GOP Debates: The Flat-Earth Society
May 4, 2007 at 2:20 pm by Wayne GarciaFor those who weren’t glued to their cable-enabled televisions for what one wag has termed a 10-man simultaneous press conference (more commonly known as the GOP President Debates from California on MSNBC), there is this gem about evolution.
John McCain was asked about his views on the scientific fact that is natural selection and evolution:
Moderator: Senator McCain, this comes from a Politico.com reader and was among the top vote getters in our early rounds. They want a yes or a no. Do you believe in evolution?
McCain: Yes.
Moderator: I’m curious, is there anybody on the stage that does not agree, believe in evolution?
At this point, three proud Christian conservatives raised their hands: Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee.
Such is the power and lure of Christian voters in the Republican presidential primary that these three brainiacs are willing to turn aside all of their education and hundreds of years of evidence to please those who want to throw Darwin into the trash heap.
Even McCain felt compelled to soften his correct answer a bit to kowtow to the Christian Right:
McCain: May I just add to that?
Moderator: Sure.
McCain: I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.
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May 4th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
It doesn’t really surprise me all that much. Evolution scares the hell out of a certain personality type that really *needs* there to be Someone Up There In Charge, because it explains how we got here without needing a guiding hand at all.
It doesn’t say that there *couldn’t* be a God up there keeping his hand in by directing evolution, but it doesn’t say there has to be one either. And that’s where it runs afoul of your average fundamentalist or conservative evangelical (or conservative Catholic, for that matter).
The validity of the theory of evolution isn’t really in doubt among people who know the evidence for it. It isn’t in doubt among the people who see how well (and how easily) it explains mountains of data from dozens of different fields of study. There isn’t a controversy about whether or not evolution took (and is taking) place; there is only a controversy among people who want to stick their fingers in their ears and chant “la la la la” instead of taking the trouble to enlarge their view of their God.
May 7th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Spend some time in an astronomy lab, a geology field trip, in a physics class or a chemistry or biology lab and science makes really makes you marvel at the wonders of the universe. Many people that I spent time in school with that were devoutly religious used to tell me that all these wonders reinforced their beliefs.
May 8th, 2007 at 12:04 am
And that’s actually a good way for a lay person to think about it - “Imagine the kind of a God that could set in motion this kind of universe!” That requires a larger imagination than many people are used to using, though.
May 8th, 2007 at 7:12 am
All three candidates have since “clarified” their statements about not believing in evolution to make it more of an “evolution explains life; creationism explains what set it all in motion” stance. Wired has one account at http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/05/post.html
May 9th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Brownback didn’t really modify his stance. He brought out some weasel-words to make it *sound* like he’s not a doofus, but if you read it closely you’ll see he didn’t change much of anything at all.
Tancredo went furthest of the three, and Huckabee was somewhere in the middle. If you read Philip Johnson’s books (Darwin on Trial, etc.) he comes out and basically admits that Creationism will never beat evolution in the scientific arena (not very straightforwardly, since he’s a lawyer by trade) because evolution has way more evidence than creationism. He whines that “materialistic” science unfairly tilts the playing field against religion, and he argues for changing the rules to allow supernatural “evidence” to be considered. If you want a really amusing read, I recommend _Darwin on Trial_. It’s a volume full of special pleading that inadvertently lays out the weaknesses in the whole creationist enterprise.
Science confines itself to things that can be observed, or inferred from observation, or inferred from logical consideration of theories. Anything considered in science has to be definable and ultimately quantifiable; things like “God” or “Creator”, whose definition varies with the person, are out of bounds.