Earlier this week, Miranda wrote a post about the Religious Right’s anti-environmentalism and its relationship to Rick Santorum’s recent attack on President Obama’s “phony theology.”
In the post, she noted that David Barton, of all people, is considered to be an expert on the topic of global warming by Republicans and the Religious Right and that, back in 2007, he even testified before the US Senate on the topic.
A few weeks after delivering that testimony, Barton gave a presentation on the subject of global warming which Wallbuilders recorded and now sells as a CD entitled “Science, The Bible, & Global Warming.”
We listened to the presentation yesterday and it was chock-full of the sort of pseudo-science that one would expect from a pseudo-historian like David Barton, as his entire presentation was rooted in the idea that there is science and then there is “false science” … and “false science” is anything that undermines the Bible:
There is science and there is science that is falsely so-called. See, the Bible doesn’t have trouble with science, but it’s talking about beware of the stuff that’s falsely called science. There’s a lot that masquerades in the name of science.
How do you know false science? False science leads you to a certain end. What is that end? That it undermines your faith. So a good definition of false science, at least based on the Bible verse, science that undermines faith is false science and science that’s wrongly used it false science.
God’s into science. He created everything. He’s the great botanist, He’s the great zoologist, He’s the great every one of those things. He knows better than anyone else because he made it all. But when science takes you to a position that causes you to doubt your relationship with God, causes you to doubt the Bible … that’s called false science.
And since all “real” science has to correspond to the Bible, Barton explains that life does not begin at conception, but rather before conception … because that is what the Bible says:
If you consider that life begins at conception … and I have to consider that Biblically, life begins before conception because it says “before you were in your mother’s womb I knew you.” So I gotta say, well it at least begins at conception. How you handle that Jeremiah verse that says before that I knew you, you know that’s an interesting question.
