It was gratifying to read the AP account of Cardinal Schoenborn’s lecture in New York last night and to note the way that His Eminence once again set the media and others straight on the position of the Catholic Church. It won’t make any difference to the Darwinists, of course, because, depending on their audience, they hold either that the Church has accepted Darwinism or that the Catholic Church is just an enemy of reason. Don’t confuse Darwinists with evidence on anything.

Personally, for me the most satisfying part of the Cardinal’s lecture was his critique of court-ordered censorship of ID in school rooms. It seems to have escaped the New York Times and many other opinion leaders that the Kitzmiller (Dover) decision was about that subject. The court had no capacity to judge ID on its scientific merits, but it did have an obligation to speak to First Amendment issues. Sadly, the judge, as we have shown, took over 90 percent of his ruling on ID right out of the ACLU brief — factual errors and all. None of the details presumably matter to the Cardinal, just the blatant effort at censorship.

Since our critics always like to put words — and policy positions — in our mouths, let me remind the reader that Discovery Institute does not support requiring the teaching of ID, only the teaching of the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory. Like Cardinal Schoenborn we also support academic freedom on the subject of intelligent design. Let the critics therefore deal with the true issue of censorship.

Today Discovery announced that another 100 scientists have signed the Dissent from Darwin list. It now totals 700 names. One of the new signers is Dr. Michael Egnor, award winning professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at SUNY (Stony Brook). Says Dr. Egnor, “Darwinism plays no role in medicine. Period.” And “Darwinists have not shown any evidence that natural selection is capable of generating significant amounts of information.”

He and Cardinal Schoenborn are on the same page: Let people debate this issue openly. Don’t try to hide the evidence or shut down the controversy. That is a dead end not only for education, but for science.