Popes are only human and have their posterity to consider. Would any pope choose to place themselves alongside Urban VIII in the history books? One would imagine not. Galileo was invited by his erstwhile friend to inspect the instruments of torture to help him in his deliberations as to whether or not he believed the earth to orbit the sun. The experience showed him the subtle error involved in his scientific understanding.
It is intriguing to ponder on what the preferred methods of encouragement are today for bringing the awkward squad into line.
One of the beauties of science — free and honest enquiry into the workings of nature — is that one does not have to accept anything on the basis of mere authority. True, there are textbooks and professors and doctors and so on, but they do not constitute the authority of science. That authority derives from oneself — each one of us has full authority to perform experiments ourselves, assess evidence ourselves, and to think and form judgements for ourselves. The paradigm of democracy where all are equal, science functions as an enormous self-correcting knowledge factory.
One scientist produces some research which sparks an idea in another. To proceed it is first necessary to check the results of the original research. That check may confirm the research or it may not; if all goes well the path is clear to build further. Brick by brick, by hard work, sweat and toil we learn more about the universe and ourselves. In this way all scientific work is continuously being exposed to scrutiny and criticism by peers. To survive over time a scientific principle has to be very durable; over time any flaws will be flushed out of the system.
Over 150 years Darwin's theory has not merely survived it has flourished; not merely has it flourished, it has become one of the cornerstones of modern science. It has passed all tests and every question thrown at it with flying colours and then some.
In order to survive a new idea in science has to produce demonstrable results. It must explain known facts in a better way than before (with greater clarity or precision or simplicity); or it must be able to answer questions which were previously inexplicable mysteries or at least very poorly understood; or it must be able to make new testable predictions which could help to solve other problems or simply reveal new parts of nature to our gaze. Above all it must explain nature in terms of nature. If it does none of these things then it will disappear from scientific sight; if it does any of them, it will become established within the body of science.
In science after talking the talk you have to walk the walk — put up or shut up. ID is all talk and no walk. ID explains nothing, solves nothing and predicts nothing. The moment that it starts doing so is the moment that science will take it seriously. It has to earn the right to be taken seriously by getting on and doing the hard graft and coming up with some results to show for it. To date, results: nil, nada, nothing, zero, null, nihilo, 0.00 recurring. Books and TV and radio and press publicity do not add up to a hill of scientific beans. They add 0 to the sum total of scientific knowledge; they qualify as talk, or rather waffle, about pseudo-science. You do not do science by waffling about it; you do it by doing it.
No surprise, because ID is not science it is religion. Oh, and it is also ideology.
Science has no manifesto or written constitution or ideological ambition. ID has “The Wedge”. This manifesto says it all in black and white: the purpose of ID is to take us back to a pre-Darwinian utopia where to look upon nature was to see ID=God everywhere and all was good, yea, even very heaven upon earth. Surely, sayeth the Wedge, this blessed time shall come upon us again when science is done as it ought to be done: filtered by the Committee for Religio-Scientific Censorship for the removal of any non-theistic sounding evil, which might be interpreted by some as indicating that there is no God. Halellujah.
Which brings us back to Cardinal Schonborn; he it was, who, with the help of some friends at the Discovery Institute for Ideological Dissemination, called Darwinian evolution an ideological assault upon reason and science (truly he did, don't laugh), but now he says:
““Without a doubt, Darwin pulled off quite a feat with his main work and it remains one of the very great works of intellectual history.”
Whew! Suddenly he's got it at last. Welcome aboard Cardinal. Nice little eulogy that, from the man who said, of the late Pope John Paul's endorsement of evolution as “more that a hypothesis”, that it was “vague and unimportant”. Apparently he now feels that John Paul didn't go far enough in his personal commendation of Darwin!
“I see no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, under one condition — that the limits of a scientific theory are respected.”
Amazing grace, he's definitely got it! There are no problems whatsoever in believing in scientific (Darwinian) evolution and God. It's easy to do of course if you believe in God; you just say that is evolution is the way God chose to make you and me. His op-ed piece was a scathing response to another a few weeks prior to it by Lawrence Krauss saying that was exactly the RC Church position. Krauss expresses himself far better that I can and his op-ed is worth reading.
http://genesis1.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/17comm2.html
After the Cardinal's NYT piece, Krauss, together with Kenneth Miller and Francisco Ayala, wrote an open letter to the new Pope asking for clarification.
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/ ... etter.html
Schonborn's recantation would appear to be that clarification. Krauss had it completely correct. Schonborn had it completely wrong. Schonborn was indulging in the same kind of ideology (in this case ID ideology) that he was accusing Darwinian science of.
I do not understand what the point of your following question is, or what relevance it has to what I wrote:
“So you would believe then that we can't determine whether an object is designed without knowing [who?] its designer is?”
I believe what Cardinal Schonborn is now saying that he believes: we cannot determine scientifically whether or not God exists. (Let us always remember that design = GOD here). Not least because there is no scientific definition of what the word God means.
Schonborn has recanted. That is not to say that he does not still believe in design or that evolution is guided by God. He has not recanted his religious faith. No, he has recanted his assertions that it is a flagrant denial of the scientific evidence to argue against those articles of faith. He has recanted his assertions that reason and the scientific evidence can reach only one conclusion: ID=GOD.
In his NYT op-ed he said that any conclusion other than the existence of ID=GOD is contrary to reason, because of the overwhelming scientific evidence to demonstrate it. Any other view is not science but ideology.
Now he says that science must remain dumb on the question.
What has happened to all that overwhelming evidence? What has happened to the unarguable scientific certainty of ID=GOD, such that only a perverse ideology antithetical to reason could deny it?
Reason may still infer (assume) design=GOD he says. This cannot be scientific reason he is talking about if science is not allowed to speak on the matter. What sort of reason is it?
An inference may or may not be true. In science all inferences are worthless unless they can be given empirical support. Something physically concrete must be seen to lend credence to those inferences. Otherwise you merely have conjecture.
That is why a scientific inference has to be observable in some way. If it cannot be observed directly then it must produce effects which can be observed; and in such a way that anyone may repeat those same observations. Strict conditions must apply to prevent subjective ambiguities from distorting the evidence.
Something which is without physical properties of any kind whatsoever, and which does not interact with the physical world in any measurable way is unobservable. It is something which is completely hidden from science. Science cannot infer anything about such things, assuming that they exist.
Examples are: God, the Devil, angels, ghosts, the soul, the mind (conceived as something distinct from the brain), astrological signs, chakras, auras, ley lines, acupuncture meridians; the list is a very long one.
I am not competent to judge the scientific status of the multiverse hypothesis. It does not seem to me, however, to have either the kind of indirect physical evidence to support its assumption, that, for example, the neutrino had when it was hypothesized by Pauli in 1930; or the degree of rigour of theoretical support which followed in 1934 by Fermi's paper on the weak nuclear force. A ghostly particle is one thing, but an infinity of ghostly universes sounds a little too spooky to be true; too much missing material evidence. I would tend to favour putting it into the unobservable list, but I shall have to leave it hanging wherever it is, or isn't, because the truth is that I am ignorant about the subject.
The theory of evolution, of course, is not unobservable; it has a superabundance of physical evidence to support it.
Incidentally, the Pope commands the assent of one billion human beings. If ID does not have his support that is one sixth of the world's population lost to the cause. I was never suggesting that ID depended on the Catholic Church for survival. My point was that the Church had learned its lesson from the Galileo debacle, but ID is showing the same scientifically ignorant temerity as that which brought humiliation upon the Church. ID is as wrong about denying science on evolution as the Church was about the solar system. There can be only one end to such wilful stupidity.
(I invariably find that ad hominem attacks indicate weakness of argument).
One may also buy into the lie that ID is a disguised form of Christian Creationism, but those who understand know it is nothing of the sort even if it can be used by creationists of their own religious purposes.