salon | Ask certain vocal members of the Christian right about science, and
it won’t take you long to discover that their conception of the
discipline is somewhat different from how it’s normally understood.
Their version of it isn’t like the kind practiced at universities and in
hospitals; it’s a special, watered-down version of science, one that
adapts to fit into their biblical view of the world.
In this
Christian-right version, scientific evidence is checked against the
Bible and if the evidence contradicts – or at least if they believe the
evidence contradicts– a single verse in a single chapter, they simply
reject the evidence and the science, no questions asked. (Exhibit A:
Intelligent Design.) This method of conducting science has led the
Christian right to make some incredible — as in, not credible
– scientific claims in the past, almost too many to document. But here
are five of the most ridiculous examples of biblically informed science.
1. Aliens would go straight to hell, if they existed
You probably saw this insane story for the first time earlier this week. According to Ken Ham, the creationist most famous for losing a debate against
Bill Nye the Science Guy about evolution, the space program is a
useless waste of money, informed as it is by nefarious secularists who
want to use science to undermine religion.
Ham doubts that aliens
exist, because they are not mentioned in the Bible, but goes on to say
that even if they did exist, they would totally not be
worth discovering, because they would not be direct descendants of Adam,
and thus would go straight to hell. Ham believes that only hard-left
secularists care about finding life on other planets, and that their
motivation is to create an illusion that evolution is real and disprove
the Biblical accounts of creation. As he puts it:
Secularists are desperate to find life in outer space, as they believe that would provide evidence that life can evolve in different locations and given the supposed right conditions! The search for extraterrestrial life is really driven by man’s rebellion against God in a desperate attempt to supposedly prove evolution!
Of course, among the
things scientists concern themselves with, Ham’s beliefs about the
exploration of space probably fall pretty low on the list. But if Ham
had his way, and NASA were defunded out of existence, this is just a few of the types of inventions we might be missing out on.
