EGAD

Countering the Crazies

As I mentioned in the comments, there's been some rantage among the locals of late. The primary target is that particularly batty wing of the religious Right that has decided that science is an obstacle that will just have to go. The roll-back-the-Enlightenment crowd, in short. This is just the sort of rumble the blogosphere was made for.

Used to, you could keep track of all the counter-Creationist blogs, for one thing. Now you need group blogs like The Panda's Thumb to do that. When they heckle in person, the counter-Rationalists often score a few points by bringing up an absurd claim about something sufficiently obscure that the hecklee can't bat it down from memory. In Blogistan, the Index to Creationist Claims neatly solves that problem.

Still, it's enjoyable to see my peeps jumping into the mix. For instance, Paul has recently gotten fed up (Bush's endorsement of teaching pseudo-science seems to have been the last straw) and gone on a tear. Although I think he's being both overly optimistic and pessimistic in claiming that there are no credentialed scientists "designing experiments to test the 'God Hypothesis.'" Because I'm quite sure there are, sadly enough. But on the bright side, I'm willing to bet there's a couple out there who are actually doing it in good faith, and interested in the answer.

On a more irreverent front, Kennedy recently posted his take on the Flood according to Biblical literalists. Like most of his rants, well-written and, incidentally, hilarious. My problem with these literalists isn't the laughable science, though. It's that they take a neat and ancient myth about the Hercules of zookeepers and propose with a straight face archeological digs to track down a stadium-sized boat filled with metric tons of dung. It's like trying to find the Augean Stables by digging for an ancient barn with a river running through it, or combing the treasuries of Greece for a literal Golden Fleece. Searching for the Holy Grail is more credible, and that's a quest that has its own Monty Python movie.