter lack of evidence for various claims made by the Catholic Church over the last 20 centuries. Not that anyone's waiting on laboratory experiments proving the authenticity of various items, but the Catholic Church, in particular, has controlled the flow of much of the information that constitutes the body of evidence for Christianity, and has, at various points in history, squelched and censored what didn't fit within The Program. Where science honestly and transparently permits what it considers to be common knowledge to be altered in light of additional and contrary evidence, knowledge within religion is inherently anti-democratic, as it flows only from self-appointed (or institutionally self-appointed) divine sources. In other words, why should anyone who isn't Catholic listen to anything the Pope has to say about science?
posted by scott pilutik at April 11, 2007 01:06 PM