Cardinal Schoenborn condemned Coyne in Chance or Purpose - Page 169.
"It is not only unnecessary, however, but contrary to reason , to view this grandiose path of life up to man as being an exclusively random process. When an astronomer, who is also a priest and theologian, even has the presumption to say that God himself could not know for certain that man would be the product of evolution, then nonsense has taken over completely.
IDers don’t use the word chance to describe the process of natural selection either. It’s biologists who use the word chance to describe how mutations occur.
Intelligent Design is not a discipline that seeks to form an airtight argument for the existence of God. It is a scientific discipline that seeks to find design in nature. Any leap to “God exists because I found design in nature” is an independent philosophical endeavor. The leap would be obvious to some, but is not required by intelligent design or anything else.
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That the quote from Coyne is a paraphrase by Schönborn is enough to arouse suspicion in me. Especially since Schönborn once again characterizes "the path of life up to man" as an essentially random process. Again, the process of Natural Selection is emphatically *not* a "random process" and the cardinal betrays an ignorance of one of the most basic principles behind evolutionary theory by continuing to suggest that it is. In order to correctly assess Coyne's position, it would be necessary to see the original argument made by Coyne in its context. That, of course, would require a complete citation, which either the cardinal or you have declined to provide.
It seems Intelligent Design is not, as you say, “a scientific discipline that seeks to find design in nature,” but instead is self-evidently an organ for the dissemination of pure propaganda. Your very way of defining the discipline implies that one arrives first at a conclusion for which one then goes out to marshal evidence, a complete perversion of the scientific process. Where, one might ask, does one find the
undesigned elements of nature necessary to make a valid comparison? What is meant by the term “design” and how is it substantially different from a subjective aesthetic? What experimental procedures has Intelligent Design proposed which could potentially disprove the theory? In the absence of such experiments, what sort of field evidence could be produced that would contradict the theory?
It seems to me that equating cold rational analysis with the human reasoning the Church refers to is flawed and diminishes the grandeur of the human person. Man’s reason is not only the cold, mechanical process of mere deduction but also embraces the passionate faculty and a certain intuition, which are both quite beyond the realm of mere science to account for. It is the rational faculty working
in tandem with the passionate faculty and intuition that make the existence of God self-evident.
The most science can ever “prove” about God or design is that neither are contradicted by any evidence we can observe. We are left, therefore with the choice of Faith. Therein lies the gift of human freedom in all its wondrous and terrible implications. Therein lies the scandalous irony of a God who, in humility, declines to rub His creation’s nose in His own existence. Therein lies the awesome love, which can never be measured in a laboratory.
