Friday, August 15, 2008

University of California

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/12/BAQT129NMG.DTL&tsp=1


A federal judge has decided that the University of California has the right to deny credit to students who have been taught that the bible is absolute and that evolution is false. This is a long overdue ruling and I'm glad to finally see a Judge that is willing to stand up for the truth. Let's face it, evolution has been shown to be beyond any reasonable objections at this time and it is absolutely ridiculous that science students should be taught anything to the contrary. It is unclear to me why this is still an issue in America but it seems to surface again and again.

Actually I do realize why it is an issue, its because of the high powered religious right and their misunderstanding of the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution runs counter to a literal interpretation of the creation story in the book of Genesis and for this religious fundamentalists would like to see evolution left out of the class room. They have even advanced Intelligent Design as a competing theory and advocated giving it equal footing to evolution in science classes. There is a blatantly obvious problem with this idea and it is that intelligent design is not based on observable evidence or anything of the sort. If a literal interpretation of the Genesis story doesn't fit with observable, testable science then it is only sensible to infer that the book of Genesis cannot be a literal story but is instead figurative. A sizable portion of if not a majority of Christians understand this point and view the book of Genesis as a figurative description of creation, but there are hold outs and they manage to control a large enough collection of votes (and currency) to occasionally push their ideas into fruition. They do not want to discover the nature of the universe or our place in it, they merely want to reinforce their beliefs. We cannot sit idly by and allow this to happen unchallenged. Any group that advocates willful ignorance, for any reason at all, must be seen as an enemy of society. Knowledge is not the enemy of Christianity and I certainly won't stand by and allow the fundamentalist movement to turn Christianity into the enemy of knowledge.

This all goes back to one of my fundamental beliefs about reality: One cannot choose the truth. Sure the choice can be made to ignore the truth or to suppress the truth but the truth still remains, neither strengthened by allies nor weakened by detractors the truth simply is...TRUTH.