Posthuman Blues

Weird Science on the Religious Right

"But when policies involving human biology and behavior are being hammered out, faith alone isn't always sufficient to win over voters and decision-makers. At such times, a bit of scientific evidence comes in handy, and some of the Religious Right's operatives aren't too choosy about where they get it."

As some readers of this blog probably realize, I'm highly mistrusting of the mainstream media's cavalier use of "skepticism" (as typified by the Washington Post's casual acceptance of Philip Klass' bogus explanation for Lonnie Zamora's UFO sighting and the New York Times' condescending use of the term "Martians").

But curiously, in the case of the Religious Right, the mainstream relaxes its usually strident intolerance for weird ideas in an apparent attempt to please everyone. This is the void that people like Michael Shermer should be scrambling to fill. (His "Why People Believe Weird Things" offers a devastating and informative critique of "intelligent design" and Holocaust "revisionism," both of which, I argue, are fundamentally connected.)

Instead, Shermer and other self-proclaimed luminaries spend far too much time brandishing toothless answers to phenomena they simply don't understand: Just because one grasps the social and political forces responsible for such nonsense as Creationism doesn't mean one is qualified to condemn the presence of unidentified objects in our skies or the presence of distinctly curious morphologies on Mars.

"Intelligent Design" is a scam; give the Religious Right an inch and they'll happily take a mile. But a similar trend pervades pop skepticulture. Shermer, Shostak, Randi et al aren't content skewering straw men; they want to take down a few genuine unknowns while they're at it.

In a week I'll be on camera for a documentary on ancient civilizations and extraterrestrial visitors to be aired on the Discovery Channel. And while I look forward to the trip -- and not-so-secretly relish the prospect of "wising up the marks" (or at least a few of them) -- I fear the worst, and not without some justification.