Dr. Ben Carson, the distinguished pediatric neurosurgeon now
giving Donald Trump a run for his money, does not believe in evolution. I never know what to think when someone like
Carson says something like that. Are we
to believe that during his long and very successful medical career, he never
prescribed any antibiotics save penicillin because he did not believe that strains
of bacteria could evolve that are immune to the very first antibiotic? Somehow I doubt it. Carson explained his decision in 2013 to
enter politics thus: "I believe it is a very good idea for
physicians, scientists, engineers, and others trained to make decisions based
on facts and empirical data to get involved in the political arena".
This is a very strange country.
3 comments:
I once worked with a man who had been a physician and a geneticist in Russia. After coming to the United States he became a "born-again" [super] Orthodox Jew. The Tanakh replaced the medical books he had previously kept on his desk and he claimed to have never believed in evolution. Obviously this is not a strictly American phenomenon. As you say, this is a very strange country. But it may be truer to observe that humans are a very strange species.
Carson is an extremely devout Seventh Day Adventist (a religion that encourages an all-encompassing lifestyle, including vegetarianism, for instance). The founder of the movement, Ellen G. White, was a key inspiration for modern creationism, because she had purported visions in which she saw a literal 7 day creation of the world take place. Seventh Day Adventist geologist George McCready Price was a major founder of "young earth creationism" in the form of so-called scientific creationism.
Empiricism is just too boring for Americans, our attention-spans are far too short. We prefer the type of "personal God" religion that justifies us in thinking the entire universe really IS about US.
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