Thanks to Chris for showing me this: a hilarious cartoon from Non Sequitur about Intelligent Design. As he said, “Yep, they went there.”

As a firm believer that science — all of it — is a gift from God, that you can’t have religion without science and can’t have science without religion (at some point, everything works the way it does because of some rule of nature, and you have to make a leap of faith), and that science, ultimately, is the pursuit to understand the universe as God created it, I am often disgusted with those who are narrow-minded enough to think that 99% of everything He created is a farce and is just here to confuse us. That would be the fundamentalist form of belief in Intelligent Design, or Creationism. They believe in some science (the basic laws of physics, for example — gravity’s cool), but not all science (like biology and anthropology, which, you know, prove we’ve been around longer than a few thousand years — carbon dating is not cool). Sorry, you can’t have it both ways: if you believe in God, then you must also accept that He created what we call science — the rules and very state of existence of the universe. When we learn about how things formed, evolved, and came to be, we are learning about the events God set in motion and predestined. The story of Genesis is a wonderful analogy, like many parables in the Bible, to help us understand what God did. It does not, however, literally mean He snapped His fingers and everything came into existence in 7 days flat, and then He went back and created dinosaur bones, radiocarbon decay, an ever-clearer evolutionary chain from lesser primates to humans, distant galaxies whose light takes millions of years to reach us, and a thousand other things just to screw with everybody.

OK I’m done preaching now. This kind of hypocrisy just really gets under my skin, and people who promote anti-evolution theories — especially forcing them on children through the public school system — are, in my opinion, actually violating the spirit in which we were created — to seek knowledge — and denying most of the universe that God created. This is what I have always believed, and recently learned it is the position of the Catholic church as well. People at one extreme or the other — atheist scientists or hardcore Christian fundamentalists — often decry the opposite side because they think they are automatically at odds with each other. But they’re really not — and if people could get this through their obtuse, stubborn heads, everyone could live together a lot happier.