Re: Cardinal

   Cardinal Schonborn said,

"Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in
the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random
variation and natural selection - is not."

   He should make an important distinction more clearly:
   neo-Darwinism does propose a mechanism that is "random variation [with
new genes produced by base-mutations] and natural selection" and this
process IS "unguided, unplanned" as far as we can OBSERVE. (unless Daniel
Dennett's "good tricks" can be considered guidance, since selection isn't
random)
   But moving from this to saying the process actually IS unguided and
unplanned requires a metaphysical/religious INTERPRETATION, and this goes
beyond the science.

   This distinction is clearly made by many authors (Miller, Gray, Haarsma,
Russell,...) in "Perspectives on an Evolving Creation" and elsewhere.
   But a deistic (or atheistic) interpretation is comm on, and was endorsed
by the National Association for Biology Teachers (from 1995 to 1997) when
they declared evolution to be an "unsupervised" process, thereby declaring
that "natural" means "without God." ( The story is at
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/origins/nabt.htm )

   Does the cardinal clarify this in the rest of his statement? (I haven't
read it, and now it's time for sleep.)

Craig
Received on Mon Jul 11 01:37:42 2005