thou shalt not be a dumbass…

One of my readers (dop) posted an article in her weblog yesterday about a dinosaur-themed Creationist theme park yesterday. I think she expected me to be shocked. I gave up on that long ago. Mostly it just makes me sad now.

There are two kinds of “Creationists” really… I think of them as active and passive Creationists. The passive ones actually worry me the most. The active ones are easy to dismiss as just plain nuts. They are the ones who go around suggesting that the Earth is really only 6000 years old and that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark and that Leviathan was a dinosaur and that the Flood killed all the dinosaurs and that pretty much everything we think we know about biology, geology, astronomy, and nuclear physics is WRONG. They try to back up their claims with “scientific” evidence and then ask that their demented, borderline clinically insane interpretations of scientific data be taught in schools as evidence that God created the Earth in 6 days. And I used to try to argue with these people… I used to try to go over to talk.origins on Usenet and have intelligent conversations with them, but nothing could be more pointless. Because anyone who can read the Bible and look at the story of Noah and read that as a historical document rather than an allegorical Fairy Tale… I mean… what are you going to say to someone like that? They are clearly not using anything even vaguely resembling a rational thought process. It’s the exact same kind of absolutely blind, incoherent devotion to an outdated mentality that causes certain other breeds of fundamentalists to blow themselves up and fly planes into buildings. It is stubbornly, defiantly, gleefully anti-thinking.

But the passive Creationist is someone who has never really thought about it much. If you ask him or her, they will say that God created Man. But if you pin them down on the age of the universe or the question of evolution, they’ll say… well… I believe that God made the Big Bang happen or “guided” evolution or something. Or worse, they’ll say… Oh maybe that’s true, but the scientists just haven’t proven it. Which is a huge failure on the part of science, and our educational system. That makes me sad. It makes me sad that in 12 years of school… nobody explained to these people how science works, or what science IS, or what a THEORY is, or HOW we know what we know about the world. Because these people were told some things in Sunday School when they were 8, and nobody ever taught them anything more… MORE… they were never taught to question or to think for themselves… they were never taught to look for something BETTER. It’s like coming across a 34 year-old who still believes in Santa Claus or still thinks babies come from the Stork something. It’s… SAD. These people aren’t being belligerent or hardheaded or clinging blindly to a millennium-old worldview. They just haven’t been educated. We’ve failed.

And these are the people whom the active Creationists are targeting with their fucking theme parks. (I mean, besides brainwashing their own children.) And it’s funny that the theme park that they are talking about in this story is about an hour from where I’m moving this summer. Maybe I’ll have to pay it a visit. Maybe I’ll have to hand out some pamphlets or something!

But what gives me faith is the knowledge of what happened with Copernicus. When Copernicus said that the Earth goes around the Sun, the first reaction was to ignore it. A couple of scientists paid attention. Nobody else. A generation later, people began to believe it. Then the Church paid attention. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake… Galileo was “vehemently suspected of heresy”, forced to denounce the belief, and placed under house arrest. But 50 years later ALL of the astronomers in Europe believed that the Sun was the center of the solar system. A hundred years after Copernicus, it was being taught in the universities. And 150 years after Copernicus’s death, his theory was being taught in Protestant secondary schools in his home country of Poland.

Darwin died in 1882. By my count we’ve got another 30 years or so left until we can look forward to the word “Creation Science” disappearing once and for all from the mouths of our uneducated School Boards. It WILL happen eventually.

I have faith.

dave (doctorsilence.blogspot.com)