Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I used to think that, among all the Republican candidates for President, Marco Rubio—the Conservative Kennedy—would ultimately get the nod (Trump is still leading the pack). I don’t like his views, but he doesn’t seem as much of a nutcase as Carson or Trump, and I wouldn’t have to scourge myself with whips if he was elected. However, he’s still marinated in faith, and, as the Christian Post reports, Rubio undertook some theodicy in a talk in New Hampshire on November 30. Like all the GOP candidates, he parades his tiresome faith at every turn.
Rubio answered his rhetorical question about why God let the Paris attacks and the Twin Towers attack occur by raising one of the tired old tropes of Christianity: God’s plan is beyond our ken, but, in the end, it leads to ultimate justice (the video of his remarks is at bottom). The CP report:
The 44-year-old senator continued by saying that even when people pray to God for guidance, they are often not given the answers they want.
“We are ordered to have peace. The peace that you are left with is not the peace of ‘it’s going to all work out great.’ [JAC: Except that it will—see below.[ We are not promised that,” Rubio stated. “Those of us who share the Christian faith, the only thing we are promised is adversity. We are told you will be discriminated against, hated, you will be persecuted. Obviously, we are fortunate to live in a country where the persecution is relative compared to other parts of the world.”
. . . Rubio then explained that he was asked during a campaign event a few days prior, “Where was God on 9/11? Where was God in Paris?”
“I said, ‘where God always is — on the throne in Heaven.’ The question was how could God allow these bad things to happen? It always challenges us to understand that God’s ways are not our ways,” Rubio argued. “What we may interpret as bad, and most certainly is in the case of Paris or 9/11, even that is part of a broader plan for the universe and for our lives that we are just not going to know the answer to. God’s ways are not our ways.”
In other words, God Works in Mysterious Ways. How, then, does Rubio know that God is good rather than evil, or that he even takes an interest in justice?
Rubio then said that God’s master plan confuses people during challenging times just as small children are confused as to why their parents would let doctors hurt them with needles when getting a vaccine.
“All that child understood at 3 years or 4 years of age is that my father and my mother, who love me, is allowing a stranger to stick a needle in my arm, in this case, some other region of the body, and it hurts, it hurts a lot. ‘Why are they allowing me to be hurt by this stranger? I don’t understand that,'” Rubio said of his child. “But I understood. While that needle hurt for 3 or 4 seconds, that needle was going to prevent something much more dangerous and much more painful and much harder later on.”
What gets me about this is that Rubio asserts that “God’s ways are not our ways,” but then uses an example showing that God’s ways ARE our ways: like children, we’re given pain for some reason we can’t understand, but it’s given because it make things come right at the end. How does Rubio know that?
If God’s ways are truly mysterious, then how do we know anything about the nature of God? I suppose Rubio would reply that the Bible tells us about the nature of God. But then the Bible also tells us about God’s ways. The relevant example is the story of Job, whose sufferings were inflicted by God just to test whether he’d remain pious in the face of suffering. In other words, God tortured Job as a test of loyalty. And, I suppose, that’s why God killed off all those Parisians and New Yorkers—to see if the rest of us would retain our belief (and presumably our salvation) in our sorrow.
Of course, a God having such ways is empirically indistinguishable from no God at all.
My colleague Richard Posner teaches at our law school, is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Seventh Circuit, has repeatedly been mentioned as a candidate for the Supreme Court (he says he’s too old now), and is the most cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century. He’s also written 40 books, so is clearly an overachiever. Posner is generally characterized as a conservative, but that’s not an accurate label since he favors the legalization of both marijuana and gay marriage.
Posner’s penchant for leftish views was on show yesterday with an op-ed in the New York Times co-written with Eric Segall, a law professor at Georgia State. The piece, “Justice Scalia’s majoritarian theocracy“, decries the increasingly theocratic and loopy views of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. I give a few excerpts below (my emphasis). I hadn’t realized how anti-gay Scalia really was, though of course he’s a devout Catholic.
The Supreme Court has decided four major cases furthering gay rights. Justice Antonin Scalia has written a bitter dissent from each.
In Lawrence v. Texas, for example, where the court invalidated Texas’ ban on homosexual relations between consenting adults, Justice Scalia complained that: “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”
He added: “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive. The Court views it as ‘discrimination’ which it is the function of our judgments to deter. So imbued is the Court with the law profession’s anti-anti-homosexual culture, that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously ‘mainstream.’”
. . . In a recent speech to law students at Georgetown, he argued that there is no principled basis for distinguishing child molesters from homosexuals, since both are minorities and, further, that the protection of minorities should be the responsibility of legislatures, not courts. After all, he remarked sarcastically, child abusers are also a “deserving minority,” and added, “nobody loves them.”
. . . Obergefell [Obergefell et al. v. Hodges et al.: the gay-marriage case] seems to obsess him. In a speech at Rhodes College in Memphis, he said that the decision represents the “furthest imaginable extension of the Supreme Court doing whatever it wants,” and that “saying that the Constitution requires that practice” — same-sex marriage — “which is contrary to the religious beliefs of many of our citizens, I don’t know how you can get more extreme than that.” The decision, he said, “had nothing to do with the law.”
The suggestion that the Constitution cannot override the religious beliefs of many American citizens is radical. It would imply, contrary to the provision that forbids religious tests for public office, that religious majorities are special wards of the Constitution. Justice Scalia seems to want to turn the Constitution upside down when it comes to government and religion; his political ideal verges on majoritarian theocracy.
The notion that our laws should somehow cater to “the religious beliefs of many of our citizens” is bizarre and scary—and, as Posner and Segall note, clearly violates the First Amendment to the Constitution, intended to protect minority faiths and nonbelief. And the comparison between gays and child molesters is reprehensible. Scalia’s statements bespeak someone so extreme, so marinated in faith, that he’s actually unstable—no longer able to judge judiciously. If judges could be fired, I’d say Scalia should get the pink slip immediately.
As an aside, Posner’s Wikipedia page describes his devotion to his Maine Coon cat, Pixie: I’ve previously featured on this site a photo of Pixie provided by judge Posner. I’ll show Pixie again, but go to the original post to see Posner’s notes on his beloved felid.
Tell us something about yourself that is largely unknown and perhaps surprising.
Well, I’m a very big cat person. Used to like dogs, then I switched. I have a big crush on my current cat. I like animals generally. I’m very soft about animals. My cat is a Maine Coon named Pixie. What’s unusual about her, besides being beautiful and intelligent, but she’s affectionate. Very unusual in cats. She likes to give us nuzzles and be with us. Her little face falls if either of us leaves the house. She’s very social. She appears to recognize members of our families, kids and grandchildren. She’s a real sweetie. It’s one of the reasons I work at home a lot now. The nature of my work is such that I don’t really have to be in the office unless I’m hearing cases. I spend probably at least half the time at home working. Everything I need, I have with me or have electronic access to. One reason is that the cat wants us at home.
Check out that last sentence. What devotion (of the man, not the cat)!
Pixie!
Here’s Judge Posner with Pixie’s predecessor, Dinah (see the interview at Concurring Opinions):
Yesterday the House of Representatives voted by a substantial majority to severely tighten the screening process for Syrian and Iraqi refugees. According to the New York Times, Congress voted 287-137 (with 47 Democrats joining the Republicans) for a bill that “would require that the director of the F.B.I., the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the director of national intelligence confirm that each applicant from Syria and Iraq poses no threat.”
From what I read elsewhere, such confirmation is nearly impossible, and would either stop the incursion of Syrian refugees cold or slow it to a trickle. This form of certification could take many years for even one individual, much less the thousands that President Obama wants to accept. Obama promises to veto the House bill, but Congress can override such a veto with a 2/3 vote, and 287/424 is 68%, slightly more than enough to cancel a veto. (One hopes that at least a few Democrats will defect.) The bill hasn’t yet been voted on in the Senate.
Alongside this embarrassing rejection of Obama’s humane policy of accepting refugees (one favored by Hillary Clinton), 31 U.S. state governors, more than half of all governors (all of these save one are Republicans), have said that they will take action to prevent the refugees from coming to their states.
This inhumane and unwarranted kneejerk reaction reminds many of our country’s shameful historical policy of rejecting “unwanted immigrants,” including pre-war Jews, who were turned away and sent back to Europe, where they faced extermination. I understand why people are nervous about these refugees, for they will probably include a few hidden terrorists, as they did in Europe. But they will also include vastly more people who are seeking refuge, many of whom, sent back, would face a fate similar to the rejected Jews who died in the Holocaust.
This shameful act betrays our values in two ways. America has historically been a refuge for the oppressed, and it smacks of bigotry to turn away a whole class of refugees because they might contain a few bad apples. Further, our country has been immensely enriched by immigrants; in fact, most of us (including me, the grandchild of people fleeing the Russian Revolution) have an immigrant only a few generations in our past. Steve Jobs’s biological father, for instance, was a Syrian immigrant.
How much does accepting these refugees endanger us? I suspect not very much, for that we already have in place a laborious vetting process that’s been largely successful. On top of that, if ISIS wanted to sneak terrorists into the U.S. it has many other ways to do so besides embedding them within Syrian refugees: for example sending terrorists of other nationalities—people who aren’t refugees. Recruitment of U.S. citizens or legal immigants by the internet can also work.
I don’t want to be part of a country that rejects threatened Syrians as it rejected threatened Jews 75 years ago. We are now ashamed of what we did then, and we’ll be ashamed in the future if we build a dam to stop the latest flood of refugees.
Predictably, Republican candidates for the Presidential nomination are up to their usual pandering to the faithful and osculation of religion. But it doesn’t get much more blatant than this statement from Ted Cruz, junior Senator from Texas, reported by Right Wing Watch(my emphasis):
Ted Cruz was thethird Republican presidential candidate to appear at the “National Religious Liberties Conference” in Iowa yesterday, an event organized by extremist right-wing pastor Kevin Swanson, who earlier in the program proclaimed that, according to the Bible, “the sin of homosexuality … is worthy of death.”
Swanson introduced Cruz by stating that Jesus Christ “is king of the President of the United States whether he will admit it or not and that president should submit to His rule and to His law” before asking Cruz to share his opinion on how important it is for “the President of the United States to fear God.”
Cruz, predictably, asserted that fear of God is absolutely vital, declaring that “any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this nation.“
Here’s the video:
Although a substantial proportion of Americans agree with Cruz that an atheist isn’t fit to be President (40% in a recent Gallup poll)*, I doubt that everyone in that group would require a President who begins his (or her, starting in 2017) knees. At any rate, Cruz is going against the U.S. Constitution here, which, in Article VI, paragraph 3, says that no religious test should be required for government office.
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*The good news, though: 58% of Americans now say they would vote for a qualified atheist candidate for President, and that’s up from only 18% in 1958 (check the link above). This, I assert, is a strong sign of the waning of religion, and attendant reduction in demonization of atheism, in the United States.
I can’t help going after Ben Carson; I suppose it’s a combination of his ignorance, his repeated and stupid attacks on evolution, and the fact that right now he’s the Republican front-runner. Readers have speculated that Carson really knows better about evolution, and he’s just lying for Jesus and his constituency, but I’m not so sure. After all, the human mind, particularly when marinated in faith, is eminently capable of deceiving itself.
Now, however, Carson has been caught in more gaffes and at least two lies. Will this hurt him? I doubt it: to Republicans, who have a seemingly infinite tolerance for incompetence and dissimulation, he’s golden.
Note two things in the third paragraph. First, his claim that “Every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience.” Even those with only a cursory knowledge of American history knows that’s wrong; the Post notes that of the five members of the Declaration’s drafting committee, four—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Roger Sherman—had held elective office. Among the 51 other signers of the Declaration, the Post counts 27 as having held elective office. That’s more than half.
The second gaffe, or rather lie, wasn’t taken up by the Post—Carson’s statement about the signers that “What they had was a deep belief that freedom is a gift from God. They had a determination to rise up against a tyrannical King.” That’s also bogus. Although the Declaration does state this—
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
—everyone knows that people like Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, were either atheists, agnostics, or at best deists, and their belief in creating a country based on freedom came from the Enlightenment, not from God. Indeed, the U.S. Constitution—the actual underpinning of our government drafted in 1787—doesn’t mention God once. Note, too, that even in the statement above, governments are said to obtain their powers from the “consent of the governed.” That doesn’t mean “from the consent of God,” but from the people.
The most famous Founders, including George Washington, could hardly be said to have been religious, and at any rate what religion they did believe they kept to themselves, unlike every Republican candidate. I suspect that people like Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington didn’t believe in any of the tenets of Christianity—save, perhaps, in a deistic God. I’m pretty sure Franklin was an outright atheist, but of course you couldn’t admit such things back then.
And now to the lies. Carson has now been caught embroidering his resume. Here he is on Charlie Rose this October, saying what Carson’s been saying for years—he was offered a full scholarship to West Point:
As I said, this isn’t the first time he’s said that, as Politico (which broke the story) noted:
Ben Carson has repeatedly claimed he was offered a full scholarship from West Point. He conveys the story in at least two other books, “You Have a Brain” and “Take the Risk.” Carson repeated his West Point claim as recently as Aug. 13, when he fielded questions from supporters on Facebook.
And in October, Carson shared the story with Charlie Rose: “I had a goal of achieving the office of city executive officer [in JROTC]. Well, no one had ever done that in that amount of time … Long story short, it worked, I did it. I was offered full scholarship to West Point, got to meet General Westmoreland, go to Congressional Medal dinners, but decided really my pathway would be medicine.”
Anybody who’s acquainted with the U.S. military academies, including the Naval Academy and West Point, knows that there are no “full scholarships”: you apply, need a nomination from your congressman (or a few other sources), and then become part of a rigorous selection process, with the vast majority of candidates failing to secure a spot. (I was once urged to go to West Point by my father, an Army officer, and did investigate the process.) If you do get in, your tuition and all expenses are free. As Greg Mayer (who sent me the link) told me—and he has a daughter who went to the Naval Academy—”Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the US military academies knows that there is no tuition for any cadet/midshipman. Not only is he lying, it’s a lie that couldn’t possibly be true.”
One more “embroidery”: the part about meeting General Westmoreland appears to be false as well. As the Detroit News reports:
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s published account of having dinner with a top commander in the Vietnam War after marching in a Memorial Day parade in 1969 as a high school ROTC cadet in Detroit does not match historical records.
In Carson’s 1990 best-selling autobiography, “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story,” the neurosurgeon tells of being offered a scholarship to West Point as a high school senior sometime after having dinner with the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, Gen. William Westmoreland, on Memorial Day 1969.
But Westmoreland’s personal schedule shows the general was not in Detroit on Memorial Day or during the days preceding and following the holiday. His schedule says he was in and around Washington, D.C., that weekend, according to Army archives The Detroit News reviewed Friday.
As with the West Point gaffe, Carson’s campaign is doing damage control, and Carson is even blaming the media for scrutinizing him more closely than it scrutinized Obama. It’s said to be a “media witch hunt,” something Republicans will increasingly maintain because they hate the media, which they see as a bastion of liberal politics.
But wait—there’s more! Carson has made a big deal of his supposedly violent past, but none of those incidents can be verified by the press, either. As CNN reports (see the video on that CNN page as well):
In his 1990 autobiography, “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story,” Carson describes those acts as flowing from an uncontrollable “pathological temper.” The violent episodes he has detailed in his book, in public statements and in interviews, include punching a classmate in the face with his hand wrapped around a lock, leaving a bloody three-inch gash in the boy’s forehead; attempting to attack his own mother with a hammer following an argument over clothes; hurling a large rock at a boy, which broke the youth’s glasses and smashed his nose; and, finally, thrusting a knife at the belly of his friend with such force that the blade snapped when it luckily struck a belt buckle covered by the boy’s clothes.
“I was trying to kill somebody,” Carson said, describing the incident — which he has said occurred at age 14 in ninth grade — during a September forum at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
But nine friends, classmates and neighbors who grew up with Carson told CNN they have no memory of the anger or violence the candidate has described.
. . . All of the people interviewed expressed surprise about the incidents Carson has described. No one challenged the stories directly. Some of those interviewed expressed skepticism, but noted that they could not know what had happened behind closed doors.
Gerald Ware, a classmate at Southwestern High School said he was “shocked” to read about the violence in Carson’s book.
“I don’t know nothing about that,” said Ware, who still lives in southwestern Detroit. “It would have been all over the whole school.”
CNN was unable to independently confirm any of the incidents, which Carson said occurred when he was a juvenile.
The reason this “violence” narrative is important is because Carson used it to show how his life was changed by God. After a particularly violent episode in which he tried to kill someone, he wrote, Carson went into the bathroom of his Detroit home and picked up a Bible. Turning to a passage in Proverbs—an experience comparable to Francis Collins seeing his frozen waterfall—Carson’s life was suddenly transformed, he came to God, and was instantly turned into the mild-mannered and anodyne person he is today.
That’s a good story, and plays into the Republican penchant for religion, but it doesn’t seem to be true.
Ben Carson, former neurosurgeon, Seventh-Day Adventist, and overall ignoramus about science, is now the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination. I’m hoping he wins that nomination because he’s a born loser, and Hillary (or whoever) would defeat him handily. But I doubt he’ll be the candidate, for although my opinion of Americans’ political acumen is pretty low, I simply can’t believe that we’d elect a man so retrograde, so right-wing, and so totally ignorant of science to run the country. It’s even more shameful because his career was based on science.
And yet he’s a Biblical, straight-up Genesis-six-day creationist. He’s downplaying it now, but if you have the time and will, listen to this speech he made in 2011 at a conference called “Celebrating Creation” (original talk here, my takedown here). That was before he knew he’d be a candidate, and so he pulls out all the stops espousing his crazy views—not just on creationism, but on cosmology.
As I wrote last week, Carson’s now downplaying his creationism, sensing that it somehow turns people off, but it’s now clear what he believes. The video below is annotated by VoysovReason to show where and why Carson is wrong. The subtitles are sometimes off (“Vestigial pelvis of Wales”? Is that a royal title?), and I don’t agree completely with every word of the narrator (humans are apes), but my disagreements with the science are trivial: by and large, it’s accurate, and shows Carson to be way off the rails:
Yep, there you hear every creationist trope, all of them long ago debunked: the great worldwide flood, a literal six-day creation, the canard of “circularity”—dating rocks with fossils and then the fossils with rocks—and so on. He even floats the Gish-ian idea that A. afarensis skeleton of “Lucy” (not just a skull, according to Carson’s lie, but a largely complete skeleton) was simply a modern human who had a “deformed head”! There’s no mention that we now have dozens of skulls and bones from A. afarensis, all of them are “deformed”!
Carson goes on: there’s an absence of transitional fossils (nope; read my book); an allusion to how complex organs like the eye couldn’t evolve because all the parts would have to be present simultaneously (“irreducible complexity”: the discredited basis of intelligent design); and even the idea that we couldn’t get order in the universe after the Big Bang because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Nor can science explain altruism and empathy: those, implies Carson, must have come from God.
There are many LOLs in this film, and most but not all are debunked. What a shameful display of willful ignorance!
But wait! There’s more! I wasn’t going to put this up, as it took place in 1998, but Carson has revived his 17-year-old claim that the Pyramids were built by the Biblical Joseph to store grain (Uncle Ben’s rice?), and that many scientists think that “alien beings” built the Pyramids. (What??) “Well,” I thought, “We have plenty of evidence of Carson’s ignorance now, so why go back so far to chastise him?” But he’s still maintaining that theory! The video below shows his original claim, and his defense of that claim justyesterday:
“Some people believe in the Bible like I do and don’t find that to be silly at all, and believe that God created the Earth and don’t find that to be silly at all,” Carson said. “The secular progressives try to ridicule it every time it comes up and they’re welcome to do that.”
Neither Carson’s church nor any other major Jewish or Christian sect shares his belief about the pyramids’ origins. Jodi Magness, a specialist in biblical archaeology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, said she knows of no scholar or archaeologist who questions that the pyramids were used as royal tombs.
“This is not an academic topic of debate,” Magness said in an email. “The use of the pyramids as tombs is verified by both written (literary) sources and archaeological evidence.”
The pyramids were built with narrow, secret passages intended to foil grave-robbers, making the structures unsuitable for grain storage, Magness said. And the design of the pyramids, with associated temples, “reflects the ancient Egyptian concept of the cosmos, according to which the king or pharaoh was at the center of a unified kingdom, serving as a god, a political ruler and a divine mediator.”
Even Carson’s own Church refuses to defend his lunacy:
Daniel Weber, a spokesman for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, said Carson’s belief about the pyramids are “his own interpretation.”
“Of course, we believe in the biblical account of Joseph and the famine,” Weber said. “But I’ve never heard the idea that pyramids were storehouses of grain.”
But does any of this matter? I doubt it. Anybody who defends Carson already knows of his creationism, and this Pyramid stuff won’t bother them a bit. For, as mushbrained as Carson is, his defenders are even more so, for they want the man to be President!
Well, all the headlines from the past several days say “yes,” but every story online appears to be a reprint of a piece by Dave Boucher in The Tennessean, “Ben Carson touts creationism during Nashville speech.” (Don’t papers do their own reporting any more?). At any rate, the Tennessean doesn’t really show that Carson is still a creationist—at least not in the sense that he still avers that God created all animals and plants ex nihilo, and within about 10,000 years ago. Here’s the “damning” bit from the paper (my emphasis):
Carson delivered two speeches Sunday morning at Cornerstone Church in Madison. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who’s recently surged in GOP presidential polls, weaved between a litany of different themes during the speeches, including everything from economics to his background growing up in Detroit.
Although the address at times sounded like a stump speech, Carson repeatedly returned to religion. This included his retort to “progressives” who question why he doesn’t believe in evolution.
“They say, ‘Carson, ya know, how can you be a surgeon, a neurosurgeon, and believe that God created the Earth, and not believe in evolution, which is the basis of all knowledge and all science?’,” Carson said during his second speech.
“Well, you know, it’s kind of funny. But I do believe God created us, and I did just fine. So I don’t know where they get that stuff from, ya know? It’s not true. And in fact, the more you know about God, and the deeper your relationship with God, I think the more intricate becomes your knowledge of the way things work, including the human body.”
. . . This is not the first time Carson has spoken about his doubts on evolution. Several national publications, including the Washington Post, BuzzFeed and others, have noted a speech from 2012 and other comments where Carson likened the big bang theory to “fairy tales” and questioned the motivation behind Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Carson’s response, in bold, espouses not biblical creationism, but just the notion that “God created us,” and that could be interpreted many ways, including as a species of theistic evolution, or even Deism. His statement about the intricacy of the human body does imply a kind of intelligent design, but it’s not very clear. So I think the title of Boucher’s piece is misleading.
But of course Carson really is a creationist. He’s a Seventh-Day Adventist, a church whose official theology espouses the literalism of Genesis 1 and 2. And while there are non-literalist Adventists, Carson isn’t among them, at least judging from his previous statements about creationism and evolution (see here and here, for instance). It’s palpably obvious from his earlier remarks that Carson is truly a diehard Biblical creationist.
It’s a serious indictment of the U.S. that a man who is so oblivious to reality, and so soaked in faith (the latter produces the former), is now—according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll—the clear front-runner in the race to win the Republican Presidential nomination. Can it be possible that he’ll really be the candidate? I still don’t think so, but, after all, Sarah Palin was a candidate for Vice President.
I would love, in future Republican debates, to see the moderators ask every candidate a straight-out question: “Do you accept the theory of evolution as espoused by the vast majority of biologists, or do you adhere to a Biblical form of creationism?”
But lately Carson has been ducking questions about his creationism, which I think he knows will turn off a lot of the American public. Instead, he he tries to emphasize his religiosity rather than his delusions about biological diversity. Here, for example, he ducks the creationism question on a recent appearance on Bill O’Reilly (see the question at 3:34):
You can see a very short video of Richard Dawkins criticizing Carson’s creationism at this CNN site.
