Friday, July 22, 2005

Young Earth, Old Fools

Ronald Bailey, Reason's science correspondent and author of Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, has been attending the 2005 Creation Mega-Conference in Lynchburg, Virgina. For the past few days, Bailey has been posting a journal of his daily experiences at the conference, with a surprisingly limited amount of snarkiness. He does a great job of commenting on the logical fallacies and misleading arguments of the Young Earth creationists he has been listening to, and his closing thought on the conference is, really, one that makes you sad for these people and concerned for the future:
"With Batten's lecture, my time among the creationists came to an end. Just as the Reverend Jerry Falwell promised, there were no snake-handlers at the Creation Mega-Conference. Instead the conferees were a bunch of decent people trying to make sense of the world and live good lives. The deeply saddening thing is that these decent people have come to believe they have to reject modern science in order to do so."

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why religion and science must be balanced. Should science be completely adrift from religion, it could lack morality and turn to Mengelism (though certainly religion is not the only source of morality, it is an important one). Should religion control science, science ceases to explore the big questions and consider data and research beyond religious text. As Bailey says, according to some conferees, 'God said it, so it is true.'
(Crossposted by Bostondreamer at Floridablues)
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