I wonder why the Vatican feels it needs to keep commenting on the subject. Did they have anything to say about the Korean stem-cell scientist who turned out to be a fraud? That's far more relevant to Catholic interest in science than this US squabble.
Excellent point.
This article makes me think that they don't know the first thing about intelligent design.
The notion that "the Vatican" is commenting via this article by a professor, is laughable.
Schoenborn has defended ID and has not backed down when attacked by Catholic scientist Stephen Barr (see www.firstthings.com for the debate). The Jesuit astronomer Coyne has weighed in on the anti-Schoenborn side vehemently, but as an individual Catholic scholar. Clearly Catholic theologians, Catholic scientists are on both sides of this question and there's been very little genuine debate between them. There is no "Vatican" position on this.
There are legitimate theoretical critiques of ID based on disagreements among scientists about the meaning of "random" etc. But simply to dismiss ID as "not science" or not employing data is stupid.
Scienctific theories are explanations of data. One can made a data-based critique of a reigning theory from within science. One can also go on from this or that explanatory model based on data and make further philosophical claims about how much of reality the data-explanation truly explains. Strict empirical science should avoid making totalizing claims that a data-based scientific theory explains everything, explains all reality. Unfortunately, science has succeeded over the last few centuries in convincing a lot of people that it can explain all reality. That's really a philosophical claim. It could be true, in which case, the various religions and non-scientistic philosophies (e.g., Plato) are wrong. But to decide whether empirical science explains everything is itself a philosophical/religious matter. Scientists cannot make this claim on purely scientific grounds. They are certainly free to put on a philosopher's hat and make such claims. When they do so, they are subject to the rules of philosophy for judging the truth of their philosophical claims, they have to defend themselves not by hiding under the sacred umbrella of "science says" but must be willing to get down and dirty with philosophy, employing their scientific data-based knowledge as part but not all of their argument.
ID both critiques on a scientific basis the reigning scientific explanatory model and goes on to do some philosophizing. Many, but not all, proponents of the theory of evolution go on also to do such philosophizing, claiming that evolutionary development is random and arises purely from material causes. That's a philosophical claim and one that is hard to defend philosophically because it rests on proving a negative (that no non-random, no intelligent causation can be proven). ID makes a counter philosophical claim--that evidence for design is sufficient philosophically and does not violate the scientific data.
Some intelligent scientists and intelligent philosophers and theologians do mount significant critique of ID for misunderstanding what some evolution-proponents mean by "randomness." In effect, however, I wonder if they are not then conceding some aspects of ID--they are conceding that "random" as they use it is not random-random and does not exclude some degree of "design" in a monstrously complex cosmic sense. But that's a fitting debate to be carried on among scientists who are also aware that science does not operate in a vacuum and needs to be conversing with philosophy and religion.
Evolution proponents who simply ignore the philosophical implications of their scientific explanations or who actually claim that their scientific explanatory theories explain reality completely are doing bad science and bad philosophy. It is these imposters that ID particularly targets and these imposters are the ones who shout ID down as "creationism" and "theism" rather than engage it's own combination of science and theology because that would force them to acknowledge that they two have been combining philosophy and theology and combining them very crudely and foolishly.
It would be wonderful if scientists, philosophers of science, theologians, and philosophers would simply let the ID people make their case in peer-reviewed journals and thrash out the pros and cons of the this philosophy/science proposal. It might be thoroughly repudiated and evolutionary science-philosophy might be vindicated, it might be modified and developed in such a way as to be helpful to everyone in understanding reality.
But the gatekeepers of the pseudo-scientific establishment, the ones who want to teach evolutionary religion and philosophy but disguise it as mere science won't even let the debate begin. The Bologna professor seems to fall at least partly into this scientist-obscurantist camp.
It doesn't help that some Christian advocates of ID don't fully understand exactly how it employs both science and philosophy and that it does have vulnerabilities both from science and from philosophy. It deserves a place at the academic table, a full hearing and debate.
It is not receiving that and the thin-skinned defensiveness of its opponents indicates that they don't really have confidence in their own philosophy/science mixture.
Fundamentally, the debate about both evolution as it is popularly presented by most scientists and about ID is not a scientific debate but a philosophy of science debates. This debate belongs in classrooms at all levels as a question of just what science is and does and just what philosophy and religion are and do. Until we begin to teach our students about the interrelationships and boundaries and distinctions between science, religion, and theology accurately, we will never begin to understand reality.
But for centuries now, science has claimed on the popular level, the role of queen of knowledge. It is free to make this claim, of course, but it is a philosophical and religious claim and philosophers and religious believers deserve equal opportunity, without being mocked or dismissed, to make their counter claims. The monopoly on explanatory power that science claims, particularly among elementary and high school science teachers and their associations who control curricula is bad science and bad philosophy. On the university level, if pressed, most scientists acknowledge the limited degree to which empirical science offers cosmic/philosophical explanations, but they tend to keep this acknowledgement fairly private and do not discipline those of their colleagues who go out into the popular arena (Sagen, Dawkins etc.) and make sweeping and preposterous claims (usually by omitting certain things) about the total explanatory power of empirical scientific theories.