ID proponent? An important issue here, and (as always) I appreciate Dr Torley's contribution to it, my general agreement with Bill Carroll notwithstanding. If I could find time to engage everyone in this (Coyne, Carroll, and Torley), I would; but, the reality is that many such conversations will happen only in a better place, at a happier time (if God is more generous to Mr Coyne than Mr Coyne is to God). I will respond to just one aspect of Dr Torley's commentary -- namely, his quotation from Cardinal Bellarmine, which is not exactly quoted out of context (Bellarmine's position is accurately stated in the passage quoted), but the context is not given -- and it's quite important, if we want to see fully what he was saying. I've written about the context at length in an article that is available only in print, but of course that is no barrier to anyone who wants to dig into this more deeply: Edward B. Davis and Elizabeth Chmielewski, "Galileo and the Garden of Eden: Historical Reflections on Creationist Hermeneutics." In Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: 1700 Present, ed. Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott H. Mandelbrote, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008), vol. 2, pp. 437 64. ( http://www.brill.nl/nature-and.....00-pr\\... ) To cut to the chase (leaving out the subtleties, which are quite important as Dr Torley and I both realize), Bellarmine was saying, in context, that biblical teaching about astronomy (specifically, about the Earth being