Science

Pat Robertson has long had a tense relationship with the scientific community, even going so far as to tell residents of a Pennsylvania town that in a school board election voted against supporters of teaching Intelligent Design that “if there is a disaster in your area don’t turn to God, you just rejected him from your city…I recommend they call on Charles Darwin, maybe he can help them.” Today on the 700 Club, the televangelist offered a confusing response to a question about the compatibility of science and religion, saying that the “trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don’t know what they’re talking about because they weren’t there.” Robertson maintained that scientists “can’t speculate about the origins of life because they weren’t there” but then claimed it is appropriate to believe a “geologist who tells you something existed 300 million years ago.”

Watch:

Robertson: God created the world; the laws of nature were created by God. True science tries to find out what God put in the world. The trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don’t know what they’re talking about because they weren’t there. They can’t speculate about the origins of life because they weren’t there. If they tell you observable phenomenon then we ought to believe them, and I tell you if you find a geologist who tells you something existed 300 million years ago then you better believe them because he knows what he’s talking about. We don’t want our religious theory go with flat earth.

Earlier this week, Miranda wrote a post about the Religious Right's anti-environmentalism and its relationship to Rick Santorum's recent attack on President Obama's "phony theology."

In the post, she noted that David Barton, of all people, is considered to be an expert on the topic of global warming by Republicans and the Religious Right and that, back in 2007, he even testified before the US Senate on the topic.

A few weeks after delivering that testimony, Barton gave a presentation on the subject of global warming which Wallbuilders recorded and now sells as a CD entitled "Science, The Bible, & Global Warming."

We listened to the presentation yesterday and it was chock-full of the sort of pseudo-science that one would expect from a pseudo-historian like David Barton, as his entire presentation was rooted in the idea that there is science and then there is "false science" ... and "false science" is anything that undermines the Bible:

There is science and there is science that is falsely so-called. See, the Bible doesn't have trouble with science, but it's talking about beware of the stuff that's falsely called science. There's a lot that masquerades in the name of science.

How do you know false science? False science leads you to a certain end. What is that end? That it undermines your faith. So a good definition of false science, at least based on the Bible verse, science that undermines faith is false science and science that's wrongly used it false science.

God's into science. He created everything. He's the great botanist, He's the great zoologist, He's the great every one of those things. He knows better than anyone else because he made it all. But when science takes you to a position that causes you to doubt your relationship with God, causes you to doubt the Bible ... that's called false science.

And since all "real" science has to correspond to the Bible, Barton explains that life does not begin at conception, but rather before conception ... because that is what the Bible says:

If you consider that life begins at conception ... and I have to consider that Biblically, life begins before conception because it says "before you were in your mother's womb I knew you." So I gotta say, well it at least begins at conception. How you handle that Jeremiah verse that says before that I knew you, you know that's an interesting question.

When Matthew LaClair heard his popular high-school history teacher tell students that only Christians will go to heaven, and that evolution has no basis in science, he knew something was wrong. Unlike most 16-year-olds, he knew it was his duty to do something about it.