I feel obligated to write about this because it squats squarely in my basket of interests, touching on politics, belief, science, ethics, media… If I didn’t post something about this I’d be signaling gross indifference to the enterprise of blogging.
Concern in the science community shouldn’t be surprising. By comparison, while we don’t expect the agriculture minister to be a farmer, we wouldn’t be surprised if farmers became perturbed by an agriculture minister from an urban riding where people tend not to share the same critical assumptions. (More of my comments can be found on Dan Brown’s post today.)
Personally I’m not worked up about it; I’m more annoyed by the coverage it’s getting than I am with the story itself. The issue was settled in my mind when I read Paul Wells’s response:
If the junior minister for science (whose influence on science policy in a Harper government, incidentally, should be reckoned as comparable to the intergovernmental affairs minister’s influence on federalism, or the health minister’s influence on anything measurable) wants to pray to the Tooth Fairy or Salma Hayek every night, then godspeed.
And as long as science can rise in this country, then I would really rather stay out of the business of interrogating ministers to see whether they’re planning to stay in line with somebody’s idea of acceptable thought. (Full disclosure: I believe in evolution, though I am quite sure it doesn’t need my help, and I’m agnostic with gusts to atheism.) If Goodyear and Harper ever try to get their claptrap taught in classrooms as equivalent to evolution, I’ll join whatever committee is in the business of stopping them.
Amen. Er, I mean…
The only thing I’d change is “agnostic with gusts of atheism.” I’m something more like the other way around: “atheist with lapses into agnosticism.” I tried explaining my position to Leo Wong on Twitter last night:
The reason I don’t think of myself as agnostic is that I’m not at all passive or ambivalent about belief. I think about it every day; what I believe above all else is that a) there’s more to discover about how life works, and b) we’re capable of discovering it. History has demonstrated again and again that people who doubt those are eventually proven wrong.
Within evolution are processes we don’t understand yet (just as Darwin didn’t know about DNA). We can’t explain attraction and we can’t say for sure how chance variation really works.
I’m open to the possibility of God existing somewhere in those yet-unexplained processes. Or maybe or some kind of “vital spirit.” But for now it does me no good to posit God. I’m still willing and able to delve deeper; I’m inclined to assume there are scientific explanations still to be worked out.
