Mike Pence squirms around creationism

Chris Matthews from MSNBC's absolutely REFUSED to let GOP Rep. from Indiana Mike Pence shirk a direct question about evolution on Tuesday's Hardball. This is exactly the strategy that certain unnamed people have tried to use against me while talking about the nature of their belief system. Ask a simple, straightforward question, and get 20 minutes of mindless blathering about some distant topic they feel like talking about.



I also find it exceedingly annoying how members of the GOP insists on cobbling together issues like evolution, stem cell research, and energy policy. These are diverse topics that each deserve to be discussed and examined individually. This just goes to show how few of them have actually studied science, especially if they can't distinguish them as separate lines of inquiry. And it REALLY makes me grumpy when they try to lump in social issues, like abortion (which I think is actually partly a science issue) and gay marriage, under the guise of some subversive liberal agenda.

John Wilkins from EvolvingThoughts also brings up an interesting point that I've struggled with for some time now: the very idea of believing in science. I don't believe that evolution happens, I understand it as a process. The very fact that evidence exists for it (mountains and mountain of evidence, mind you) completely removes the necessity for belief. This is along the same lines of the Bablefish's Proof of God's non-existence from Douglas Adam's timeless Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

`I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.

The only thing you need to really believe is that the universe does in fact exist. The rest is all observation and math. Regardless, Mike Pence is being infuriatingly dishonest when he says "science is an exploration of demonstrable fact," yet still contends that Intelligent Design is a science. I ask you, Rep. Pence, where are those demonstrable facts?

From Pharyngula