Rosio Pavoris

This discussion is still going on, and it’s surprising how wrong some people who are otherwise quite intelligent manage to get it.

John Wilkins links to this opinion piece by a Washington Post writer (not one of the intelligent people I mentioned; we’ll get to those later). She argues that asking who believes in evolution was unfair and didn’t serve a purpose other than to make people look like idiots.

As debate audiences were pondering the meaning of Darwin in the Oval Office, McCain asked permission to elaborate. McCain then added: “I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.”

Note to George Tenet: This is what you call a slam dunk. McCain was able to acknowledge both science and religion — evolutionary theory and creationism — and make them mutually inclusive.

Except that’s not how most Republican voters will see, or how most rational people would. He managed to give an answer that would annoy both sides and appeal to the “moderate” religionists, a group whose size I think he greatly overestimates.

The truth is, each man took a calculated risk — or a courageous stand, depending on one’s view. To say “yes” would have been to betray many evangelical Christian voters, 73 percent of whom believe that human beings were created in their present form in the past 10,000 years or so.

Protip: presidents don’t get define reality, despite what the neocon movement seems to believe. If 73% of the people believe God created the universe 6,000 years ago, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not that’s true.
Of course, she means it more cynically than that: the people want a president who’s willing to lie to them and betray his own beliefs entirely in order to tell them what they want to hear. That’s a sad state of affairs, but the truth of it does not mean that’s the sort of president people need.

To these folks, “no” didn’t mean anti-science; it meant pro-God and conveyed a transcendent, nonmaterialistic view of the world.

Even to the worst of the appeasers, it should be obvious that in this case, that’s the exact same thing.
(I’d argue that it’s the exact same thing in any case, obviously.)

In a conversation after the debate, Huckabee said, “I wish life were so simple…. If I’d had time, I would have asked whether he meant macro or micro evolution.”

That’s a different sort of answer than what is inferred from a simple “no” forced by the manic pace of a 90-minute “debate” among 10 candidates, none of whom is qualified to seriously debate scientific theory.

Is it? Is it really?

Anyway, moving on.
Mitt Romney (that secksy, secky man-beast) casts himself as a theistic evolutionist, and people seem to be going nuts over it. I’m not sure how the conservative blogosphere is reacting (right-wing blogs tend to make me physically ill), but for the most part, our side thinks it’s great.

“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe,” Mr. Romney said in an interview this week. “And I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”

This of course is the standard theistic evolutionist response. Boilerplate, banal, and politically safe… but also essentially pro-science.

No, it really isn’t. On the face of it, it may look pro-science enough that it’ll cause future candidates to avoid any move towards publically accepting reality after Romney inevitably loses, but it’s still firmly in the anti-science camp.

He was asked: Is that intelligent design?

“I’m not exactly sure what is meant by intelligent design,” he said. “But I believe God is intelligent and I believe he designed the creation. And I believe he used the process of evolution to create the human body.”

Translation: I’m not touching ID with a ten-foot pole.

… What?

“I don’t know what ID is, but I believe God guided evolution” translates to “not touching ID with a ten-foot pole”? If anything, it’s worse than standard ID positions, since they at least try not to invoke God a lot of the time.

You disappoint me, Panda’s Thumb.

PZ has more on this, including links to more disappointments.

To sum up: Republican candidates are still as anti-science as they’ve ever been. You could make a case that they’re trying to be more subtle about it, but they aren’t improving.
The sad part is, I’m not sure any of the Democratic candidates are any better, in this area.