E pur si muove

Last updated on: May 11, 2013 at 10:41 am by Fred Clark

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E pur si muove 2013-05-11T10:41:19-04:00 Fred Clark

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In comments below, Lila provides a link to this account of Bill Nye the Science Guy's visit to a Texas community college.

Who doesn't love the Science Guy? Well, I guess the fundies don't:

The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light,” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light.

A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence.

“We believe in a God!” exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.

This is what Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, meant when he warned of "creationism … reducing the doctrine of creation."

This sad, angry woman has somehow been convinced that it is impossible to believe in God without also believing in an illiterately literal reading of Genesis 1:16. She's painted herself into a corner in which she must reject not only evolution, but the existence of the dark side of the moon. She is forced to regard Neil Armstrong as the pawn of Satan.

This is the inevitable conclusion of the brittle faith she has been taught. It is impossible, she has been told, to believe in God without also accepting this unworkably literal reading of every phrase in the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Thus, if the moon simply reflects the light of the sun and does not itself project light, she believes, then there is no God. And that means, she has been taught, that life is random, meaningless, nasty, brutish and short.

That's part of the fundamentalist "worldview" — to use one of their favorite words — that only these two options exist. Option No. 1: Total and unquestioning belief in the God of the fundies' literalist text. Option No. 2: Nihilism.

Her three young children are being taught this binary worldview. What will become of them? I've seen this story play out before, dozens of times. The only way to preserve the fragile faith they are being taught is to keep it sheltered from the world, like John Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble — they have to be sent to fundie school, or to be home-schooled, until they are old enough to attend Bob Jones University. In the meantime they must be kept away from Bill Nye, and the Discovery channel, and NASA.gov. They can't even be allowed to watch The Boy in the Plastic Bubble lest they begin to ask dangerous questions about Buzz Aldrin.

Some few of these kids will somehow manage to maintain this soap-bubble faith all the way through to adulthood. They'll marry within the bubble and teach this fundamentalism to another generation of children. But those cases are the exceptions. Reality is too hard and pointy a place for soap bubbles to survive very long and most of these kids will end up being forced by reality to reject Option No. 1. Unsurprisingly, they tend to turn to what they have been taught is their only alternative.

A friend of mine attended an unaccredited fundamentalist elementary school out near Williamsport, Pa., where children were taught a variety of young-earth creationism. The teachers there weren't clever enough to embrace the "Omphalos hypothesis," (the last-Thursdayism I heard from my own middle school science teacher), so they had to reject any apparent facts that implied the universe had existed for more than 6,000 years. Thus, I kid you not, children at this school were taught that the stars were tiny lights in the heavens, none further than 6,000 light-years away. Their soap-bubble faith required them to assert that the universe was roughly 1/2,500,000th its actual size.

My friend soon escaped that place for an accredited school in the reality-based community, but she kept in touch with some of her old classmates from the soap-bubble school. They became drop-outs, drunks and druggies. Why? Because at some point they had seen a lunar eclipse, or they had learned that the Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away. And they had been taught that if the moon itself is not a "light," or if the universe were older than 6,000 years, then there's no reason to become anything other than a drop-out, a drunk and a druggie.

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