I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.

Around the country, scientists were [...]]]> When asked by The Globe and Mail if he accepted evolutionary theory, Conservative Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear offered a curious response.

I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate.

Around the country, scientists were shocked that the federal Minister for Science interpreted a question about his acceptance of evolutionary theory as an attack on his religion. Some likened his response to a refusal to answer whether or not he thought the earth was flat due to his religious beliefs.¹ Others were more blunt, wondering how the chiropractor-cum-cabinet minister could possibly retain the science portfolio if he rejected one of the world’s most well-established scientific theories.

The issue is particularly troubling given the Conservatives’ gutting of research-based science funding in their January budget. With a focus on the commercialization of discoveries to “bring them to the marketplace” quickly, important areas of scientific study remain woefully underfunded.² Whereas in the United States the Obama administration has pledged $10 billion USD to fund basic research, the Conservatives have forced research agencies in Canada, including those responsible for studying stem cells and climate change, to cut spending by $148 million. It is not difficult to see Conservative ideology at work here. Add to that the unrestrained hostility that Mr. Goodyear and his staff have for lobbyists acting on behalf of the scientific research community — witness his boorish behaviour of loudly accusing them of lying whilst an aide screamed at them to “shut up” mere moments into a scheduled meeting — and it is no wonder that scientists in Canada see no alternative in such a climate but to ironically move Stateside to what is now a more hospitable environment for scientific research.³

A history of holes

Goodyear is not the first Conservative cabinet minister to display pride in a preschool ignorance of evolutionary theory, or outright hostility to it. Stockwell Day, the Conservative Trade Minister and former leader of the party while it was incarnated as the Reform Party, is known for his creationist views, which, together with a suitable compendium of gaffes, likely cost him the 2000 election.

In response to their respective creationist kerfuffles, Mr. Day and Mr. Goodyear and other government spokespeople have rightly said that MPs, including cabinet ministers, are entitled to their beliefs. They have said the government is not in the business of promulgating either creation “science” or any other viewpoint. Those would be comforting words but for the fact that Mr. Day lamented that creationism was not taught in public schools, and that Mr. Goodyear controls funding for an area of science he is openly hostile to, in a Ministry he has demonstrated is controlled by ideology over need. They would be comforting words but for the fact that Day, Goodyear, and their apologists shrilly cry foul when their views are challenged by the media, because somehow their religious beliefs are sacrosanct and untouchable, even when they themselves present them to the public, or offer them up in some unpalatable concoction of public policy and private piety.

Furthermore, when a creationist openly ridicules evolutionary theory and its scientists on the floor of the House of Commons, the public venue entrusted to him by his riding constituents so that he may represent their most fundamental needs, he has made two fatal errors: he has abrogated his political responsibilities, and he has polluted his public office with his private religious beliefs contrary to the stated aims of even this Conservative government. On April 2, 2009, James Lunney, another chiropractor and now Conservative MP for the British Columbia riding of Nanaimo-Alberni, addressed Parliament.⁴ Evolutionary scientists are arrogant anti-scientists, he said. He claimed that all the millions of Canadians who believed in a creator were being ridiculed in the debate surrounding Mr. Goodyear’s curious response to a question about evolutionary theory. Lastly, and ghoulishly if not laughably, he said that, since Charles Darwin could not be conjured from the grave, today’s evolutionary scientists could not disprove that the father of evolutionary theory would not today abandon it if presented with the “discoveries” of the likes of creationist and Seventh-Day Adventist Robert V. Gentry⁵ — discoveries dismissed as amateur pseudoscience after peer review.⁶

A concession, of sorts

In the end, Mr. Goodyear was forced to affirm a “belief” in evolution, some suggesting that those in the upper echelons made him do it to avoid yet more Conservative controversy. Unfortunately, his espousal had nothing to do with evolutionary theory, and only underscored the Science Minister’s appalling ignorance of science. “We are evolving every year, every decade,” he said. “That’s a fact, whether it is to the intensity of the sun, whether it is to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it is running shoes or high heels, of course we are evolving to our environment.”⁷

Yet again, Canada seems destined to belatedly follow the United States in areas of public policy and cultural myopia. We can only look forward to the day when we also follow their political lead, and discover energizing politics, youthful ideas, a devotion to reason, and dynamic leaders once again.

1. Anne McIlroy, Minister won’t confirm belief in evolution, The Globe and Mail, March 17, 2009.
2. Carolyn Abraham, Researchers fear ‘stagnation’ under Tories, The Globe and Mail, March 2, 2009.
3. Ibid.
4. Aaron Wherry, James Lunney v. Evolution, Macleans.ca, April 2, 2009.
5. Darrell Bellaart, Darwin would think again, Lunney tells House of Commons, Nanaimo Daily News, April 4, 2009.
6. Polonium Halo FAQs at The TalkOrigins Archive.
7. Anne McIlroy, Goodyear continues to deflect questions on evolution beliefs, The Globe and Mail, March 18, 2009.

Given to comedic ridicule, and preoccupied with talking snakes and other absurdities, the movie is somewhat predictable as Maher wends his way across the globe in search of believers he can mock. He spends much time in the [...]]]> This weekend, I saw Religulous, Bill Maher’s documentary-style raz of religion.

Given to comedic ridicule, and preoccupied with talking snakes and other absurdities, the movie is somewhat predictable as Maher wends his way across the globe in search of believers he can mock. He spends much time in the US, at the odious Creation Museum in Kentucky, and the repugnant and unrepentantly lucre-driven Holy Land Experience in Orlando, Florida, where six-year-old children line the streets to watch a gore-covered man being horse-whipped toward his ultimate place of torture. Lovely religion.

Maher takes on the usual suspects: a fundamentalist senator, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who stumbles his way through an interview in which he seems to admit his less than stellar IQ; a Jewish convert to Christianity whose sole reason for finding Christ had something to do with a rude believer who told him to hold a glass of water out the window if he was thirsty — which he inexplicably did — purportedly resulting in a deluge from the heavens; a gay man who, on turning to Jesus, suddenly married and fathered three children and found this reason enough to make his life’s work the conversion of gay men everywhere to his special brand of Christianity; a bunch of slack-jawed, slack-bellied truckers whose chapel is in the bowels of a transport truck and whose command of English is as one would expect; and on and on and on.

The interviews are fodder enough for Maher, and the movie punctuates each idiotic quip and every forehead-slapping affront to reason with clips from old movies, which serve to punctuate the stupidity of it all. This is great fun, and one of the better reasons to see the movie. But Maher isn’t too concerned with getting things exactly right.

For example, he cites a figure of 16% from a “recent study”, that represents, as he puts it, Americans who do not identify with any religious group. He says this percentage is a larger demographic than blacks, Jews, homosexuals, and others that have a strong political lobby. He seems to admonish the audience to use this knowledge in order to effect secular change in the political landscape of the United States.

He doesn’t name the “recent study”, but it’s probably the 2004 report done by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, entitled The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States. But the study does not suggest that this number of 16% of religiously unaffiliated people are either hard-core secularists or agnostics, and they are certainly not atheists. In fact, one of its major findings is that those who don’t identify with a religious group — a turn of phrase that Maher himself uses in describing the study he refers to — do, in fact, practice some form of religion.

Sizable numbers of those who do not affiliate psychologically with any religion are, nevertheless, occasional or unsettled practitioners. As such, they might sometimes attend religious services, have previously identified religiously as adults, or expect to take up a religion sometime in the future. A more complete religious profiling requires additional information about religious beliefs and behavior.¹

So described, these are hardly the sorts of people who are going to be demanding a lot of fundamental secular change in the way politics is conducted in the United States.

Maher also conflates the biblical account of Jesus with the stories of Mithras, Horus, Osiris, and Dionysus, as has been done before, most notably in Brian Flemming’s documentary The God Who Wasn’t There. In fact, he even uses a similar device for counting matches between the stories, where his narration of the similarities is punctuated by a visual and audio element that increases a counter as the matches accumulate.

Maher isn’t the quickest thinker on the planet. On ridiculing the trinity, he was impressed with one believer’s response that compared the Christian god to water, which, said the believer, also has three states of solid, liquid, and gas. Without needing to get into the fallacious nature of this analogy, Maher could simply have said something like, “But they’re not all three at the same time,” or some such, and neutered this non-starter with a non-starter of his own. Alas, he was merely impressed.

The most memorable interviews were with a cantankerous but oddly lovable Catholic priest outside the Vatican, and a Catholic priest and scientist who deftly swept aside creationism and fundamentalism as the backward anomalies they are.

The movie takes a dark turn in the last five minutes. Standing on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the site of the end of the universe according to all three major monotheistic religions, Maher launches into a dark oratory, concluding that, indeed, the world might end because of religion, but not for the reasons believers think. He makes a worthy appeal to reason, and to the reasonable, and asks doubters and atheists to come out of the closet to make reason and logic important in the national discourse once again. It’s a good ending to what had been a fun and fluffy ride.

Here and elsewhere, Maher owes a lot to writers like Christopher Hitchens, and especially Sam Harris. His appeal, though condensed, strongly echos the essays in Harris’ The End of Faith. He is neither as eloquent nor as studied as Harris, of course, but the resemblance to the gist of Harris’ book is striking.

I enjoyed this movie, and so did the audience. It’s not for everyone. It’s certainly not for the believer who is easily offended at irresistible clarity. Nor is it for the atheist who is squeamish when the believer is unapologetically ridiculed. But the message, like the urgent message carried by all atheists in the early twenty-first century, is important indeed, and I would recommend this movie both for its entertainment value, and its five-minute ending message.

1. Sid Groeneman and Gary Tobin, The Decline of Religious Identity in the United States, Institute for Jewish and Community Research, San Francisco, 2004, p. 3