[BOBPARKS-WHATSNEW] What's New Friday July 15, 2005

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 15 Jul 05   Washington, DC

1. EVOLUTION: SCHOENBORN’S FOLLY LINKED TO DISCOVERY INSTITUTE.  As 
scientists battled efforts by Christian fundamentalists to counter the 
teaching of evolution, we took comfort in the more enlightened position of 
the Catholic Church.  But as WN reported last week, a powerful cardinal 
wrote in the July 7 New York Times that evolution may be incompatible with 
the Catholic faith.  His argument sounded like the the Discovery 
Institute’s intelligent design nonsense.  It was.  The NYT revealed two 
days later that Schoenborn’s essay had been written at the urging of Mark 
Ryland, vice president of the Discovery Institute, and  submitted to the 
Times by the Discovery Institute’s public relations firm.  

2. APPEAL TO THE POPE: WAR LOOMS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION.
Schoenborn’s op-ed was meant to refute a May 17 NYT op-ed by Larry Krauss, 
then chair of physics at Case Western Reserve, which said the Catholic 
Church “has no problem with the notion of evolution.”  Krauss is not 
Catholic, but yesterday he was joined in a letter to Pope Benedict XVI by 
two well-known Catholic biologists: Francisco Ayala at UC Irvine and Ken 
Miller at Brown.  They urge the Pope not to reestablish the divide that 
once existed between the scientific method and religious belief. 

3. GOD’S HAND: CATHOLICS DON’T HAVE TO BELIEVE IN ADAM AND EVE.  On 
Tuesday, at the National Press Club in Washington, Cardinal Theodore 
McCarrick told reporters that Catholics can believe in evolution – as long 
as it’s understood to have been guided by “the hand of God” rather than 
chance.  The Church cannot accept the belief that “this is all an 
accident,” he said.   

4. HARRY POTTER: AS IF CHARLES DARWIN WASN’T ENOUGH OF A PROBLEM.
As Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, hits book stores, we learn that 
Pope Benedict XVI is not a fan.  “Those are subtle seductions that deeply 
distort Christianity in the soul,” he wrote two years ago.  Catechism 
number 2117: “All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to 
tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a 
supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of 
restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion.”  
You want to take magic out of kids books?  Why not ban Cinderella?  
Scientists look at it differently: Magic and sorcery don’t work.

5. PRAYER: AND WHILE WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THINGS THAT DON’T WORK.  The 
shuttle is still on the ground, the Kansas City Royals are 28 games behind, 
cold fusion is a memory, missile defense isn’t even being tested, and 
intercessory prayer has no effect according to researchers at Duke 
reporting in Lancet.  Didn’t we already know that  
http://www.bobpark.org/WN04/wn120304.html?  Prayer is just one of the 
things the Samueli Institute supports that don’t work.  The Institute is 
headed by Wayne Jonas, a genuine authority on the subject of things that 
don’t work.  Former head of the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine, Jonas 
authored Healing with Homeopathy http://www.bobpark.org/WN96/wn080296.html.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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