"... the idea that a rather tenuous reading of a literary work holds the same weight as centuries of scientific evidence is more than a little absurd."

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Comment: If your beliefs can be disproven you should reconsider what you believe.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson v. the Right: Cosmos, Christians and the Battle for American Science
By Sean McElwee, June 23, 2014

The religious right has been freaking out about Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos for what feels like an eternity. And, while the theological complaints seem laughable for their rancor and predictability, it's time we thought harder about what they represent, because the Christian right's Cosmos agita actually indicates a far deeper problem in religious conservatism -- the selective acceptance of Enlightenment values. Religious conservatives have selectively adopted the legacy of liberal Enlightenment, from free speech to science, and jettisoned it when it does not suit their narrow ideological aims.

There is a nasty tendency for those arguing for their case to adopt a stance of enlightened empiricism on one issue to devolve into empirical nihilism on another. There is also the habit of shifting from a high praise of liberal values on one issue to utter contempt on another. Of course, our various liberal values will come into conflict frequently and must be weighed, but we must be disturbed at how quickly some, particularly on the religious right, are willing to twist these traditions for their own gain.

The odd conflict of science and religion has come to define modern religious fundamentalism. While most religious people happily accept scientific theories about gravity, claims about the age of Earth are subject to a strange scrutiny by those who believe that the literary creation narratives in the Bible describe actual events.

The scientific consensus about global warming must be untrue, because, as Dr. Innes writes in Left, Right and Christ, the world is "not a glass ornament that we might accidentally destroy... we are not capable of destroying it, whether by nuclear weapons or carbon emissions." Young earth creationism is the ultimate attempt to both accept modern science, but also to deny it. Fundamentalists like Ken Ham argue that the world and laws we currently observe simply bear no resemblance to the past.

In truth, we cannot get fundamentalism without the scientific revolution. Fundamentalism does not exist independently, but rather defines itself in relationship to post-Enlightenment values. It is the odd melding of science and religion that creates fundamentalism -- the belief that the Bible is ultimately both a scientific and religious text. Fundamentalists, like the conspiracy theorists they resemble, will build up reams of evidence creating the case for something that can be disproven with a simple logical proposition. Few thinkers have built such an impressive edifice of logic and evidence upon such a thin foundation of speculation.

Dinesh D'Souza, for instance, has taken to using science as proof of religion -- he argues, rather absurdly, that the Bible's explanation of the origins of the universe predates modern science. In his speech at Intelligence Squared, he claims:

When the discovery of the big bang came -- this, by the way, was at a time when most scientists believed the universe was eternal, the steady state universe was the prevailing doctrine of American and Western science -- so it came as a shock that the universe had a beginning. Why? Because, in a way, it wasn't just that matter had a beginning, but space and time also had a beginning. In other words, this was something that the ancient Hebrews had said thousands of years ago and without conducting a single scientific experiment. By the way, this is not the same as other cosmologies. Other ancient cosmologies posited the universe being fashioned by a kind of carpenter god who made it out of some preexisting stuff, but the ancient Hebrews said, 'No, first there was nothing, and then there was a universe.'

But this rhetorical flourish is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the creation narrative, and religion in general. Religion, ultimately, aims at truths deeper than science and trying to apply religious reasoning to the natural world is absurd. Augustine warned as much, telling Christians in "De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim" to avoid, "talking nonsense on these topics."

More worryingly, the idea that a rather tenuous reading of a literary work holds the same weight as centuries of scientific evidence is more than a little absurd. D'Souza is trying to selectively apply science, but without its foundation -- empirical, testable, repeatable propositions.

We see here the fundamentalist flaw: A mass of rhetoric, reason and evidence built on the utterly insane proposition that the Old Testament is meant to be a scientific account of the origins of the universe.

The reason any somewhat knowledgeable Christian is frustrated by these debates is that they simply pit one fundamentalist against another. One tries to use science to disprove religion, the other to prove it -- both apparently unaware that belief is something that cannot be "proven." That's the entire point! Too often, religious excursions into science resemble the thinking of the suicidal people described by Anne Sexton, "They ask only what tool, they never ask why build?" Fundamentalism at its core is the misunderstanding of the proper relationship between science and religion -- one practiced just as frequently by atheists as Christians.

[major snippage]
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