A Long, Overdue Nap

"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture,"
-Pastor Roy Mummert, who isn't too keen on evolution.

The good pastor should know something about the whole evolution/creation fight. While believing in an all-powerful God who is at the helm of everything (running the scene as if playing "SimUniverse") can be comforting to the fearful and pious, it's terrible science. Here's where evolution vs. creation falls apart. While evolution is a theory, it's a theory that can be tested in a lab. It's a theory that's been observed in the wild. It happens in nature, and while not completely perfect, it works.

Creationism, on the other hand, can't be verified. You can't back up the universe into your lab and replicate the creation of Life, the Universe, and Everything in seven days or less. It's a nice idea, but it's a piece of mythology, just as the idea that Athena sprouted from the head of Zeus. Try doing a peer review of God's handiwork sometime, and not start a holy war. It's impossible, because God, that clever rascal, didn't leave behind a copy of his/her intelligent design blueprints for us to decipher. All we have left is trying to guess what God meant, what God was up to, and for centuries we beat ourselves to death over a turn of phrase. Meanwhile, here comes evolution, getting the job done in explaining how we got to where we were. Again it's not perfect, but about 150 years after Darwin comes along the hands-on practice of genome testing, which does handily fill in the gaps of explaining how organisms grow or die.

Of course the grand irony of all this is for scientists to prove God did create the universe, they'd need some bad-ass science experiment to pull off. And once you have the gear to replicate what God did, once you have the power to create a universe and terraform planets in less than a week, God becomes irrelevant.

But of course, the pious don't want people in the reality-based community to poke holes in the fabric of divine tapestry. Having science chew through scripture makes the flock realize the Holy Book is just a set of stories and not the iron law of society. When people start thinking, religion gets nervous. Here in America, we've been deluged with anti-intellectualism and power faith since 2000. As firebrand cartoonist Ted Rall recently put it, "After the 2000 election, it's the dumb and the mean lording it over the smart and the nice." We have a media that tolerates and promotes lies. We have leaders who prop up the brain dead for political means. We have wars based on falsehoods. We have a giant ignorance field set up in this nation where the opponents get shouted down and the dissenter gets firebombed within a 24-hour news cycle. It's heresy to poke holes in the comfy little tapestry that says everything is okay. Torture is necessary. Nothing we do is illegal. Don't worry about soldiers coming home in the middle of the night without limbs, without health care, without jobs.. In the arts, we have banality as far as the eye can see: from "American Idol" to Jessica Simpson to faux-outrages to "reality" shows to generic sitcoms where you know the punchline from 100 yards out. No discussion, just a feed from the blue glow keeping the Happy-Happy Tapestry up and running.

In the April (fools?) edition of Scientific American, the editors get into the act, writing a tongue-in-cheek mea culpa: "Okay, We Give Up."

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

It's insidious, but in the past five years, you feel this sort of mission creep come over your soul where you want to just hide out in your home or stop being creative. Irony is dead, satire is irrelevant, compassion is a dirty word unless you use to invade a country or keep a brain-dead human alive a little longer to appease your base. It's the March of the Stupid that we rational Americans have had to deal with in the past five years, and we'd love for it to just go away. We're a patient lot, us rationalists. We know no system can sustain itself forever. Oceans ebb and flow, clouds form and break, empires rise and fall. Eventually, the March of the Stupid will get tired, the movement will falter, that so-called "tipping point" will be reached and -zap- the sun rises and everything returns to a reasonable shade of normal.

But it gets tiring as the zealots in charge keep finding a way from not falling out of power. Maybe that's why they hate science. Maybe they know an end comes to everything, and like children, if they pretend they aren't sleepy, maybe they won't be put down for a nap.

Battle Stations

OneWord.com is not operational as of this post. Their domain name has expired, and I hope they get back on the air soon. If we lose them, we're going to lose a great 60-second tap into the soul.