The people who think the world was created in six days six thousand years ago are Just. Plain. Wrong. That is not what happened. By hinging their beliefs in Jesus, their sense of meaning in life, and their connections with the past on this ludicrous cosmogonical error, creationists are doing more and deeper damage to the life of the spirit in this age than any Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett could ever do for them.

Last week, Bill Nye and Ken Ham debated each other at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. I tried my best to ignore this. This decision was good for my mental health, but maybe not so good for my professional life. As the week went on, in fact, I started feeling just a little guilty. I’m doing a PhD in religion and science. I write a blog called, last I checked, “Science On Religion.” I should probably weigh in somehow about this creationist-evolutionist debate, right? I don’twant to. But I should. So here are a few thoughts about the modern religion-science media circus. You’re welcome.

The reason I didn’t get too excited about this religion-science hubbub in Kentucky was because I knew it would be, er, incredibly frustrating. Ken Ham is wrong. Pathetically so. I do not respect his beliefs (although if I met him personally I would try to respect the man). I don’t respect his beliefs because they are false beliefs, and demonstrably so. The people who think the world was created in six days six thousand years ago are Just. Plain. Wrong. That is not what happened. By hinging their beliefs in Jesus, their sense of meaning in life, and their connections with the past on this ludicrous cosmogonical error, creationists are doing more and deeper damage to the life of the spirit in this age than any Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett could ever do for them.

Meanwhile, however, the popularizing anti-Creationist crusaders are committing a similarly grave error by making a cartoon out of faith and working their damnedest to convince us that all religious people are dolts and buffoons – not by saying so outright, mind you, but by giving the most attention to the least-enlightened representatives of faith, by debating the Ken Hams of the world but not the Huston Smiths or the John Haughts. There’s a strategic reason they do this, though: since the 19th century, the religion-science divide has been encouraged by the popularizers of Science for the sake of their profession. What do I mean? Here’s what T.H. Huxley, a fierce advocate of evolution during Darwin’s era, had to say about religion:

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.

Huxley, the grandfather of Aldous (the guy who wrote Brave New World, which you never finished in high school), was doing something clever when he said this. By pitting science against religion in the public’s eyes, by making it seem as if we had to choose one or the other, he was actually carving out a new space for professional Science as a stakeholder in the public arena.

You see, prior to his era, science was not an institution, nor was it even a profession. Science was a pastime for aristocrats and priests.

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