Huckabee gives himself away

[fpb]

Governor Mike Huckabee is a Creationist - one of the old kind we thought defeated after the eighties. What is more, his answers reveal a depressing ignorance of the basics of science, a worrying failure in understanding the relationship between science and government, and, what is more surprising, a spectacularly poor grip of theology

Comments

[eliskimo]

In this context, to speak of it as one of many possible beliefs, which a man accepts not because of the authority of science, but out of a mere personal taste, is disgraceful. It is a genuine validation of quackery and arbitrariness - finally, of that very relativism which the Pope has singled out as the evil of our age, and that all thinking Christians since C.S.Lewis if not G.K.Chesterton have been fighting.

Ah, but therein lies the rub! Huckabee may feel that he can - or that he must - speak this way because the mass culture has accepted relativism on a grand scale. Witness how popular (at least on this continent) Adam Savage's quote from Mythbusters is: "I reject your reality and substitute my own!" Of course, most people think it's funny, but there is an element of acceptance in there.

[fpb]

But that places him right outside the Christian tent. I am not speaking as a Catholic, but as an exponent of what C.S.Lewis called "mere Christianity", when I say that the concept of one reality for you and another for me is totally alien to Christianity. If there is one God, there must be one truth, although of course it is far too high for our finite minds to grasp wholly. It was the authority who was preparing to murder God who did not believe in truth: "What is truth?, said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer."

BTW, you might be interested in my community, FPB de fide, in which I debate properly religious issues: http://community.livejournal.com/fpb_de_fide/

[eliskimo]

You're right, and it unscores what you wrote about the best thing "one could say that he did well to move from the ministry to politics." Th irony is that he rejects what could be argued is a populist position using essentially another populist position to do it and apparently doesn't see the inheirent contradiction, or sloppy reasoning that it represents.

[fpb]

There is of course no particular issue with a politician being weak in this or that discipline; but the matter changes considerably when we are talking about the leader of a country. Of course, if Huckabee were to gain the nomination or even the nomination to VP, the Democrats would use his views to the hilt and probably win the confrontation. But what bothers me even more is that this shows a basic flaw in the make-up of the conservative movement, which makes it for all practical purposes unelectable - since the majority of voters will see the problems with the Governor's views as clearly as I do - and leaves the running to the otherwise minoritarian Democrat/left position almost by default. In Britain, the Conservatives have long been known as "the stupid party" because of their intellectual weakness (even though their most famous leaders, Disraeli, Churchill, were also their most intellectual), and all over Europe the right wing suffers from lack of convincing and intellectually coherent figures. In Italy they have fallen under

[asakiyume]

Thanks for this very cogent essay. So much of it makes me nod in emphatic agreement, but two things in particular.

First: your criticism of the rhetorical device of trying to make it seem that two things are opposed when really they're not--I see this a lot. It's rhetorical sleight of hand. Make people choose between things that are not in opposition or incompatible, and then move on from there.

Second: the danger of bad science under bad governments. Add Mao to your list. In the late 1950s, his Great Leap Forward caused the starvation of 20 million people. This was mainly due to the disaster of collectivization, but the notion that you could, for instance, fertilize fields with ground glass didn't help, I'm sure--well, in general, I suppose you could say it was his belief that ideology should trump reality. If it ought to be true, it IS true--seems to have been his feeling.

[theswordmaiden]

Honestly I don't think this sort of creationist will be defeated for quite a while. Also I think his use of "believe" is off, because scientific facts are those that you accept, not believe. He's making it sound like "the religion of Darwinism" or something. I've heard that before.

[headnoises]

There are folks who treat darwinisim as a faith-- and are about as well based in it as our host shows Mr. Huckabee to be.

[guarani]

I guess you can see many examples whenever somebody with a poor grasp of anything decides to go along with those wrong concepts anyway. The man does not know theology, science, philosophy... not even rhetorics, if he's not aware of the false contradiction he's pointing at. But he feels free and wise enough to use all those tools. As one of my physics professors used to say, the easiest thing on Earth is to utter an opinion on something you know absolutely nothing about. Of course, it's easy, but also irresponsible.

[jordan179]

Oh, and by the way Man did not simply "descend" from a primate. Man is a primate. So said Carl Linneas -- a creationist.

To be fair to Linneas, pretty much all scientists, with a very few exceptions, were creationists in the 18th century!

[fpb]

You know that and I know that. But does Governor Huckabee know that?

(P.S.: it's Linneus.)

[goreism]

Linnaeus, you mean? :p Even Americans don't reduce all ae's to e's.

[fpb]

You're right. I suppose it's kind of a slip that goes with being used to the Catholic pronunciation of Latin, which turns all the aes into e's.