If Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson were to become president, America would be under the management of a fellow who believes his own personal religious upbringing trumps whatever scientific evidence you might place upon his desk. He is not the only candidate to think so, of course. He just wants to again
make it very, very clear.
"They say, 'Carson, ya know, how can you be a surgeon, a neurosurgeon, and believe that God created the Earth, and not believe in evolution, which is the basis of all knowledge and all science?'," Carson said during his second speech, referencing "progressives."
You know, there was a point when "accepts well-established scientific facts" and "progressive" were not necessarily identical things. It was possible at one point for even non-"progressives" to accept that millions of years of fossil records, et cetera, and so on, were not an elaborate prank being pulled to sway true believers from their path. My Catholic high school, way back when, taught evolution without drama or heartburn.
Indeed, there are a great many spiritual people in the world who accept both the notion of a Creator and are keenly interested in the details of How. When we discovered that the heavens did not consist of lights painted on a darkened ceiling were we a bit sad, for say a few centuries or so, but then we moved on. The question is whether you believe a series of ancient texts are meant to be the end point of all human knowledge or a beginning, and one of those possibilities is considerably more depressing than the other.
In any event, we are not going to solve the eternal mysteries of existence here. Which is fortunate, because Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson has already done it for us.
"Well, you know, it's kind of funny. But I do believe God created us, and I did just fine. So I don't know where they get that stuff from, ya know? It's not true. And in fact, the more you know about God, and the deeper your relationship with God, I think the more intricate becomes your knowledge of the way things work, including the human body."
What Dr. Ben Carson believes is, any line of work other than leading a technologically advanced nation, generally his own business. The easy scorn with which Dr. Ben Carson has—for years—simply dismissed whatever great wide sweeps of scientific knowledge are necessary in order to keep Dr. Ben Carson from having to think Too Hard does not, however, bode well for the prospects of scientific advancement under a Ben Carson presidency. For starters, he believes the recent advances of astronomy to be "fairy tales" so it's not clear that NASA would fare well under his watch (note to self: verify Dr. Ben Carson believes Mars exists); we can presume that if the sitting president believed, as Dr. Ben Carson does, that the theory of evolution was inspired by the devil himself then biology textbooks throughout America might become considerably thinner.
Those bad and devil-inspired things, you see, are peddled by progressives. For Dr. Ben Carson it is not science that opposes his personal religious beliefs, but American progressives—as in, his movement's political enemies. And when belief in science is dismissed, or targeted, as a political point of view that becomes a bit more unnerving, doesn't it?