From the Washington Post:
I can only hope that when these Liars For Christ spart spewing their nonsense in natural history museums that other patrons who overhear – and who can easily refute the nonsensical rubbish that passes for “reason” and “evidence” among Creationists – jump in and lay out some actual facts. If people want to believe nonsense, fine. If they want to *teach* nonsense, that’s fine, so long as the students are willing. But if they want to preach their nonsense in a public forum, others have the right to speak up and tell them that they are not only wrong… they’re lying.
Belief in a higher power such as God? Sure, why not. Belief that God created the universe? Sure, why not. But belief that God created the universe 6,000 years ago? This requires either massive ignorance, or the belief that God is a lying scumbag who created a whole universe full of evidence of extreme antiquity just to fool people. Since seemingly few Creationsts push this worldview, their arguement thus is that the evidence of the world around use argues for a world that is astonishingly young. But the only way this works is if you ignore and in fact overturn whole fields of science.
But here’s the real test: Big Business doesn’t give a rat’s ass about religion, one way or the other. Ford, Boeing, Microsoft would not care if the world was 6,000 years old or 4,5 billion. It’s simply not relevant. But petroleum companies are a little different: in order to find oil, you either randomly start poking holes in the ground, or you use geologists to predict *where* to poke holes in the ground. And the theories that predict – with reasonable accuracy and success – are based on an old Earth where evolution happened. Even many Christian educators have accepted this.
This is an important part of why Christianity is on the slight decline in the US, and in major decline in Europe. The world as revealed by science is a wonderous place… and it’s pretty damned consistent. You have to dig into some pretty obscure – as far as the man in the street is concerned – areas before you get into ares where there is great debate. String theory. Gamma ray bursters. Dark matter. But the world around us, that we see, feel and touch easily, has been pretty well nailed down. And so when someone comes along with a philosophy that requires (so they say) that you reject what is blatantly obviously factual, the response is often enough to reject their philosophy as a whole. Many Christians – even Popes – have understood this, and come to recognise that a literal interpretation of the Bible means rejecting reason… but an acceptance that some of the Bible is in fact allegory permits a comfortable fit.
If some new political party came on the scene that fit pretty well with *your* views on immigration, foreign policy, taxation, fiscal policy, gun control, crime and social programs, far more so than current political parties, you’d want to at least give them a look. But if other major party platforms included rubbish like 9-11 conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, or the Flat Earth hypothesis… you’d be well advised to turn your back on them. Religions that push similar anti-fact rubbish run the same risk. And part of the risk is being mocked in public.
