I continue to be impressed by the hostility of science rejectionists to God.
You can see how useless it is to argue with them about science. Side note: of course they claim they aren't hostile to science--just to evolution. At the same time, these are the sort of people who claim that you can't accept religion on an a la carte basis. Yet they fail to realize that it's even more true of science, which all rests on the same rigorous empirical foundations. You can't reject empiricism here and accept it there. You're either empirical...or not.
It's not that they're ignorant of science. It's that they're ignorant of their ignorance. You can't enlighten those who are both certain and incurious--kind of like The Decider, as even supporters of him like David Frum concede.
So I think it would be more interesting to probe such folk about their hostility to God. This is more paradoxical on the surface, since they all claim to be godly folk--indeed, the only godly folk, and definitely godlier than mainstream protestants and Catholics, who generally accept science, including of course evolution.
They're hostile to God because, from a religious viewpoint this is God's universe--right? And the way it works is How God Did It. And the way it works is the purview of science, which only turns guesses (i.e. hypotheses) into facts (i.e. the stuff that's proven, called theories, not to be confused with the lay meaning of the term) when those guesses are confirmed mathematically and experimentally/observationally--largely through predictive models that prove out.
Evolution is How God Did us and all our biological kinfolk, from bacteria to belugas. You can't reject evolution without rejecting the actual God of the actual universe. Those who do so worship themselves onanistically through a fake God they invented--a caricature of the real deal, carefully designed to justify their prejudices and cramped world view.
And this perversion of God and of religion has come to dominate the thinking of roughly half this country--and the teaching of biology in a majority of classrooms outside urban areas and college towns.
You can see how useless it is to argue with them about science. Side note: of course they claim they aren't hostile to science--just to evolution. At the same time, these are the sort of people who claim that you can't accept religion on an a la carte basis. Yet they fail to realize that it's even more true of science, which all rests on the same rigorous empirical foundations. You can't reject empiricism here and accept it there. You're either empirical...or not.
It's not that they're ignorant of science. It's that they're ignorant of their ignorance. You can't enlighten those who are both certain and incurious--kind of like The Decider, as even supporters of him like David Frum concede.
So I think it would be more interesting to probe such folk about their hostility to God. This is more paradoxical on the surface, since they all claim to be godly folk--indeed, the only godly folk, and definitely godlier than mainstream protestants and Catholics, who generally accept science, including of course evolution.
They're hostile to God because, from a religious viewpoint this is God's universe--right? And the way it works is How God Did It. And the way it works is the purview of science, which only turns guesses (i.e. hypotheses) into facts (i.e. the stuff that's proven, called theories, not to be confused with the lay meaning of the term) when those guesses are confirmed mathematically and experimentally/observationally--largely through predictive models that prove out.
Evolution is How God Did us and all our biological kinfolk, from bacteria to belugas. You can't reject evolution without rejecting the actual God of the actual universe. Those who do so worship themselves onanistically through a fake God they invented--a caricature of the real deal, carefully designed to justify their prejudices and cramped world view.
And this perversion of God and of religion has come to dominate the thinking of roughly half this country--and the teaching of biology in a majority of classrooms outside urban areas and college towns.
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