[Yes, it's pretty bad when the Vatican seems the voice of reason by comparison. What *is* the matter with Kansas? Two items follow:]
Kansas Board Approves Challenges to Evolution
By JODI WILGOREN
TOPEKA, Kan., Nov. 8 - The fiercely split Kansas Board of Education voted 6 to 4 on Tuesday to adopt new science standards that are the most far-reaching in the nation in challenging Darwin's theory of evolution in the classroom.
The standards move beyond the broad mandate for critical analysis of evolution that four other states have established in recent years, by recommending that schools teach specific points that doubters of evolution use to undermine its primacy in science education.
Among the most controversial changes was a redefinition of science itself, so that it would not be explicitly limited to natural explanations.
The vote was a watershed victory for the emerging movement of intelligent design, which posits that nature alone cannot explain life's complexity. John G. West of the Discovery Institute, a conservative research organization that promotes intelligent design, said Kansas now had "the best science standards in the nation."
A leading defender of evolution, Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education, said she feared that the standards would become a "playbook for creationism."
The vote came six years after Kansas shocked the scientific and political world by stripping its curriculum standards of virtually any mention of evolution, a move reversed in 2001 after voters ousted several conservative members of the education board. ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/national/09kansas.html>
The Times November 07, 2005
A pope for our times: why Darwin is back on the agenda at the Vatican
By William Rees-Mogg
... Cardinal Paul Poupard, an admirable example of the cultivated French intellectual in the Roman Curia, ... is ... the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture. ... Last week the cardinal was giving a press conference before a meeting in Rome of scientists, philosophers and theologians .... Nothing he says is said without careful thought. At the press conference he was discussing the issue of evolution, which is the critical dividing line between science and religion. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shook religious belief when it was first published in 1859 in a way that Isaac Newton’s equally important Principia had not shaken the faith of 1687.
In The Times Martin Penner reported the cardinal’s argument. He had said that the description in Genesis of the Creation was “perfectly compatible” with Darwin’s theory of evolution, if the Bible were read properly. “Fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim.”
He argued that the real message of Genesis was that the Universe did not make itself, and had a creator. “Science and theology act in different fields, each in its own.” In Rome, the immediate reaction was that this was a Vatican rejection of the fundamentalist American doctrine of “intelligent design”. No doubt the Vatican does want to separate itself from American creationists, but the significance surely goes further than that. This is not another Galileo case; the teachings of the Church have never imposed a literal interpretation of the language of the Bible; that was a Protestant mistake. Nor did the Church condemn the theory of evolution, though it did and does reject neo-Darwinism when that is made specifically atheist....
Cardinal Poupard’s address to the journalists ... is a precautionary statement, distancing the Church from the American attack on Darwinism that Rome considers to be neither good science, nor good theology. It will also be taken as an indication of the priorities of the present Pope Benedict XVI. ...
Cardinal Poupard’s statement ... gave a further indication that the mindset of Benedict XVI may be a good deal more modern than had been expected. ....
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1052-1860310,00.html>
Carl