Creation & Healing In The New Theocracy

What follows is a bit of a digest of a conversation that several friends of mine are having in a closed forum.  Several of them are academics and / or scientists.   Here, I  report and comment on the ideas presented there.

----------

December 17, 2010: Gallup releases a poll documenting that four out of every ten American believe in "strict creationism," that is, the belief that human beings were created by God more or less as we are now less than 10,000 years ago.

This is down just a hair since 1982, suggesting that, though the evidence mounts for our common descent with other primates, something in the culture has retarded acceptance of the data. 

Acceptance of the evidence for human evolution increases with education, and (unsurprisingly) is inversely related to church attendance.   That seems natural enough: church is after all a religious sub-culture, which is to say that it practices enculturation in thoughts that evade, resist or totally refuse scientific processes: the proposition "there is an unseen God at work in seen phenomena" is of course a statement that science cannot approach.

More interestingly to me, there's a heavy discrepancy between Republican and Democrat views:

This suggests that the Right Wing's entanglement with religious fundamentalism and Evangelicalism over the last three decades has been quite fruitful, and the fruit is really bad fruit: Republicanism is more or less in the business of denying the evidence on the matter of human origins, and is not coincidentally increasingly in the business of positioning itself outside the rough and difficult business of obtaining scientific consensus.

But Republicans today are in appalling disarray, morally.   It isn't enough to have denied that science can speak more clearly on human origins than a politician with a Bible can do.

When in doubt, take a little fear of having your pocketbook plundered, anti-intellectual terror of things you don't understand, and some worst cases, combine, frappé, and serve in a populist salad of paranoia.  So goes the Hell's kitchen that is the Republican leadership.  Republican House Whip Rep. Eric Cantor has launched a movement in which citizens get the line item veto on National Science Foundation grants.  Well, more precisely, citizens get to inform on grants they think are bogus or want removed from the public dole.

Well, sure... I mean, let's stop waste in the NSF, right? 

Not exactly the problem.  If Americans generally (and Republicans and church-goers more specifically) weren't disproportionately and self-evidently anti-science on the origins of the human race, this would be a more defensible position.  But I'm not sure I would trust 52% of Republicans to understand a high school science project.  Evidence does not matter to these people: dogma and religion do.

Cantor, the only Republican Jewish member of the U.S. Congress, cannot be directly linked with the Christian Right's prostitution to toadstool conservatism, but he also opposes embryonic stem cell research.  His brave new Republicanism opposes this research on moral grounds that are, I believe, becoming less and less tenable.  The moral objection to destroying a fetus to harvest embryonic stem cells is not a foolish or frivolous concern, as some on the Left would have it: to "strip for parts" (however useful those parts are) what is, after all, a viable embryo with a full compliment of DNA short-circuits the important (though stalled) debate on the beginning of human life. 

But the debate is a complex one.

Robert Lanza, who has recently written that "we're not just the collection of cells and molecules classical science describes," happens also to be the man who in 2006 published in Nature a letter suggesting that stem cells can be harvested in ways that do not destroy the embryo.  In the years since, there have been methods developed for creating induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells from adult skin.  The technique was pioneered in 2006 by Shinya Yamanaka's team at Kyoto University, and refined by several teams subsequently.

But for the Right, there is no retreat.  Just this month, Matthew Hoberg, writing for Lifenews website, lies this way: "Until recently, such cells could be produced only by destroying human embryos and harvesting embryonic stem cells. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) sought a method of producing pluripotent cells without destroying embryos."

It isn't opponents of stem cell research that pioneered IPS cell research.  It was friends of knowledge, of science, and of what can be done. 

But the obstructionism of the Right is likely to continue for a long, long time.  Until both religious people and conservatives purge themselves of their anti-intellectualism, they will condemn those whom science can help.  And they will continue to condemn those who really want truth as they force their young to choose between spiritual and intellectual suicide.