Wednesday, March 11, 2009

"Why should we be afraid to test our worldview against reality?"

Because by setting your "worldview" from "reality," you concede that your basis for scientific explanation was written when the Earth was assumed to be flat and that it was perfectly reasonable that an omnipotent God would play an elaborate Punk'd by asking a man to burn his son to death. This is a fine measure on which to base a faith, if that's your thing, but not exactly deserving of a national science prize.

I really try not to be anti-religious, in spite of religions being historically anti-intellectual--I do try to turn the other cheek, as it were--but sentences like this just infuriate me:
"If Christianity is true, it better be true in the natural history museums and in the zoos."
Christianity is a faith. To believe it, by definition, you must disregard all rational evidence to the contrary. I can't say definitively that God does or does not exist--one cannot prove a negative. But somehow, these nitwits think that just because they believe it to be true, a museum is supposed to base their exhibits on a grand conjecture that includes stories about men trapped in whales? Should Pinocchio be included too?

Museums are for teaching, and museums based on science should teach on observable phenomena and measureable data. To suggest that it is somehow improper for the museum to ignore someone's purported invisible man in the sky into their exhibits would be laughable if not so repugnant to reason.

It does not take an atheist to understand the difference between faith and science. Even when science is wrong, it is wrong for discrepancies in observation. By contrast, it is not wrong for, say, basing hypotheses on 2000 year old stories that--to be kind--stretch the imagination.

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