Vatican and ID

The Vatican has been very good on this issue. Could it be that in some towns a kid might have to go to the local Catholic school to get a decent science education? Galileo is somewhere smiling.

The whole ID thing is witless, as David Hume demonstrated over 200 years ago in his "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion." Even if you, for some reason, accept the idea of an intelligent designer, you can't get from that to anything else of importance to Christianity.

It's another ill-chosen proxy war, a useless skirmish along a much wider cultural front. That larger set of issues is important, but this battle shows the unseriousness of both sides. I think these are Matthew Arnold's ignorant armies that clash by night. Paul Campos is right: this is an argument that, by its nature, "can produce no winner, or even a coherent disagreement."

Byron