What in creation are they thinking?
Everybody who thinks he knows God’s exact opinion about the 2008 presidential election may as well quit reading. Particularly those with anger issues or elevated blood pressure. Because you haven’t got a clue, OK? The last time, everybody who believes GOP stands for God’s Own Party thought the deity had chosen George W. Bush. You’d think that would teach them humility.
Alas, the opposite has happened. As the Republican core shrinks, its ideology grows more anti-intellectual and authoritarian. Australian economist John Quiggin points out at CrookedTimber.org that this is only partly due to reality-based voters turning away from Bush’s failures. It’s also due to “the party’s success in constructing a parallel universe of news sources, think tanks, blogs, pseudo-scientists and so on, which has led to the core becoming more tightly committed to an extremist ideology.”
On many issues, the Republican right increasingly resembles a quasi-religious cult. GOP True Believers appear increasingly committed to an obscurantist worldview exalting “Christianist” theology over facts, superficially mimicking real science while rejecting its methods.
I first encountered this phenomenon covering Arkansas’s “Creation-Science” trial in 1981. Republican Gov. Frank White had signed a so-called Balanced Treatment of Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act mandating Biblical literalism in biology classes. Derived from the superficial concept of “balance” taught in journalism schools and practiced on TV shows like “Hannity & Colmes” – where there are two sides, and ONLY two sides to every question – it equated evolutionary biology with atheism, advocating equal time for God.
A coalition of religious leaders and teachers’ organizations filed suit under the auspices of the ACLU. Of course, biological science no more mandates atheism than do the rules of baseball, which also exclude the supernatural.
Judge William Overton’s astringent decision rebuked the parade of creationist quacks and crackpots who testified. “While anybody is free to approach a scientific inquiry in any fashion he chooses,” he wrote, “he cannot properly describe the methodology used as scientific if he starts with a conclusion and refuses to change it, regardless of the evidence developed during the course of his investigation.”
Creationists didn’t go out of business. Repackaging the product as “Intelligent Design,” they ended up back in a Pennsylvania federal court in 2005, with the same result. Crucial to the effort are well-funded organizations like the Seattle-based Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, which are skilled at cloaking religious dogma in scientific-sounding jargon. Their ultimate goal, explained in Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross’s book “Creationism’s Trojan Horse,” is nothing less than repealing the Enlightenment, i.e. making science subordinate to religion.
Creationists may be getting nowhere with scientists, but they’ve gotten good at bamboozling TV anchorcreatures and other trusting souls. A recent Newsweek poll found 48 percent of Americans rejecting the theory of evolution. Even 41 percent of Catholics dispute it, although the pope does not. Another study found that among 34 developed countries, the United States ranked 33rd in acceptance of biological science, just ahead of Turkey.
Where cult views get downright dangerous, however, is with respect to climatology. How has that become an article of faith? Simple: Al Gore helped make a movie about the threat of human-caused global warming. Overnight, a small industry of self-annointed skeptics sprung up to accuse essentially the entire relevant worldwide scientific community of masterminding an elaborate hoax for the sake of A) scrounging research grants, or B) ushering in worldwide socialism.
Granted, the science behind the global warming hypothesis isn’t as settled as evolution, the most massively documented theoretical construct in history. Dissenters to the anthropogenic (human-caused) view of climate change do exist, although they’re becoming fewer as the data accumulates.
Never mind the Oscar. Gore recently received a standing ovation from the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, earth and space scientists. Could they all be Godless Marxist conspiracists? A voluminous report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with greater than 90 percent certainty that global warming is primarily caused by human activity.
A poll of conservative bloggers by rightwingnews.org, however, found that 100 percent disagreed. Starting with conclusions, conservative “think tanks,” many funded by the oil and coal industry, are churning out shameless propaganda. Even respectable journalists seeking “balance” have done their bit.
The New York Times recently ran an article critiquing “An Inconvenient Truth” by rebutting a claim it never made: that Gore predicted a 20-foot rise in sea level, for example, while U.N. scientists estimated only 23 inches over the next century. But Gore’s hypothetical mentioned no time frame; it was based, moreover, on the possible melting of immense freshwater glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, which the IPCC report did not consider.
Nonsense like that discourages real scientists from entering public debate. But Americans need to hear from them. Ignoring reality is always dangerous; here, it’s become a national security threat. A practical people, most will resist cult beliefs when presented with expert information.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.