Anti-Science on the Science Committee

Monday, October 8, 2012 at 12pm
By John Friedman

Those who read my stuff know that I have a soft spot for numbers, and that I regret having not done more math in school.

The same is true for science, except my science education stopped at the end of my high school career rather than barely into it.

So over the years I’ve read a lot of lay-science books as well as lay-math books. There are a lot of great ones out there.

The draw for me from both of these subjects is that they both get closer to absolute truths than most other disciplines. For instance, and using a close-to-home example, when a structural engineer, using a lot of arithmetic and a lot of materials science and physics, signs off on a 2,717 foot tall building being able to stand up, essentially, forever, that’s not a guess or a belief: it’s a stone cold fact, not quite up to the exactitude of, say, 2 + 2 = 4 or the speed of light being 299,792,458 meters per second, but close enough so that folks hang out inside of the Burj Khalifa (also known as the Burj Dubai) all the time and without giving a second thought to the possibility of the building doing an all-fall-down.

So science has helped us to do a lot of amazing things by, in part, giving us the knowledge to predict what will happen over time.

*  *  *

I bring this up because scientists and lay-scientists, everywhere and alike, are aghast, flabbergasted and slack-jawed at a video in which Representative Paul Broun, from Georgia’s 10th District (which is east of Atlanta, bordering South Carolina and encompassing Athens and Augusta), goes 180 degrees in the opposite direction, and does so in a visual setting that you really have to see to believe:

 

Yes, those are, as best I can tell, a lot of dead animals, brought down, predictably, by some physics and math and human beings, and then preserved via some biology and chemistry and human beings.

 *  *  *

Representative Broun sits, with his peer Todd Akin, on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology; his educational qualifications for this role are having a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta and a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Georgia in Athens.

In the video, Broun has this to say:

All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the Pit of Hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

Representative Broun then goes on to say that the Bible is the “manufacturers handbook”, which teaches us how to run our lives individually . . . and . . . how to run . . . everything in society.

*  *  *

Personally, I do not want the Bible teaching any of us how to build a tall building, thank you very much.

 

 

537 words (less than a six-minute read sans links)

◄ Back to Blog
Categories:
Tags:

Leave a Comment

Name
Email
Website
Message