Thursday, February 14, 2013

Missouri bill redefines science



Last I heard, only 6% of American scientists now call themselves Republican. Is it any wonder? (Not that the Democratic Party is always great, when it comes to science, but they're not this bad.)

And all this is just to push Creationism! How crazy is that? After all, evolution is the foundation of modern biology. It's the bedrock on which the rest of biology stands. There is no controversy in science about that.

Everything we've learned in the past 150 years or so has just confirmed evolution. Charles Darwin didn't even know about genes, let alone about DNA. We know vastly more than we did back then, and it's just made the scientific consensus about evolution even stronger.

No, this "controversy" doesn't exist in science. It's all just a matter of religious zealots pushing a 2,000-year-old myth. It's the 21st Century, but they still want to think that 'God' made Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - literally! Incredible, isn't it?

3 comments:

Jim Harris said...

Bill, why are you still amazed at this fact? I give the conservatives credit to be smart enough to realize that God and Evolution are mutually exclusive. People who try to embrace both don't understand evolution. Evolution flat out denies the need of God. I can't blame the faithful for rejecting science, because they are savvy enough to at least intuit that science is the denial of God.

The people that bother me are those who try to claim God can science coexists.

Religion rejects reality and embraces a delusion. It seems silly to embrace reality and a delusion. To me that means you know not reality or your religion.

It's like the movie The Matrix. Take the red pill and know the truth, take the blue pill and forget. You can't take both.

These people have made a choice. They want God and eternal life. They want it bad enough to deny reality, to refuse logic and evidence.

We live in a world where most people are opium smokers. Few of them will give up their habit. They are not apathetic lotus eaters though. They are cunning enough to attack science, to undermine education, to spread FUD about reality. Like any hardcore drug addict, they will go to any length to maintain their high.

In a strange way I admire their tenacity of avoiding reality.

What I wonder about is what the world would be like if religion was forgotten and everyone understood science and saw reality. How would that change our global culture?

Chimeradave said...

John Lennon wondered about that too.

"Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace"

:)

Bill Garthright said...

Sure, Jim, if you really understand it, evolution is the nail in the coffin for religious belief. But that still doesn't mean human beings can't believe both.

Heck, most mainstream Christian denominations do accept evolution, and there are even Christian biologists (not many, but some).

That's because people aren't always rational, aren't always consistent, in what they believe. And that goes double for the faith-based!

Should believers stick with a flat Earth? Should they continue to insist that the Sun revolves around the Earth, since the Bible clearly indicates that?

Denying evolution is equally ridiculous, so why wouldn't they make their peace with it? After all, believers are very good at rationalization. Indeed, as I say, the churches themselves already do this.

In fact, most American Christians belong to a denomination which does accept evolution, at least... in part. (They insist that it must have been guided by 'God,' despite the abundant evidence against that and no evidence for it. And they ignore what that implies about their deity, too.)

It's mostly just their members who refuse to give up, and I find that astonishing. I wouldn't be more surprised if they continued to insist that the Earth was flat or that our planet was the center of the universe.

150 years after The Origin of Species, evolution is the foundation of modern biology. Everything we've discovered since then - and we've made incredible advances in biological science - has just confirmed Darwin's insight (in general, if not in specific details - just as we'd expect).

So yes, I find this denial incredible. They might as well still be denying that the Earth is billions of years old. :)