Your Religion Is False

Generally, I try to avoid debates on topics that contain more than 14 letters. Today I will make a rare exception.

You see, there’s a new book, Unscientific America, arguing that scientific illiteracy threatens our future.

I have no doubt this is true. Just last weekend I wore my Maxwell’s Equations T-shirt out to a nightclub, and not a single woman remarked on how clever it was. And to be frank, I’ve had similar experiences with my “Carbon Based And proud of it!” shirt, with my periodic table tie, and with my “Negative air pressure differentials SUCK!” shirt.

(And you don’t even want to know about my “Geologists Make The Bed Rock” misadventure.)

Like everyone else, I have lots of good ideas about how to solve this problem:

• bring back “El Mundo de Beakman”
• new CBS drama “Dr. Quinn, Postdoctoral Researcher”
• marijuana-growing contests
• daily ballistic pendulum demonstrations in elementary school classrooms
• Tacoma Narrows Bridge video put into constant rotation on MTV and MTV2
• routine in-school showings of pro-biology movies like Underworld: Evolution and Dragonball Evolution
• new national anthem: “She Blinded Me With Science”

“Those are great ideas,” you’re thinking, “and I’d love to fund them. But where’s the debate?”

Well, I haven’t read the book per se, but I’m told that the debate lies in chapters 8 and 9: “Why Wicked Scientists Shouldn’t Tell Credulous Believers That Their Religion Is False” and “Why Wicked Bloggers Shouldn’t Tell Credulous Believers That Their Religion Is False.”

Apparently (and, again, I’m piecing this together from what I read on a couple of blogs and in TV Guide), by telling people that science and religion are incompatible, we’re scaring them away from science (but not from religion).

Instead we should be reassuring them that science and religion are perfectly compatible, just as long as they abandon a few ancillary tenets like “our holy scriptures mean what that say” and “god doesn’t have to obey the laws of physics” and “it’s possible to get pregnant without sperm, and also it’s possible (using 1st-century technology) to come back to life after being dead for three days.”

Actually, I’m pretty sure that we’re also not supposed to point out the necessity of throwing out the religious claims. Better still to trot out Francis Collins and the BioLogos crew.

After all, he worked on the Human Genome Project, so anything he says about science is automatically trustworthy. And if science and religion are compatible enough for him, then who are we to argue?

Tags: accomodationism, ballistic pendulums, beakman, beakman's world, biologos, dragonball evolution, francis collins, geologists, human genome project, maxwell's equations, religion, science, she blinded me with science, tacoma narrows bridge, thomas dolby, underworld: evolution, unscientific america