Strange Bedfellows

Oh, man! When the Catholic church backs your play, you gotta a) rethink your play, or b) take the money and run:

The Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said placing intelligent design theory alongside that of evolution in school programs was "wrong" and was akin to mixing apples with oranges.

"Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be," the ANSA news agency quoted Coyne as saying on the sidelines of a conference in Florence. "If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science."

Old pal Chontos and I, both good Catholic boys who've since given it up for Lent, are in agreement with respect to American religious dogma and how it is dispensed, i.e., shoved down the throats of the young and the simple-minded. Moreover, we reinforce the other's belief that modern Catholic schooling, or at least that to which we were exposed, was never anti-intellectual. (Messrs. Copernicus and Galilleo, please call your offices!) Evangelicals, however, have clearly miscalculated in applying a higher value on a subjective worldview rather than on known imperical data, essentially the physical universe as based in objective reality.

This bit of news from the Vatican, then, is most welcome. The Paleo-Christians are now in retreat on the subject of Intelligent Design, especially considering the vote in Pennsylvania, and are just a little bit more isolated today on the issue of what is and what is not "Science."

Meanwhile, the betting here is Kansas will eventually see the error of its ways, and perhaps as soon as next summer -- just as its high school juniors start receiving rejection letters from the major universities.