KingMerv00
Penultimate Amazing
Looking at his picture, I'd say he's old enough to retire.
The suggestion that Coyne was fired isn't just being hyped by ID advocates, but also ID opponents and Church critics. Randi seems almost gleeful about the idea - he's never been very skeptical of claims that can be used to portray the Church in a negative light.
Ace_of_Sevens
Thinker
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2005
- Messages
- 225
Randi seems a little unclear on Intelligent Design as well. Intelligent Design and theistic evolution aren't closely related but he seems to think they are the same thing. Theistic evolution doesn't purport to be scientific theory and doesn't require rejecting any particular evidence. Basically, it says evolution happened, but that God directed it. It does nto attempt to claim this is provable. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, claims that evolution could not have happened on its own and that this is provable and everything therefore must be the work of an intelligent designer. I'm not sure if there's some definitive hypothesis about how exactly the intelligent designer did it, though, but many ID believers reject evolution completely. In short, one can believe either one, or both, or neither, so they aren't really the same thing.
Mongrel
Begging for Scraps
Paraphrasing from Red State Rabble, an Italian newspaper is reporting that Father Coyne is undergoing Chemotherapy for Colon cancer(Source), which, if true, is a very good reason for stepping down.
TriangleMan
Graduate Poster
We discussed this a while back on the Bad Astronomy forum and apparantly Coyne was critical of the Pope's stance, even to the point of telling a magazine something along the lines of that the Pope didn't have a clue about the importance of the ID debate in America.
Now if Coyne isn't just retiring due to illness, age or other reasons and was actually fired I'm not surprised. Going to the media and bad-mouthing your boss is never a wise thing to do. If I ever did that about my firm's Chairman I'd be handed my walking papers the day the article hit the press! So at this time I'm a little skeptical of jumping on this as some kind of "Vatican suppressing criticism of ID" tangent.
Now if Coyne isn't just retiring due to illness, age or other reasons and was actually fired I'm not surprised. Going to the media and bad-mouthing your boss is never a wise thing to do. If I ever did that about my firm's Chairman I'd be handed my walking papers the day the article hit the press! So at this time I'm a little skeptical of jumping on this as some kind of "Vatican suppressing criticism of ID" tangent.
Good point. I think this is the second most likely scenario after ordinary retirement, with Vatican suppression of criticism of ID being the least likely explanation. Interestingly, if you're right, that would make this situation more like Galileo, but not for the reasons some would think. Galileo got in trouble more for rubbing a few key personalities the wrong way than for any purely scientific activity on his part.