A big bust

John Scalzi gets cosmological:

I was initially a little confused by the cover, in that with the exception of a couple of unregenerate Hoyle-loving solid-statists out there, probably the entire of the magazine's 185,000-member subscriber base has probably already signed off on the whole Big Bang thing; it'd be like Parenting magazine having a cover story that asked if its readers believed in pregnancy.

No, Mr. Scalzi. The parents were around for that big bang. OTOH no one has ever seen the kind you're talking about.

The second aim is to give non-Creationist parents some reasonable ammunition at the next school board meeting, when some Bible-brandishing yahoo demands the science curriculum be changed to give equal footing to whatever damn fool brew of mysticism and junk science they've cobbled together this year to make an end-run around the separation of church and state, and someone rational needs to step in and point out what evidence exists to suggest the Big Bang actually happened.

Of course we must insult those we don't agree with.

All you really have to do is point out the obvious - creationism isn't science. And to get along with your neighbors as any decent person would want to do, you drop the offensive part of the curriculum - is anyone going to miss the big bang?

Mr Scalzi seems blind to the possibility of science and creationism living in harmony.

And Mr. Rationality doesn't explain just how local control of the school curriculum has anything to do with separation of church and state. Maybe that's because it doesn't, and he doesn't want to expose the fact that he has no basis for intervening on such grounds.

I'd go straight to the endgame, which would be to inform the school board that if it went ahead and confused science and theology, I'd be more than pleased to drag in the ACLU and make it take all the tax money it was planning to use on football uniforms and use it to pay lawyers instead.

Mr. Scalzi doesn't much like democracy, does he? He thinks it's ok if one horse's ass decides to trump the will of an entire town by dragging in goons from the outside. Why would he want to live amongst such a benighted populace, anyway? - let him go elsewhere.

Fundamentally, one doesn't "believe" or have faith in much of anything as it regards science, since as a process science isn't about believing at all.

Dead wrong, and the next post down is devoted to this in detail. The short answer is that you have to believe in the process - if Mr. Scalzi is aware of this he doesn't let on.

I expect better from a professional journalist.