Hey, they don't put dates on those things

Hey, they don't put dates on those things

by digby

Numbers don't mean nuthin':
Canadian Edgar Nernberg isn't into the whole evolution thing. In fact, he's on the board of directors of Big Valley’s Creation Science Museum, a place meant to rival local scientific institutions. Adhering to the most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits "prove" that the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

Unfortunately, Nernberg just dug up a 60-million-year-old fish.

Local outlets report that the man is far from shaken by the bony fish, which he found while excavating a basement in Calgary.

Because here's the thing: He just doesn't believe they're that old. And he's quite the fossil lover.

“No, it hasn’t changed my mind. We all have the same evidence, and it’s just a matter of how you interpret it,” Nernberg told the Calgary Sun. “There’s no dates stamped on these things."

No sir, no dates. Just, you know, isotopic dating, basic geology, really shoddy stuff like that. To be fair, I'm not any more capable of figuring out when a particular fossil is from than Nernberg is. I'd be one sorry paleontologist, given the opportunity. I've never even found a fossil, so he's got me there. But the science of dating fossils is not shaky -- at least not on the order of tens of millions of years of error -- so this fossil and the rocks around it really do give new earth creationism the boot.s. Adhering to the most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits "prove" that the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

This piece by Chris Mooney explains that recent studies have proved that religion also plays a substantial role in whether one believes in climate change:

Biblical literalism also, needless to say, is tied to conflicts with the theory of evolution. (We’ve all seen that movie.)

Moreover, these results persisted even after the researchers controlled for other major variables that influence views on the environment, including gender, level of educational attainment, and most of all, ideology and party affiliation (which have the biggest influence of all on environmental views). Despite these controls, faith remained an important factor in shaping environmental stances. “What we find is that the effects of these denominational affiliations is on par with some sort of typical demographic variables,” said Konisky, like gender or level of education.

In other words, while faith doesn’t have as much of an influence on environmental views as outright politics does, it still has a meaningful one.

And so in some cases does religiosity, or, how intensely a faith is practiced through factors, such as prayer and church attendance. For Catholics and Evangelical Protestants, the study found, more religiosity was also linked to less climate concern.
[...]
The new study does not probe why evangelicals seem more inclined to reject climate concerns, but a recent blog post by Christian author Scott Rodin, entitled “As a Conservative, Evangelical Republican, Why Climate Change Can’t be True (Even Though It Is),” provides an intriguing hint.

Much of the animus in what he calls the “conservative evangelical” community, Rodin suggests, is about viewing environmentalists negatively, as a sort of “other” who don’t share the same worldview and values. Thus, Rodin writes that he had been “conditioned” to think that “People who care about the environment are left-wing, socialist, former hippies who have no job and hate those who do” and that “People who care about the environment are atheists who worship nature, hate Christians and believe humans are intruders on the earth.”
That sounds right. And the same holds true of right wing politics, obviously.

I think liberals do the same thing to some degree, but it doesn't carry over to whether they believe in science. If they reject conventional scientific consensus it's based on a distrust of corporations not because Tea Partyers believe it.

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