The Blue Voice

«Home | Next: What are you going to do about it?»

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Science Wars

Time Magazine, always the echo of the vox populi, is right on the current bandwagon with its August 15 cover story - Evolution Wars. I don't have a copy yet, but I've been reading it online. A fascinating sidebar story is Can You Believe in God and Evolution?, a forum amongst four people with very different answers to the question. This question, it seems to me, is what this controversy boils down to. The hardcore Creationists, and even the IDers, seem to feel that a scientific belief in Darwin's theory must completely negate a belief in any kind of God. These are the people who believe that everything bad about current culture arises from the work of the evil trinity: Marx, Freud and Darwin. And right now it's Darwin's head they're after. And yet, many contemporary scientists are among the faithful, and in that term I include Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and others I'm not thinking of. The first one answering the " Can You Believe in God and Evolution?" question is Francis Collins, Director, National Human Genome Research Institute. His answer begins with this:

I see no conflict in what the Bible tells me about God and what science tells me about nature. Like St. Augustine in A.D. 400, I do not find the wording of Genesis 1 and 2 to suggest a scientific textbook but a powerful and poetic description of God's intentions in creating the universe. The mechanism of creation is left unspecified. If God, who is all powerful and who is not limited by space and time, chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create you and me, who are we to say that wasn't an absolutely elegant plan? And if God has now given us the intelligence and the opportunity to discover his methods, that is something to celebrate.

It would be a good thing to see other prominent scientists proclaiming the same good news to the lay community: Listen up everybody!! God and Darwin are not mutually exclusive.

More news on the scientific front: one of my favorite science writers, Chris Mooney, has a book coming out very soon. It is titled The Republican War on Science, and it has its own website already. The site tells us that this book is "A stinging indictment of how the Republican Party has not only ignored science but has used bad science to justify its political agenda." Mooney's interest is the intersection of science and politics, and we know that this administration has given him plenty of material for such a book.

Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration.

In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues - stem cell research, climate change, abstinence education, mercury pollution, and many others - the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus.

In The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.

Interesting that both the Time mag pieces and Mooney's book employ the war metaphor in the titles for their subjects.

posted at 12:30:00 PM by marigolds2

| +Save/Share | |