George Coyne, the Vatican astronomer, has been sacked. Red State Rabble and John Wilkins speak out on it.
They cite one source condescendingly claiming that Coyne “appointed himself an expert in evolutionary biology,” while Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute (speaking of unqualified gits appointing themselves the status of ‘expert’) calls Coyne an “evangelizing Darwinist,” and blames his fall on his radical theology. It seems to me that Coyne was actually a highly qualified scientist who was well-informed about the general principles of science, and who informed the Vatican about the actual status of the discipline of evolution within the domain of science. What this represents is a case of Catholicism once again rushing to bury its head in the sand—they can’t have someone who honestly represents the uncomfortable facts of science speaking out, after all. I’m sure his replacement will be better steeped in the dogma, will confine himself to a much less forthright position, and appreciates theology more than the science.
I hope George Coyne uses the freedom from one set of duties to reconsider that religion thing. It must be hard to serve two masters, especially when one is about enlightenment and knowledge, and the other is about ignorance and dogma.
Yes, how presumptuous of him. That privilege is reserved for cardinals.
Off-topic: Does anyone else get the email alerts of new posts? I seem to randomly get 1-4 copies of the email for each post for each blog i ‘subscribed’ to.
Read the comments on those two blogs. Coyne is 73 and recovering from cancer- he retired. And there is nothing in Funes’s background to suggest he is any more sympathetic to ID than Coyne. Here’s a quote from him, from an article to which one of the RSR commenters linked:
I’m afraid people are falling right into Bruce Chapman’s trap.
When reading Wilkins’ site, a reader notes that Coyne is 73 and that this may reflect retirement, rather than any sort of knee-jerk ideological reaction. The reader over there cites private correspondence with Brother Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory which, if true, puts a more hopeful spin on things.
SH
I posted this before, since I doubt it would get through via mail considering that you are being nutspammed. But check this out:
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=v6pywllczrz22q3ybkb4b94qrx35ckr7
The new grants for better funding science education are out! Yay more money for science educat…. hmmm. Something appears to be missing. Of the subjects listed as eligible majors, one number in a range is missing…. the number for “Evolutionary Biology.”
I don’t think that Jose Funes, Coyne’s successor, is any friend to intelligent design:
“Like all the priest-scientists, Funes said he kept his astronomy and religion separate… ‘Science is about natural, not supernatural causes,”‘ he said.
I think Bruce Chapman is gloating too soon.
Oops, time-lag in commenting.
That means science covers pretty much everything, doesn’t it?
Steve LaBonne:
I’m afraid people are falling right into Bruce Chapman’s trap.
What trap? I think you give him far too much credit. Chapman thought he could get away with claiming yet another undeserved “victory” for ID. He lied, he got caught. Same old, same old.
He was not sacked, he retired. At the age of 73, it’s allowed. :-)
It just goes to show the depths to which a lying sack like Chapman will stoop, though. 73 year old priests with distinguished careers are fair game if they don’t toe the party line.
You know, after seeing “Darwinism” for about the ninth time this morning, I think I’ve just about reached my limit.
One doesn’t see such terms as Newtonism, Einsteinism, Hubblism, Maxwellism, Avogadroism, Lavoirsierism, Crickism, Hamiltonism, Gibbsism, Agassizism, or Wegnerism, yet the nutcases keep going after “Darwinism” as if that means something, and as if it means something in their favor.
Ahcuah, Darwinism is the thin end of their wedge. The gazoonies hope to promote a view that the Earth is only about six thousand years old, & flat.
HEY, come-on now!
Give the Catholic church a break!
Didn’t they just pardon Galileo?? Huh?? I mean good grief! You give an inch and they want a yard!!
Now, let’s get real, let’s stop being arrogant pricks. Modern “Scientists” need very little evidence and study to get cocky. Yeah, the Catholic Church retreats into the darkness, because they don’t agree with me and my friends! How could they, I am so intelligent! Bah…
Do we have a new troll?
Ahcuah:
“Newtonism”
Actually it’s “Newtonian” and it is used quite a bit.
“
“Darwinian” is also used, like “Newtonian,” to refer to a very specific subset of a discipline. When biologists hear themselves called “Darwinists”, it’s not considered insulting…but it usually means the person doing the talking doesn’t have any idea what the word means, and doesn’t realize that the science has moved on quite a bit. It would be funny to hear a modern cosmologist called a “Newtonist,” don’t you think?
Joaoa
Hmmm….
Ok, neato commentary. I’ll ignore the name calling. Can you back any of those clever assertions up with expert statements (links would be nice)? Or are they just your opinion?
In refutation, the vitriol and disdain directed toward religion in these threads is not because “they don’t agree with me and my friends”. Science is all about disagreement and skepticism.
It’s because religionists have no substantive evidence to support their disagreement. Then, they just throw a tantrum, like you just did, because of their utter lack of rational, empirical support that science CONSTANTLY finds in nature.
Was anything here stated not accurate? Your anger seems to be coming from intellectual frustration, not from misrepresentation presented in any comments here.
Didn’t the Pope endorse evolution, albeit in a limited and very vague fashion? Catholics have less of a tendency to be looney, literal creationists than protestants.
On the science front perhaps.
Observation: The suffix ‘-ist’ seems to connote belief systems for many. ‘Darwinist’ and ‘evolutionist’ then are conflated with positions such as materialism or naturalism.
I make the observation that I am not an evolutionIST or a DarwinIST, I’m an Evolutionary Biologist whose thinking is Darwinian!
SH
There are strong suggestions in the comments above, as well as the linked comments, that “sacked” and “ousted” may be over-excited interpetations of this personnel change. Likewise, that the “replacement” director is not at all anti-science or anti-evolution, which also tends to deflate the claim that this move has implications with regard to the Pope’s or the church’s attitude toward evolutionary science.
It’s certainly appropriate to attach Chapman’s smarmy tone of celebration, but it may well also be appropriate to withhold judgment on his characterization of the underlying facts.
Heliologue: The previous pope (JP II) did as you describe. The current one hasn’t done as much.
Thanks, PZ, re Newtonian vs. Newtonist.
To Jonathan,
We also use the Hamiltonian, and Gibbs Free Energy, and Maxwell’s Equations, and Avogadro’s Number. But we don’t use Hamiltonist, or Gibbsist, or Maxwellist, or Avogadrist. We honor those scientists by using their names to describe what they did and their contributions. We don’t make gods of them by making their contributions into holy writ that is described as if it were a religion.
I’m going to give the Vatican the benefit of the doubt on this one, sounds like its a simple changing of the guard.
And I certainly don’t think its at all important that evolutionary science receives the Vatican Seal of Approval.
There might have been a time when that was important, as such approval might keep an honest scientist out of the pot where the boiled the heretics.
But it isn’t necessary anymore. We’ve (science) grown beyond all that.
Rather amusingly (to me anyway!) they could find some support for that latter view in current physics (and applied mathematics) textbooks. Except that they probably wouldn’t be intelligent and well-educated enough to spot it for themselves.
It’s in the treatment of a trajectory under gravity as being a parabola. Think about it. It’s not just the simplification of an airless planet (ie no air resistance or wind), and that of a planet which doesn’t spin (ie the coriolis complication), but also of a planet which is (locally) flat. An Earth where down means down, not inwards. One which might as well be standing stolidly on some pillars.
Teach the controversy! :-D
Perhaps it’s just me …
My prayers are with Fr. George Coyne. Our Prada-Pope apparently thinks Fr. Coyne is much more dangerous than the “new” Primate of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine and Faith’s “personal secretary,” who the Primate absoconded to Rome to prevent his secretary’s prosecution for heterosexual rape in San Francisco. God is merciful and just, even if we his piddling little lambs cannot figure out why. At least, our Pope is immaculately dressed. He and Dorothy will have much to talk about in Oz. Blessed is SHE who comes in the Name of the Lord.
On hearing the repeated use of the “-ist”/”-ism” construction (as opposed to the perfectly sensible “-ian” construction, as pointed out by others), I’m always reminded of the Stephen Hawking essay My Position, in which he writes:
Indeed.
Of course, I have no problem which “-ist”/”-ism” label anybody might choose for themselves; the denigration technique is to pick one for your opponent and then demonize the word itself. Hence, the demonization of Charles Darwin personally coupled with labelling anybody who accepts the theory of evolution as being a “Darwinist”.
Keith Douglas:
The previous Pope did say evolutionary theory is compatible with Catholic belief. Since the current Pope was the head of he Inquis–er, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the time, it’s highly unlikely his theological views vary from JP II’s that much.
And as an ex-Catholic, it’s pretty safe to say the Church hasn’t really been hostile to science (if not always encouraging) except during two periods:
1) The Reformation/Counter-Reformation, when the Church was losing followers and political influence and thus became increasingly insular and dogmatic (this is why Galileo faced the Inquisition even though the Pope had praised Copernicus for the same ideas less than a century before).
2) The mid-19th century, when the Church’s ideology was assailed by communism, socialism, republicanism, and the Pope’s lands were being seized by the nascent Italian Republic, so again with the retreat to insular dogmatism.
Generally, Scripture is not the sole source of doctrine (or you wouldn’t need the Pope), so the Church has never felt obliged to follow the Bible literally. In practice, this means the New Testament is largely considered “truth” while the Old Testament is a bunch of metaphor that exists largely to “prove” that Jesus was God and the Church does his will.
I’m not saying the Church and Pope Ratzi aren’t deluded or even evil, but I’d rather call them on their actual sins than hyperbole and inaccuracy.
So which one is about ignorance and dogma? Darwinism or Catholicism?
Well, False Prophet, their position (or rather that of JPII, again) on the evolution of psychological faculties of humans is that it didn’t happen. This is pretty antiscientific. The residual mind-body dualism in general is a pretty big problem. Not to mention the fact that about the Galileo thing it took them hundreds of years to admit to wrongdoing.
Just for fun.
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/printthread.php?t=41365
Two points, Keith Douglas: One, it’s not their position that the mind wouldn’t have been subject to evolution, but rather the soul. This is an important distinction, as one is measurable, and the other is an ephemeral theological construct that can’t be tested in any known way, shape or form.
“Theories of evolution which, because of the philosophies which inspire them, regard the spirit either as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a simple epiphenomenon of that matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.”
Secondly, the church has been eager to stay out of science for a long time. There are the occasional encyclical like the one previously quoted, but on the whole, they stick to purely religious matters. The exception (Most often, of late) are ‘matters of morals’ to the Catholic Church, such as Stem Cells. Combine this hesitance to get burned in yet another Galileo affair with the natural human reluctance to admit one was in error, and the bureaucratic pace inherent in any organization of that size, and I think it’s a small wonder they managed to apologize at all.
FP has it more or less correct in that the Catholic Church rejects an ultra-literalist approach (or claims it does, on the whole), as the whole institution of the pope is dependant on divine interpretation of the inerrant-yet-seemingly-contridictory bible.
Just a nit pick: John Paul II wasn’t the only pope. Pius XII preceded JP II in saying there’s no conflict in the encyclical Humani Generis.
“yet the nutcases keep going after “Darwinism” as if that means something, and as if it means something in their favor.”
Yes, the Abrahamists are annoying. I wish their liberal neo-Abrahamists could keep after them better.
“Actually it’s “Newtonian” and it is used quite a bit.”
And so is Galilean and Planckian, as subsets of disciplines or regimes. OTOH Laplacian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian are theoretical objects. Since -ians are narrower and more welldefined concepts than -ists, technically they are stronger and kick the laters ass. :-)