Monday, August 08, 2005

God vs. Science

I'm echoing the headline given to the article I'm linking. Most of the time, I'm inclined not to echo the headline, because the writer of a piece seldom writes the headline. However, in this case, the headline is also the first sentence of Bill (no one else's spin zone) O'Reilly.

(Oops! Did I tip my hand there? Naughty me...)

Last Wednseday, O'Reilly opined about the flap over Bush's statements about intelligent design / intellgent origin theory. In particular:

Whatever your belief, it should be respected. But the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science both reject intelligent design and don't want it mentioned in science classes. That, in my opinion, is fascism. There is no reason the students cannot be told that more than a few people, including some scientists, believe the creation of the world, no matter how it occurred, involved a higher power. What on earth is wrong with that?

The answer to that is in the opening sentence.

God versus science: that is the subject of this evening's "Talking Points Memo".

This is not a matter of "science versus God". Despite O'Reilly's attempt at sounding fair, balanced, and even-handed, he has laid out his agenda at the very start. If you believe in God, you can't believe what science tells you. If you accept the science, you may not be against God, but God is against you. If your experience is that no experiment, no observation, no explanation of how things came to be had any need to refer to God, then you're now on God's "b list".

Is that what we want taught in schools? And about how many different subjects do we want that taught?

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