Science or Religion or Superstition?
Posted by admin on 17 Feb 2009 at 07:59 pm | Tagged as: Government
It seems to me with growing frequency that much of what some people call religion is indistinguishable (in this life) with superstition. Neither superstition nor religious belief is provable by measurement or statistics.
I think superstition whenever some belief only works if the believer “has faith”. Nothing wrong with an informed and examined faith, but frankly some of the things many religions would have us believe on blind faith alone are really quite preposterous and unlikely. Creationism in the strict seven days work done 6000 years ago variety of the religious far right seems to me to be such a superstition, certainly not a science at all.
Here we have come to Darwins’ 200th birthday this month, and don’t you know it but that Mr. Jindal’s solidarity with the religious right caused him not to veto the Science Education Act last year. Now that act is causing loss of revenues in Louisiana and also impeding Science in Louisiana. One national group of biological scientists, The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, has canceled their significant convention here, and other groups of scientists are speaking out as well on web sites and blogs.
Geez Louise, evolution has evidence to support its theory all around us. It is a theory, but a well suppported scientific theory of the type science treats as true until or if later proven false. A theory that has withstood years of research and questioning by the same biologists who cancelled their conference here in New Orleans.
Creationism or Intelligent Design has zero science involved, there is no growing body of evidence to support it. In fact evidence says it cannot be as the Earth is more than 6000 years old for a start. It points to the Bible for proof, which one must then first try to translate in the correct context and then also must believe on faith alone (blind faith I think) in the Bible as the inherrent word of God. This is just as silly as the flat earth thing folks, although the flat earth theory had no big religious meaning behind it.
Now, if somebody wants to believe that God created everything in seven days is a metaphor for God or a Higher Power or Nature guiding evolution or setting it in motion, no problem. To stand in the way of Science though, to harm Science and attempt to change its results to fit a superstition, those who do this should be ashamed of themselves. Talk about sore losers. But, you see, if Creationism isn’t “literal” about the seven days and the 6000 years ago, then all kinds of other things in the Bible likely aren’t literal either, it all falls more suspect and needs close inpection.
Mr. Jindal is an educated man and knows better, he should have vetoed the bill last year and needs to see it gets rescinded.