Can We Please Stop Treating Mythology As Science?
In the early 2000s, I spent a decent amount of time debating with many friends who were/are literal biblical believers over the incursion of religion into science classes in the United States. At the time, the main target of religious fundamentalists was evolution. Well-funded groups at places like the Discovery Institute were trying to insert the religious concept of Intelligent Design (ID) into high school science classes on an equal footing with biological evolution—in spite of a lack of evidence in favor of the notion that the current complexity in biological species required divine intelligence to arise, and a massive amount of counter-evidence that the few specific biological systems, such as bacterial flagella, that these groups focused on, evolved from various earlier organisms. The believers in evolution were very successful, culminating in a famous court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, where a local school board had tried to replace...