Agylen

Yesterday we chided Pope Ratzi for being a homophobic reactionary. Now it’s time, thanks to PZ Myers, to see how he stands on matters of science, especially in fields where science seems to be perfectly able to explain things like the evolution of living beings, without needing to resort to a lot of hand-waving about a “creator” or some kind of “intelligent design”:

It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow and how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error…(They) point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before. Thus we can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project, which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. Human beings are not a mistake but something willed.

This is the same old pro-design argument that was first brought forward by William Paley more than two centuries ago and that has since been utterly refuted numerous times (see Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, for instance). You’d think Ratzi would know better than that.

Indeed, his predecessor JPII sounded a bit more informed than him:

Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis. In fact it is remarkable that this theory has had progressively greater influence on the spirit of researchers, following a series of discoveries in different scholarly disciplines. The convergence in the results of these independent studies—which was neither planned nor sought—constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory.