A post from a parent reviewing a so-called “science fair project” has me laughing my ass off, while providing an absolutely stellar example of why you should never try to legitimately mix science and religion.

This stabs right at the heart of the “creationism” movement — people so desperate to shoehorn religion into public schools as much as possible (indoctrination at young ages is still the best way to shore up the numbers for any religion) that they’re actually trying to convince the world that “God did it!” is a legitimate “scientific” principle.

In the linked post, the author reviews an absolutely hilarious “hypothesis:”

Project Title: Better Living Through God

Question: Do unchristians make less moral choices than Christians?

Hypothesis: The Bible is the perfect guide to life that shows us how to be moral people. Without believing in the Bible you can’t know God and he can’t guide you and give you rewards for being a good person. I think people who aren’t Christian will be less successful.

Experiment: I will interview thirty people and ask them if they are Christian. I will give them the same questions so I have a control sample. I think they are immoral if they score lower than 15.

It doesn’t matter where you really land on the map on this one. Obviously, agnostics/atheists are already rolling their eyes. Actual scientists are weeping. Any Christian actually trying to live by those espoused virtues is hopefully thinking “ugh, not this shit again.”

The linked writeup does a fantastic job of ripping this thing to shreds, not because it’s just a lame attempt at a “bash everyone that isn’t Christian” by a brainwashed child (it is that, mind you; it’s just not the reason this deserves a shredding), but because as a “science project,” this thing falls far short of being a legitimate scientific research project.

Therein lies the problem with most people that genuinely cling to this notion that evolution is “just a theory.” I completely understand the appeal of trying to use a doctrine against itself — it’s loads of fun to point out the contradictions in the bible, simply because people profess to believe in the damned thing word-for-word, as if it were really the result of a divine hand, with nothing but faith to back up the claim.

So, being sick of that kind of “trickery” from we lowly heathens, it’s easy to understand why some have turned their attention to the theory of evolution, trying to use science (and scientific principles and methods) to trash the theory and render it invalid.

The trouble is this — we have people, openly and willfully ignorant of how science actually works, trying to use their (intentionally broken) understanding of scientific principles to attack theories developed with those principles.

Let’s take away the trouble magnet of “religion” for a moment and consider something more benign (but important): suppose an asteroid really was lined up to smack into Earth, and lay waste to our whole planet, to a point where those of us who didn’t immediately die from the incredible destructive power of the initial impact would die from the resulting weather, or lack of food, or some other indirect cause.

Would you want the same armchair scientists who claim “evolution is just a theory!” heading up the team tasked with the challenge of destroying or diverting the asteroid before it killed us all? Certainly not! You’d want the world’s best physicists, engineers, mathematicians at work on it. The dipshit that once told me, straight faced, that “gravity was just a theory,” is right out — they’d never let him even apply for the job.

Getting back to the science project discussed in that blog post — read through the questions the student proposed to ask the test subjects, then snicker at these conclusions:

Conclusion: We are all sinners and need to ask God’s forgiveness and repent. Since Christianity shows us how to do that, it would make people more moral if they became Christians.

In other words, not even the student’s “chosen righteous” passed the morality test offered in the project. Whoops. That’s not science — that’s a mockery of science, whose only goal was to preach.

I don’t actually care if you preach or not, so long as you adhere to some very simple rules:

• Not around my kids or my family
• Not around any kids that aren’t yours, unless you’ve got permission from their parents/guardians to do so
• Not in any publicly-funded venue that you are using free-of-charge (i.e. you pay to play like everyone else if you’re peddling religion, and you’re not doing it in a public school)
• Not forcefully (i.e. if I ignore you, you don’t try to “increase the volume” or get physical to get my attention)

Lots of people have problems with this, of course. That’s why we see creationism proponents even getting any attention in school board meetings. It’s why religion tends to be the root cause of just about every major armed conflict in mankind’s history. It’s great that people believe in their little “gods,” but when someone else doesn’t, the believers tend to get a little bit violent to prove their god’s dick is bigger (with all respect to George Carlin for his infamous “my god has a bigger dick than your god” routine).

It doesn’t matter much in this case, though — this student is clearly just parroting what’s been drilled in by the parents and teachers that encouraged and supported it. If this poor kid actually spent any time thinking about the “science” part of this, a much better project might have turned up instead of this dreck. If you insist on using your kids to push your religion on the world, please make sure you train them at least a little in the “real” world and how it works before you send them out to embarrass themselves like this poor kid did.

Technorati Tags: Politics Religion Silly