Thursday, January 19, 2006
Vatican: ID Isn't How Science is Done
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, according to an Associated Press report.
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.
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, lamenting 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.
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."
