{"id":764,"date":"2014-04-13T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-13T17:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/04\/america-stupidly-stuck-between-religion-and-science.html"},"modified":"2014-04-13T17:05:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-13T17:05:00","slug":"america-stupidly-stuck-between-religion-and-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/04\/america-stupidly-stuck-between-religion-and-science.html","title":{"rendered":"America: Stupidly Stuck between Religion and Science"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
Karl Marx\u2019s famous maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, can apply just as well to the history of ideas as to the political sphere. Consider the teapot-tempest over religion and science that has mysteriously broken out in 2014, and has proven so irresistible to the media. We already had this debate, which occupied a great deal of the intellectual life of Western civilization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it was a whole lot less stupid the first time around. Of course, no one on any side of the argument understands its philosophical and theological history, and the very idea of \u201cWestern civilization\u201d is in considerable disrepute on the left and right alike. So we get the sinister cartoon version, in which religious faith and scientific rationalism are reduced to ideological caricatures of themselves, and in which we are revealed to believe in neither one.<\/span><\/div>\n
Young-earth creationism, a tiny fringe movement within Christianity whose influence is largely a reflection of liberal hysteria, is getting a totally unearned moment in the spotlight (for at least the second or third time). Evangelist\u00a0Ken Ham<\/a>\u00a0of the pseudo-scientific advocacy group Answers in Genesis gets to \u201cdebate\u201d Bill Nye the Science Guy about whether or not the earth is 6,000 years old, in a grotesque parody of academic discourse. Ham\u2019s allies, meanwhile,\u00a0complain<\/a>\u00a0that Neil deGrasse Tyson\u2019s new \u201cCosmos\u201d TV series has no room for their ludicrous anti-scientific beliefs. If anything, Tyson\u2019s show has spent a suspicious amount of time indirectly debunking creationist ideas. They seem to make him (or, more properly, his writers) nervous. Not, as Ham would have it, because somewhere inside themselves these infidels recognize revealed truth, but because religious ecstasy, however nonsensical, is powerful in a way reason and logic are not.<\/span><\/div>\n
Everyone who writes a snarky Internet comment about why the T-Rex couple didn\u2019t make it onto Noah\u2019s ark betrays the same nervousness, and so do earnest Northeast Corridor journalists who rush to assure us that Ham\u2019s elaborate fantasy scenarios about fossils and the Grand Canyon are not actually true, and that we would all find science just as wonderful as religion if only we paid attention. (Such articles strike me as totems of liberal self-reassurance, and not terribly convincing ones at that.) Repeating facts over and over again doesn\u2019t make them any more true, and definitely doesn\u2019t make them more convincing. I suppose this is about trying to win the hearts and minds of some uninformed but uncommitted mass of people out there who don\u2019t quite know what they think. But hectoring or patronizing them is unlikely to do any good, and if you believe that facts are what carry the day in American public discourse then you haven\u2019t paid much attention to the last 350 years or so.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karl Marx\u2019s famous maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, can apply just as well to the history of ideas as to the political sphere. Consider the teapot-tempest over religion and science that has mysteriously broken out in 2014, and has proven so irresistible to the media. We already had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAmerica: Stupidly Stuck between Religion and Science<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Karl Marx\u2019s famous maxim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, can apply just as well to the history of ideas as to the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/04\/america-stupidly-stuck-between-religion-and-science.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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