No Such Thing As Evidence

One thing I have pretty much given up on is trying to convince religiously-based conservatives of anything.

I spent a lot of time, in earlier years, presenting clear and simple evidence for the science of evolution. I think my books were pretty good in this regard. But I was not trying to convince creationists. They know they are wrong, and creationism is just a way of them influencing other people to be their followers.

I have also spent a lot of time presenting clear and simple evidence for the science of global warming. I briefly thought I might convince some “climate skeptics” that they were wrong. But they already know they are wrong. “Climate skepticism” is just their way to influence other people to be their followers.

More recently, millions of people refuse to believe that there is any such thing as the covid pandemic. Some of them run state governments. Here in Oklahoma, the Republicans have repeatedly proclaimed that a mask mandate is just as bad as Hitler’s Holocaust. They ignore all medical evidence.

To religious conservatives, there is no such thing as externally-verifiable truth. This became abundantly clear during the Trump years. Trump’s followers believed, and still believe, that He won the election of 2020. Their evidence? None, other than the fact that He says so. I deliberately gave the God-capitalization to the pronoun.

The religious conservatives have always been half-hearted in their beliefs. When the preacher Rice Broocks visited the University of Illinois, before he became a cofounder of a major church, he publicized that he was going to speak about creationism, but he asked the audience to release him from this topic, so that he could talk more about all the miraculous healing that God was doing through his hands. When I contacted the leader of the Heartland Institute, asking him for evidence regarding some of his claims that global warming was a hoax, his personal email response to me was, “Snore.” I’m not sure what that means, other than that he has no time to answer any questions. He was too busy hoodwinking people into believing him.

But with the covid epidemic and the Trump campaign, religious conservatives have abandoned all pretense at presenting evidence. The total absence of evidence does not show them they are wrong but is simply proof that Satan is so good at hiding their evidence that nobody can see any of it. I heard a preacher claim, a couple of months ago, that Joe Biden stole 41 million votes. Where is the evidence for this? None. To them, the absence of evidence is evidence that they are right.

And not only right, but the very rightness of God. Religious conservatives are blasphemers, who believe that Donald Trump creates truth by saying it. Here in Oklahoma, I see their flags and stickers all over the place. And they have stockpiles of automatic weapons. They do not hide this fact.

There is no point in trying to convince anyone on the political right. They already consider themselves to be incapable of error, as inerrant as God Himself.

When I stood in line last summer at a state agency, a Trumper started telling us that the covid epidemic was caused by dirty Mexicans coming over the border, or else (he was unclear) Biden invented it as an excuse to take away our freedoms. I had to struggle to suppress my desire to raise my voice. He insulted me by saying that my extensive studies, leading to a Ph.D. in biology, were less important than his wild guesses.

Further evidence of their blasphemy is that they not only despise anyone who does not believe them, but they particularly despise their fellow Republicans. To Trumpers, Biden (and especially that colored woman who is his vice president) is an infidel, but moderate Republicans like Liz Cheney are heretics. Heretics are always worse than infidels. Shi’a extremists hate Sunnis worse than they hate Christians.

I continue to write about evolution and global warming, not to try to convince right-wing blasphemers, but to educate people who already know the truth but appreciate discovering new evidence. Only the people who already know about evolution and global warming and the pandemic and that Trump lost, only these people, are delighted to learn new things.

And as a science educator and writer I really enjoy helping sincere people understand the world better, and that is my only goal and the only reward. In a way it is a relief to not have the burden of convincing anyone.

Why Fundamentalists Must Believe the Coronavirus Pandemic is a Hoax

I have posted a video that describes the ideas below.

Thousands, if not a million or more, fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe that the coronavirus pandemic is a hoax that has been started by Democrats to make Donald Trump look bad. Part of this is because white evangelicals have, as the title of a recent book indicates, chosen to “worship at the altar of Donald Trump.” In some cases, fundamentalist belief that there is no coronavirus pandemic has led them to acts of aggression, as certain recent viral videos have shown.

But there is another reason that fundamentalists MUST reject the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is caused by a virus. And that is because the Bible says so. I first pointed this out in a blog entry in 2012.

Actually, the Bible does not say that there is no such thing as viruses, or that they never cause disease. But I present below the evidence that the New Testament describes one-third of all diseases as being demonic in origin.

Here is a complete list of Jesus’ healings, in which I indicate which ones were and were not attributed to demon possession. In order to do so, I have tried to determine which of the parallel Gospel accounts refer to the same event, so as not to double-count them. And here they are (demonic events in bold).

	Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
1	Healing a leper	8:1	1:40	5:12
2	Centurion’s servant	8:5		7:1
3	Peter’s mother-in-law	8:14	1:29	4:38
4	Same day: demoniacs	8:16
5	Gadarene swine	8:28	5:1	8:26
6	Forgave the paralytic	9:2	2:1	5:17
7	Resurrected ruler’s daughter	9:18	5:21	8:40
8	Woman with hemorrhage	9:20	5:24	8:43
9	Two blind men	9:27
10	Dumb demoniac	9:32		11:14
11	Man with withered hand	12:10	3:1	6:6
12	Blind dumb demoniac	12:22
13	Canaanite woman with demon daughter	15:21	7:24
14	Epileptic boy falling into fire	17:14	9:14	9:37
15	Blind men near Jericho	20:30	10:46
16	Demoniac near Capernaum		1:21	4:31
17	Deaf dumb man, Decapolis			7:31
18	Blind man at Bethsaida		8:22		9:1
19	Young man in his funeral			7:11
20	Another woman with flux			13:10
21	Man with dropsy			14:1
22	Ten lepers			17:11
23	Official’s son				4:46
24	Lame man at Bethsaida				5:2

I cannot be sure of some of the classifications; item 23 might be the same as item 2, but I have erred on the side of caution in favor of fundamentalists; item 2 refers to a servant, item 23 to a son, which most of us believe could just be a garbled transmission of the account, but fundamentalists do not believe garbled transmission is possible in the Bible. I have omitted the famous account of Lazarus, since it was considered an example of a resurrection, not a healing.

The point here is that seven of the 24 healings were specifically described—in all the parallel accounts available—as the casting out of demons. This is 29 percent. If you count the stories separately, 14 out of 46 involve demons, which is 30 percent. That is, in roughly one-third of the healings, exorcism was involved. In one of them (14), clear symptoms of epilepsy are described.

Creationists make a really big deal about evolution. Decades ago, they wanted to outlaw the teaching of evolution. When that didn’t work, they tried to mandate equal time for creation and evolution. When that didn’t work, they wanted to mandate the inclusion of a mention of creationism. Clearly, over the decades, evolutionary science has been their target. More recently, they have begun attacking the science of global warming with nearly as much fervor as they once attacked evolution.

But they didn’t have any trouble with medical science. Their children learned about how viruses, bacteria, protists, fungi, and parasitic worms cause contagious diseases, and how mutations can cause other diseases—in medical school, in college, in high school, even before high school. In none of these places, except perhaps their own schools and colleges, was demonology mentioned. I have never heard of fundamentalists trying to get legislation passed to mandate the inclusion of demonology in the medical science curriculum. They chose to allow a figurative interpretation of, or perhaps just to ignore, those Bible passages that attribute disease to spiritual causes. Fundamentalists occasionally attempt exorcisms, but they never insist that the rest of us agree with them.

How can the creationists do this? They think that God has given them the right to decide which parts of the Bible to take literally and which parts to take figuratively. “Day” is literal in Genesis 1 and figurative in Genesis 2; “the Earth” was figurative in Peleg’s day but literal in Noah’s day; and natural law accounts for the wind and the rain and diseases but not the origin of species.

I wondered, in 2012, what God would do without fundamentalists to tell us which parts of the Bible to believe and which ones not to believe. But now I know. They have embraced a literal Bible interpretation to such an extent that they reject medical science, except when they get sick. There are more stories than any of us can list of fundamentalist preachers rejecting the coronavirus pandemic, only to themselves die of covid.