Repeat after me:

Christian science is bullshit.
Christian science is bullshit.
Christian science is bullshit.

That’s a lower-case ’s’, by the way. The philosophical Christian Science and the “Church of Christ, Scientist” aren’t out in force trying to alter our laws. They’re much too busy pretending to heal people.

Introduction - About CS

“Christian science” is a rather misleading name for the category. Really, the only things it deals with are the theory of evolution and creationism. Occasionally there’s a wild conspiracy theory about the Flood/Noah’s Ark, the Ark of the Covenant or the Walls of Jericho. Everything else in this category is just regular science with “because God made it that way” thrown in every now and then.

Unlike regular science, which relies on the scientific method to gain empirical data in proving or disproving a hypothesis surrounding a theory, Christian science or “Creationism” interprets the bible according to varying degrees of literalism, then thinks up scientific explanations for the events therein.

The direct result of such a presumptive model of research is that it assumes the theory is correct or absolute, which means that only evidence which supports this theory can be admitted. Evidence which does not support, or even contradicts the theory is discarded or ignored, even when the evidence indicates another hypothesis or theory entirely.

We can see where this type of reasoning would lead if applied to, say, our legal system in which a murderous man is presumed innocent, but any evidence that suggests a guilty verdict is discarded from the case. It’s good for the man, but not so good for the rest of society. This is what I’m getting at: Creationism and other self-styled Christian sciences are great for Christianity, but not so great for the rest of us.

Imagine if the theory of evolution never existed. Would Gregor Mendel have discovered inheritence factors or would he have found them relevant? Had he not discovered them, there would be no reason to discover chromosomes, genes or DNA. Under the guidance of Christian science and their Creationism, we wouldn’t have the understanding of the body or of microbiology to create antibiotics and vaccines, or medicines to treat our diseases, all of which have saved lives, extended life, and made life easier for those who suffer.

Christian scientists would have prevented it because it’s not in the bible.

Would they have, if they’d known the good that would come of it? Possibly. But they didn’t know what would come of it–they were fighting it even then! They think they know what the end result will be, but they don’t. Starting with Darwin and ending with modern life science and medicine, can you imagine what we could have accomplished without all the setbacks by religious hostility?

Creationists claim that God created everything as it exists today but ignore the fossil record. They say the earth is no older than 15,000 years (many say it’s as few as 6,000 years) but ignore carbon dating and all the information stored in a stratigraphic column, as well as the knowledge that stars are millions of light-years away, but we can still see them shining. How can this be considered science?

It can’t, and the creationists know it. Instead of defending their methods, they carry on the long tradition of attacking actual science to make their views seem less… insane.

Unnatural Selection - Creationism vs. Evolution

Might as well get this one out of the way. Evolution. Fundies hate anything that has to do with Darwin, so they attempt to break evolution into a number of parts and attack them separately, drawing conclusions between them… and demonstrate an amazing lack of understanding about them in the process. According to them, nobody was around to observe “evolution,” so it must not exist.

Mutation is a popular target for scrutiny. The creationists say that if mutations exist, there should be millions and millions of examples in the fossil record and no missing links whatsoever. They’ll say that every now and then a human should give birth to a monkey, and vice versa. Why aren’t people occasionally born with wings? They say this is proof that evolution is wrong and creationism is right. There’s no room for more than one possibility in Christian “science.” It’s God or bust.

Another popular target of attack is natural selection/survival of the fittest. The fittest survive. They get the breeding rights, the food, the land. I’m not sure how this is incompatible with Christianity, but for some reason it’s still a target.

Then there are all the outright silly claims of debunkery such as the one where if evolution is true, we should find life randomly appearing all around us. One video I recall has people who weren’t even biologists saying that “the food industry counts on evolution being false” and that “every once in awhile, we should be able to open a jar of peanut butter and find life.” The man then opens the jar and says something like,”nope, no life here.”

Thing is, we do see new life coming into existence every single day. I’ve heard that thousands are discovered daily. Just because you can’t see it with the naked eye doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I mean, seriously, do they expect a worm to randomly come together with all its parts and complex systems in working order inside a jar of peanut butter?

Is it so surprising that literal-minded creationists would attack evolution in such ways? I think not.

Not So Fast! - A Thinking Man’s Retort

Nobody was around to observe Creation, so it must have just been made up by guys who wrote it down in a book. We can actually observe evolution: through a microscope. Because of the extremely high rate of reproduction, viruses and other microbes provide a microcosm of evolution at work. Resistance to immunity, changing from fluid transmission to airborne transmission… is this not the very definition of evolution? Oh, that’s right. We didn’t “see” apes turn into humans.

First off, you don’t have to be present at the first time an event occurs to view it. That’s what a lab is for. Scientists will attempt to simulate the conditions that are believed to have surrounded the event in question. They use what they already know and build upon it, then draw from that knowledge to help explain other things. Christian science, however, uses deceptive reasoning and half truths–of course there will be millions upon millions of transitional fossils if everything that dies becomes fossilized. But it doesn’t work that way. Anyone who thinks about the claim for five minutes can easily reach such a realization.

Want to figure out our origins? Look around you.

“What were conditions like on earth millions of years ago? Let’s look at the rock layers. Ah, traces of meteoric dust in this layer, a meteor must have hit earth during this time. Ah, fossils also exist in and above this layer. We hypothesize that this meteor may have had an impact on environmental conditions. Indeed, we see an increase in deadly chemicals that must have surrounded the air during this period. No bones of mammals have been found in this layer, so we hypothesize that they must not have existed yet.”

Easy enough to follow, right? While this may be a hypothetical train of thought, it’s all based on truth. We can tell when Ice Ages happened, when the air was hot and windy or wet and calm. There are actually layers or rock and sediment we can observe which actually has thinks like meteoric dust settled within it. They’ve used layers of of ice in the polar ice caps in the same way.

But if we are to believe the young-earth creationists, for that dust to get there a meteor must have struck sometime in the past 6000-10000 years–one big enough to leave the same type of dust in the same layer of rock found all over the planet… and it wasn’t mentioned in any oral or written history. Or, maybe they’ll claim that God made it that way. For what? Why have meteoric substances buried between layers of rock meters and meters below the surface?

When they don’t have the answer, they say “God works in mysterious ways,” or “nobody fully understands God’s plan.” In other words,”You stumped us, so we’re going to stop using our Christian science and instead rely on something that is unfalsifiable by science,” which means that it can’t be tested by experiment.

Seems their science only works when it suits them, doesn’t it? Someone ought to tell them that their children are mutants. The overall process involving mutations is that they effect the organism gradually over a very long period of time, thus making arguments such as “why aren’t humans sometimes born with wings” or “why don’t monkeys give birth to humans once in awhile” become non sequitur, almost parodical. Mutations happen during conception every single time. The DNA is changed; that’s a mutation. Otherwise we’d be autosexuals who didn’t need partners to reproduce; we’d just make clones of ourselves.

“Why wouldn’t a monkey give birth to a human, since humans are the next step in evolution, or for that matter, if survival of the fittest is true, then why are monkeys still around?” Obviously there was a genetic split somewhere. Since not every ape breeds with every other ape, evolution is not going to take place at the same pace or even in the same direction among a common species. There’s no reason to believe that apes from Africa would have a common evolutionary path with apes from South America. Look at the differences between tigers and bobcats. Both are kitties, both have fur and claws, but they’re different enough to make a distinction between them. They might as well ask why humans and whales don’t look the same, or why fish don’t sometimes flop out of bird eggs.

So far, here’s the list of some of the tools and evidence each side has:

Science: the fossil record, land formations, laboratories, telescopes, radiocarbon dating, rock layers, geology, dinosaurs, DNA, biology, microscopes, physics, microbiology, chemistry, reason, college degrees and science careers, credibility.

Creationism: the Bible, people who aren’t scientists and believe in the Bible.

The truth is, all this is futile. This whole blog, this whole debate. No matter how much proof you have, they will ignore it. Fail to explain the most minute thing, suddenly there’s a gap that only an all-powerful god can fill. But besides that, creationists can just lie about evolution to debunk it.

The Slyentific Method - Christians on Science.

Science, as I mentioned earlier, relies on the scientific method. The scientific method is a process by which something is studied then has a hypothesis formulated around it, which is tested by empirical means.

Creationists hear this definition and immediately jump up and say you can’t empirically test evolution. They say that people weren’t around back then, and there definitely weren’t scientists who knew what evolution was, so therefore the theory cannot be proven. Because there’s nobody around to watch evolution as it happens, fundies triumphantly claim that it is “bad science.” Even though, as I pointed out earlier, we can and do view it.

Now, the fundies are turning the tables and saying that it’s not Creationism that takes faith, it’s the theory of evolution that takes it. Instead, they argue, Creationism does not require faith because God communicated it to Man through the Bible. We’ll come back to this point in a moment.

They also try to brand people who believe the Theory of Evolution as “evolutionists” and call secularism a religion. Then they have the audacity to cry “separation of church and state!” while demanding that equal time be given to creationist theories in public classrooms. They say that not accepting creationism as an alternative to evolution is intolerant.

Then there’s the big whopper: that evolution is such a controversial topic, there’s a huge debate among scientists about whether or not it even exists.

WTF?

Whenever a scientist shows skepticism towards evolution or any facet thereof, fundies immediately claim him as a creationist. “See!” they say,”even SCIENTISTS question evolution!” Isn’t it a scientist’s job to be critical? I find it reassuring that scientists question their own findings or the findings of others. More often than not, it helps to confirm the results rather than debunk them.The questioning of evolution has been going on for about 150 years and guess what? It’s still around, going strong as ever.

Keeping creationism out of a science class should be self-explanatory. Science class is for science. God-theories are for church. Maybe the fundies ought to be doing their job as Christians rather than asking the state to do it for them.

Dare I even address the assertion that science is a religion? How can such a comparison even exist when one requires evidence and the other requires faith, respectively? What ought to be asked is why Christians are so hostile to evolution and does it have to do with evidence, or does it have to do with their religion?

Are we to believe that these people disagreed with the theory of evolution based on its merits and simply happened to be Christians? Now that demands faith.

Don’t even get me started on ID, or “Intelligent Design.” ID is another presumptive pseudo-science where instead of saying “God created everything,” it comes from the angle that everything appears to have been designed by an intelligent force or being and guided in its progression. Proponents coyly state things like,”Now, if the intelligent cause turns out to be supernatural, that’s a determination that is outside of science.” Yeah, so is saying things were created by an intelligent source. Unless someone out there has a better word for “supreme being capable of creating the universe and guiding everything in it,” why not call a spade a spade: This is god science, creationism with a new label.

The Breakdown - Christian Science is Bullshit.

The paranoia surrounding science, particularly the theory of evolution and origins of the universe, is silly. The idea that science wants to trick people or force them to think a certain way, or tell people they have to make a choice,”us or them,” is ridiculous. Saying that scientists aren’t looking into creation as an alternative means they’re afraid of what they might find is nonsense and shows a lack of understanding.

Science is neutral. It doesn’t give a damn about religion. In fact, letting religion guide their findings is the very definition of “bad science” and should be avoided at all costs! Fortunately for the rest of us, scientific conclusions are based on evidence, not opinion. When fundies complain that science is trying to stifle their opinions, they’re wrong. Uninformed opinions without evidence that are made by people who either A) aren’t scientists or B) don’t have a degree in the field of science they’re criticizing–they have no place in science. We’re not trying to silence you, we’re simply ignoring you and hoping you’ll take the hint.

But that’s not to say that science claims god doesn’t exist, mainly because there’s no way to prove it, hence why it is not considered scientific to make such a claim. Yet, if at the apex of human knowledge and understanding we do indeed discover that there’s a god (or something) that created it all, awesome. Science discovers God. The difference in credibility is that science will have proof to back up their claim, while creationists and ID theorists will still have none.

You see, even if Christian scientists are proven to have been right all along in their conclusion, it does not, by extension, automatically justify their methods. If someone is on trial for a crime, killing all the witnesses is not the right way to reach a ‘not guilty’ verdict, even if the defendant really is innocent.

What fundamentalist Christians need to realize is that science does not have a Secret Agenda of Evil. It is not out to “get” them. Politicians and activists may reference scientific evidence to support their causes, but that does not mean science is altering the results or making bogus claims to push an agenda.

Another ridiculous claim is that most scientists are atheists, and evolution is the only way that atheism can be true (more of the same crappy reasoning that it can only be one or the other). They say that evolutionary science is really a conspiracy by atheists to justify their “religion” of not believing in God. Outrageous!

First off, there doesn’t need to be justification for atheism, especially not to holier-than-thou pharisees like the Religious Right. What ought to be justified is how people are allowed to lie like this and still be taken seriously by our courts and legislatures.

Science is not the enemy of Christianity. Nobody is asking anybody to abandon their faith in God. In fact, the ones who say we must make a choice are the fundies! “Either you believe in God or you believe in Man.” It can only be one or the other? And moreover, who gave you bastards the authority to judge such things? It wasn’t God, and it sure as hell wasn’t us.

A Compromise - Science and Religion in Harmony.

Evolution is perfectly compatible with Christianity. So is the Big Bang theory, for that matter. The Bible said that God created Man, but didn’t go into much detail. The Bible also says that God created the universe and BANG; the universe is created. See, fundies? This is your trump card. Will you play it?

My guess is no. As our knowledge and understanding of the world’s complexity expanded, our superstitious explanations should have naturally declined. Instead of seeing stories in the bible as allegorical comparisons designed to teach us a lesson (think “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”), they’re being interpreted as literal. When people cling to the bible as being a completely accurate transcription of how things happened, they tend to lose the meaning of the stories and the lessons they attempt to teach us. Didn’t Jesus speak in parables? Why would the rest of the bible be much different? Look at Revelations. Most end-times people I’ve encountered regard the book as something that is open to interpretation, not something that is being described in precise detail.

Some atheists make the mistake of labeling everything in the bible as false by association, lumping the mythical side of Christianity with the side that tries to convey a message to help us get along in life. They overlook the wisdom that can be found in many biblical stories. Honestly? They’re missing out.

But why wouldn’t they lump it together? The fundies do it. They’ll focus so much on the details that they end up missing the forest for the trees. Which is more important: whether or not a woman was actually healed by touching Jesus, or the moral about how forgiveness can help to set things right? Do you see what I’m getting at? Think about it.

I’ve come up with a Deistic proposal for fundies to follow. Why isn’t it aimed at “evolutionists,” you ask? Because evolution is playing nice and not trying to destroy Christianity. Maybe someday they’ll return the favor.

First, instead of trying to return to the dark ages, fundies ought to thank their Creator for giving humans brains that are capable of figuring out and understanding how his creations work. Instead of fighting science and characterizing it as a trick by Satan, you should thank all the brilliant people out there who, because of things such as the theory of evolution, were able to establish other branches of science that have led to unprecedented improvements in our ability to prevent and treat disease, prolong life, and save life when it’s endangered.

How about taking the theory of evolution at face value: not as an attack on the Christian faith, but as an imperfect model to help scientists understand the world and how it works. Instead of seeing it as having religious grounds, maybe you ought to at least try to look at it as a neutral area of study that seeks neither to confirm nor deny the existence of God or the validity of your religion.

It’s also time to start taking the bible at face value and recognize the folly of interpreting every line literally while trying to prove it with science, inadvertently driving people away from God while eradicating the fundamental tenet of Christianity: faith.

Is this so unreasonable?

In Closing…

Fundies, it’s time to start doing your job as Christians and start influencing people by setting a good example rather than attacking them for things that you don’t know much about either. Maybe you’ll be such a sparkling example of the love of Christ that you’ll convince others to come to church and join you. Then, you can start winning souls for Jesus like the bible commands instead of trying to mingle science with religion, which just makes people write you off as crazy.

What you could do is follow the example of non-fundie Christians out there who follow the teachings of Jesus, but don’t seem to give a shit one way or the other when it comes to scientific explanations of spiritual events or origins. I’m merely speculating at this point, but maybe these people are enlightened in that they realize how pointless origins really are. Where we came from is not nearly as important as the fact that we are here now and must learn to live together in peace.

How about it, fundies?