From The Associated Press, 1/18/06:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-vatican-evolution,0,4353529.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
Vatican Paper Hits 'Intelligent Design'
By NICOLE WINFIELD
Associated Press Writer
VATICAN CITY --
The Vatican newspaper has published an article saying "intelligent
design" is not science and that teaching it alongside evolutionary
theory in school classrooms only creates confusion.
The article in Tuesday's editions of L'Osservatore Romano was the
latest in a series of interventions by Vatican officials -- including
the pope -- on the issue that has dominated headlines in the United
States.
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."
He lamented that certain American "creationists" had brought the
debate back to the "dogmatic" 1800s, and said their arguments weren't
science but ideology.
"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 and the pretext that it
be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin's explanation is
unjustified," he wrote.
"It only creates confusion between the scientific and philosophical
and religious planes."
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"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science
collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke
miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into
the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to
abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all
fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon
distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to
characterize the ideas of their opponents."
Stephen Jay Gould
Harry
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