Vatican raps intelligent design...
 

The Associated Press
Updated: 8:23 p.m. ET Jan. 19, 2006
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.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10932031/

Taken from the evolutionary psych listserve.

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Most peculiar: an organization devoted to top-down emergence affirms its recent shift towards bottom-up!

In FredSpell: ABsltly Fkn CL!

JB

References:

Sowell, T. (1987) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Quill.

Lewontin, R. (1985) Darwin, Mendel, and the mind. In R. Lewontin (2001) It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (2nd Ed.) NY: New York Review of Books, pp. 77-108.

Re: Vatican raps intelligent design...
 

Top-down and bottom-up, Alpha and Omega, the first and the last—where does it begin, where does it end? More peculiar, as noted in the article:
Go figure . . . ever wonder how entropy got to be so low, 14 billion years ago, at the beginning?

Re: Vatican raps intelligent design...
 

No Vatican is not "affirming bottom up". It is simply doing that which is reasonable ... demanding that everything be put to the test of science. "Intelligent design" is a postulate and is not testable any more than the statements "There is a God" or "There is no God". Anti-theists will not usually acknowledge that their proposition is a statement of faith and not testable. Vatican takes some of the wind out of the sails of those opposed to theism, by being honest and acknowleging that theistic statements are not testable. Intelligent design offers no testable proposals so it should not be taught in education. On the converse side however, the notion that there is "no intelligent designer" should also not be taught, but rather it is proper to teach that at this point in our history we have no scientific methodology to test for the notion of a thoughtful creator nor for the universe as an act of random chance. Stupid statements are made in the name of science when in fact they are only elements in the non-theistic religious system. The Canadian cosmologist Hugh Ross has proposed a "testable creation model" which has received attention at Berkley and Caltech. At least some honest scientists are willing to look at such a challenge with open minds. You can view some of Ross's work at:

www.reasons.org

if you are so disposed. He makes many religious fundamentalists uncomfortable as well as some anti-theists. It must feel pretty lonely sometimes, to have been on staff at Caltech with a doctoral dissertation on Quasars and to be caught between the religious views!
It intrigues me that there is so much religious fervour on both sides of this debate. It would be much more helpful to understanding the appearance of the cosmos if both sides provided testable theories of the origin. The religious and anti-theistics sides both seem to just keep on shooting from the hip with no further thought than that which they wish to believe at the moment. So both sides of the debate approach it with considerable religious zeal!