Arizona Professor Is Being MOBBED By Christian Conservatives For DARING TO SHOW THIS SLIDE In Class

[hunter]

113. They demonstrably lack certain critical thinking skills.

I trust doctors or pharmaceutical researchers to practice evidence based medicine. There's still plenty of room for spiritual beliefs in the practice of medicine, we are, after all dealing with people and we don't know everything about the human body or the origins of human motives, personalities, and "spirit" (if you wish to believe in such.)

But believing in the small, mean, incompetent god of many fundamentalist religious sects, a god madly tweaking the joysticks of the video game he created, is on the face of it a strong deceleration that a person is committed to denying and ignoring scientific evidence.



People who make such declarations shouldn't be practicing medicine or science, nor should they teach it.

It's possible to have spiritual beliefs that do not contradict scientific evidence, just as it's possible to be an atheist and a very ethical person.

In my own life, whenever the scientific evidence conflicts with my spiritual beliefs, it's my spiritual beliefs that adapt to the new evidence, never the other way around. Exposed to such conflicts, I aggressively pursue them until the conflict is resolved, but never by denying the scientific evidence.

I was raised in a Christian pacifist home. The flavor of Christianity was intellectual-Catholic but we ended up as Quakers because my mom is entirely unable to keep her heresies to herself. She's the sort who argues with priests and bishops, she'd argue with the Pope, she'll argue with God Himself until she's satisfied with His answer. My wife's family is liberal Irish Mexican American Catholic. We're married in the Church and we raised our children in that same tradition.

I'm an evolutionary biologist by inclination and many years of education (alas, no graduate degree yet, maybe when we are done paying for our kids' college education.)

It seems absurd to me that people can call themselves "Creationists" and then categorically deny some of the most wonderful aspects of that Creation.