The View from South Africa

These are excerps from an article by George Monbiot in the Mail & Guardian of South Africa.

Evolution + life with no purpose

All is not lost in America. When George W Bush came out a couple of weeks ago in favour of teaching “intelligent design” -- the new manifestation of creationism -- the press gave him a tremendous kicking. The Christian Taliban have not yet won.

But, they are gaining on us. So far there have been legislative attempts in 13 states to have intelligent design added to the school curriculum. In Kansas, Texas and Philadelphia, it already has a foot in the door. In April a new “museum of Earth history” opened in Arkansas, which instructs visitors that “dinosaurs and humans did coexist”, and that juvenile dinosaurs, though God forgot to mention it, hitched a ride on Noah’s Ark.

Similar museums are being built in Texas and Kentucky.

The controversy fascinates me, partly because of its similarity to the dispute about climate change. Like the climate-change deniers, intelligent-design adherents cherry-pick the data that appears to support their case. They ask for evidence, then ignore it when it’s presented to them. They invoke a conspiracy to explain the scientific consensus and are unembarrassed by their own scientific illiteracy.

Why pick on Darwin?

It is surely because, as soon as you consider the implications, you must cease to believe that either Life or life are affected by purpose. As G Thomas Sharp, chairperson of the Creation Truth Foundation, admitted to the Chicago Tribune, “If we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical explanation for man, then we lose the validity of Christianity. Period.”

The full article can be found here.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=250103&area=/insight/insight__comment_and_analysis/

I like the observation about being "...unembarrassed by their own scientific illiteracy," but they don't view it that way. Here's a quote from Bob Jones University Press which publishes "Christian Textbooks."

The battle for our students’ hearts and minds is ongoing, and textbooks filled with the errors of secularism, humanism, and materialism are—at best—dangerous. It’s important for Christians to understand that Christianity is reality, not a part of it. Therefore, any education which tries to explain reality apart from Christianity is ultimately false.

In other words secularism and humanism are BY DEFINITION false regardless of the evidence. The Bible is revealed truth and anything, including science, which may contradict the Bible must be rejected. What they fail to understand is that the conflict is not between the Bible and science, but rather between their interpretation of the Bible and science. The average fundamentalist Christian has elevated the dogma developed by men, through the interpretation of the scriptures, into divine infallibility. Worse, now they're trying to force feed this nonsense to the rest of us.

These people are dangerous. I used to think that they were just ignorant and silly, but I realize that I was wrong. These people are dangerous and incompatible with a modern world based upon tolerance, science and the concepts of the Enlightenment.