science and non science

Science and non-science

Science and nonsense

Maybe it's a good book. I don't know and I don't expect to spend time

reading it. But I doubt it. The author is Cardinal Christoph

Sch�nborn, archbishop of Vienna and friend to the Discovery

Institute's intelligent design advocates. Chance or Purpose? has been

published by Ignatius Press, which took out a full-page ad for the

book in the December 2007 issue of Inside the Vatican. (Ignatius Press

is the American publisher of the books of Pope Benedict XVI and a

regular advertiser in Inside the Vatican.)

Sch�nborn's publisher is quick to round up the usual suspects to

provide laudatory blurbs for the cardinal's book. My favorite is by

the unavoidable Michael Behe:

Science cannot speak of ultimate purpose, and scientists who do so

are outside of their authority. In Chance or Purpose? Cardinal

Sch�nborn shows that the data of biology, when properly examined by

reason and philosophy, strongly point to a purposeful world.

--MICHAEL BEHE, Professor of Biochemistry, Lehigh University,

Pennsylvania and author of Darwin's Black Box

______________________________________________________________

Go ahead. Read Behe's statement again. He does not appear to be

kidding. First he says that "ultimate purpose" is beyond the ambit of

science. Fine. (I think it's outside the reach of the fables of

religion, too, but that's a separate point.) Then Behe says that

biology (I think that's a science) points toward a "purposeful world"

when a religious philosopher examines the data produced by its

practitioners--by scientists! I guess scientists should just do their

work and wait for the priests to tell them what it means.

Have you ever seen anything sillier? (Sorry: I forgot about The Edge

of Evolution.)

Yet when Behe's blurb crossed the desk of the person responsible for

putting together the Ignatius Press ad, did he (or she) say, "Oh,

dear. This is just arrant nonsense. We can't use this!" Apparently

not. Working on ad copy for a religious publisher must train you to

believe at least six impossible things before breakfast every morning,

so Behe's blather was treated as golden and placed near the top of the

ad for Sch�nborn's book.

I noticed that the cover of Chance or Purpose? juxtaposes two spiral

images: the nautilus shell that is so beloved of the Discovery

Institute and a spiral galaxy (the Whirlpool Galaxy, in fact). Did

someone mean to imply a unity between earthly biology, as represented

by the shell, and God's infinite universe, as represented by the star

system? Perhaps. If strained symbolism was their purpose, perhaps

someone should have noticed that the spirals are oriented in different

directions. They oppose each other.