Pope Benedict, dumb or dumber?

The following come from a contribution by Pope Benedict XVI to a recently published book entitled Creation and Evolution, as cited on the website http://ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=8779:

"Both popular and scientific texts about evolution often say that 'nature' or `evolution' has done this or that"…"Just who is this 'nature' or `evolution' as (an active) subject? It doesn't exist at all!"

"The process itself is rational despite the mistakes and confusion as it goes through a narrow corridor choosing a few positive mutations and using low probability," he said, arguing that this observation "inevitably leads to a question that goes beyond science ... where did this rationality come from?"

This pope is presumably smart enough to realize that texts that use the words “nature” and “evolution” don’t really mean to cast these as active subjects, but use this language as shorthand for otherwise-cumbersome phrases like “differential reproductive success as resulting from natural selection acting on genetic variation,” and so his objection “Just who is this 'nature' or `evolution'” is idiotic.

The notion that natural selection is “rational” and that this “rationality” had to come from somewhere is equally dubious. It’s not clear from this report what he means by “rational” in this context, other than that the realization of a low-probability event is supposedly evidence that it was rationally directed, which is again ridiculous. He also assumes that any given species requires an explanation for its unlikely existence, as though a universe without, say, vervet monkeys in their present form would be unthinkable, and so the low likelihood of there being a universe with such a creature in it requires invoking the hand of a rational agent to explain it rather than acknowledging that a universe without vervets would be a universe without vervets and so what? I also especially like the “despite the mistakes and confusion”—so when the process works, it’s evidence of rational directedness, but when it doesn’t work, you can’t count the screw-ups as evidence the other way.