Is evolution relevant to the presidential race?
Over on Hullabaloo, tristero writes that a candidate’s response to the evolution question is “a litmus test.” Governor Mike Huckabee was one of three Republican candidates to disavow evolution in a previous debate. In this clip he is asked whether he believes the story of creation. Huckabee retorts that it’s an unfair question because it “asks in a simplistic manner… whether there is a God or not.” So I guess the religious beliefs of presidential candidates… are not anything the voting public should care about?
Of course, Huckabee is very invested in our knowing that he believes in God. And to him, it’s straightforward: “A person either believes that God created this process, or that it was an accident.” He’s unequivocal: accepting evolution is rejecting God. Huckabee gets so much more wrong in this two minute response, beyond distorting the question into a test of faith. Conflating the theory of evolution with the origin of life is a blunder that confuses major scientific disciplines—but for Huckabee that’s not relevant, because to him research into the origin of life and evolutionary biology are wrongheaded and only within his sphere of interest as threats to Christian faith. His suggestion that evolution is a purely random (accidental) process is so misguided that it’s staggering that a presidential candidate would promote it with such confidence. Which leads us to the real problem. Huckabee says (not for the first time) that this question has no business harassing a presidential candidate—the question of evolution is for someone writing “an eighth grade science book.” Huckabee’s dismissal is alarming, and tristero’s right: if a candidate doesn’t recognize that a government must rely on basic science research to develop responsible and ethical policies, that candidate has no business in the White House.
January 12th, 2008 at 2:56 am
Huckabee backed down; you know God created the earth in six DAYS because after each stage of creation, God says “So the evening and the morning were the first day.” I was wondering, if some people say the evolution came about by chance, and you say that is absurd, then why did it happen?
January 13th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
What I’ve called absurd is the claim that evolution is a purely random process, or that complex adaptations are accidental. The reason this is an absurd claim is because it is false, and because it has never been an argument held by the scientific community. It has only been a misguided claim made by anti-evolution advocates.
Evolution is not a purely random process. Evolution CAN proceed by the random process called genetic drift, and the genetic diversity that enables evolution is generated by mutations that occur randomly. But evolution can also proceed by a deterministic (nonrandom) process called natural selection. It is by this process that adaptations evolve. Click here for a primer on the mechanisms of evolution.
If you are asking why life originated in the first place, then your implicit criticism is correct: this is not a question that science can answer with the certainty that Scripture can.
January 14th, 2008 at 2:24 am
Thank you for your interlucative feedback:).