A voice of reason

I'm listening to the C-SPAN stream I previously blogged about, and I'm listening to the interview and call-ins with Michael Chapman. Chapman is the descendant of Darwin, and wrote Trials of the Monkey, about when he visited Dayton, Ohio, where the Scopes Monkey Trial took place.

He said something in the interview that I thought was so well put, I'd share it.

If you had a sick child, and if you were in a room full of a hundred doctors, and ninety-nine of them said, "We diagnose this disease as X, and we think the best treatment for it would be Y." And one doctor said, "I think we should pray for this child." Which one would you go with?"

Then he mentioned the National Center for Science Education's Project Steve as a good way to measure the ninety-nine evolutionists vs. the one ID proponent.

Frankly, I think it's more like as if that one doctor said, "I've never seen any of these things called germs all these other doctors are talking about. They've never proved they cause sickness. This disease is clearly caused by the child's sin, and the Devil should be beaten out of the child and that will make him better."

LATER:

Oh man, this interview ends on a great note. This guy's not a scientist, and he's not shy about saying so. He's a writer, and you have to feel bad for him because all of the caller's are talking about evolution, and not his book. But he's very well-spoken and quite insightful.

[Talking about the idea that evolution is a big fraud perpetrated by amoral atheist scientists.] In the history of science, you often see supernatural explanations for things that later are found to have a natural explanation. There will be probably things that remain a mystery, but it doesn't seem to be a logical way of looking at the teaching of science. To simply speculate about something that can't be proven.

And this part surprised and really cracked me up. A great way to end the program.

[About how ID is a uniquely American religious phenomenon.] In a way, the Church is capable of supplying more comfort to people in their lives than the theory of evolution does, but is that the function of knowledge, I don't know. I think it's also interesting to look at the failure of the American education system... And when you look at Darwin, and when you look at how he was educated, or not educated. He didn't actually go to college; he was sort of an educated and enlightened amateur. And then you have George Bush, who went through the education system, and actually graduated from Harvard. And here is a man who has had all of the advantages of the American education system, and has the views of a basically somewhat ignorant fundamentalist crowd. It's a bizarre thing to see how a man who has reached that level, with such an apparent lack of understanding of science.

Oh, I think I like this man.