Last week, Brendan claimed that creationism is not a huge issue in the upcoming election. He’s right, insomuch as no one is talking about it. But Brendan is wrong, because a candidate’s stance on creationism reflects his or her stance on science and that is a very important thing indeed.

When I first brought up creationism in my little spat with Thomas I offered that we need to reject intelligent design (for the sake of any argument made with me regarding creationism, the terms “creationism” and “intelligent design” are equivalent, until demonstrated otherwise) because our country is falling behind in science and math. I’ll admit that this was a bit of a red herring, my distaste of creationism runs quite a bit deeper than that.

You see, science is based on a small number of very important concepts: falsifiability, testability, repeatability and honesty. Sadly, cdesign proponentsists don’t understand that last one, which leads them to ignore the others. Creationism discounts legitimate scientific findings out of hand, proposes that claiming that evolution is wrong is a scientific theory in itself (hint: it’s not) and presents an ever rising (and completely irrational) bar for evolutionary biology to jump over. At the same time, creationism does not include any experiments (that prove its ideas - proposed experiments that no cdesign proponentsist has ever tried don’t count) that can be performed in a lab, cannot be proven false and, really, doesn’t offer any explanation that helps us understand our world or predict what may happen in the future.

The thing that really bugs me about creationism is that it ignores all of the evidence that we have for evolutionary biology. The fossil record, differences in speciation across vast distances and countless experiments all point to evolution as the driving force behind the adaptation of every species that has ever existed - and will ever exist - to the changing conditions of its environment. Evolution is an elegant, beautiful description of how life develops (at least on earth). As an asiide, I highly recommend the Nova program Intelligent Design On Trial as a good, basic overview of some of the evidence behind evolution (and against intelligent design).

But the worst part about the recent outbreak of creationism in the United States is its insistence that everyone else has to agree with it. Monotheism has always bugged me for this reason; I find it hard to insist that my god is the right god, and someone else’s is the wrong god. It’s especially difficult for me to cope with different sects of a religion that disagree on the minutiae of dogma or who should be the successor to a particularly important prophet. But that’s all fine, you can have your religion and I will have my (no) religion; I’m not (yet) as militant as Dawkins or Hitchens. As long as you let me be I will do the same to you.

As soon, however, as people start imposing their religions beliefs on others I get upset. That’s what creationism in our schools is: imposing religious belief on other people. Well, that and just plain dead wrong. Our country and our tradition is founded on letting others practice (or choose not to practice) religion as they choose.

Back to the relevance to the current presidential race. Last May, when the Republicans had their first debate, three of the candidates indicated that they do not believe in evolution. Granted, two of the men in question don’t seem to be going anywhere in the polls, but one of them, Governor Huckabee, is in the middle of a surge. Let me say this for the record: Evolution is not something to be believed in. Sure, you can reject all of the evidence behind evolution, but that doesn’t make you less stupid just because it’s for religious reasons. The claimed holes in the fossil record are not there; the claimed scientific debate over evolution does not exist. Evolution is accepted, by consensus, in the scientific community because it does an excellent job of describing biological development, not because of a vast conspiracy against the Christian faith.

Rejecting evolution, then, is a demonstration of an individual’s willingness to ignore the evidence presented to him or her and, instead, to base his or her actions on conjecture. We’ve seen where that has gotten us during the current presidency. This country does not need a president who acts on belief. We need a president who logically analyzes real evidence and takes rational actions based on the facts.