The Pope and Antievolution

The Discovery Institute Fellows are salivating over word about the upcoming confab the Pope is having:

Last week, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Austria revealed that evolution and creation had been chosen as the subjects for this year’s meeting of the Pope’s Schulerkreis – a group consisting mainly of his former doctoral students that has been gathering annually since the late 1970s. Other participants at the closed-door meeting will include the president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Peter Schuster; the conservative ethical philosopher Robert Spaemann; and Paul Elbrich [sic], professor of philosophy at Munich University.

And no wonder. The list of conference participants is pretty much a who’s who of European antievolutionists. It’s like the Catholic church wanted to take its lead from Groundhog Day here in the USA: if the Pope steps out and sees his shadow, the Catholic church will postpone coming to terms with science for another four hundred years.

If there’s at least one scientist without the antievolution baggage, there just might be a chance, though. He could sit throughout the proceedings chanting, “Galileo, Galileo, Galileo…” Pope Benedict might just take the hint.