As a fossil fan myself, I share TFT Media correspondent Peter Hyman’s cheer at seeing the 4.4 million-year-old primate skeleton known as “Ardi” make the front page of the New York Times. It’s true that on a certain level, Ardi replaces Lucy, the more-famous 3.2-milion-year-old skeleton that is now on display in Times Square.

But I have to disagree with him that this new discovery constitutes “another blow to Intelligent Design,” the political-religious movement which works to erode public education in evolutionary biology, in favor of a Biblical literalist view of the earth’s origins.  First of all, the discovery of Ardi is not really new. Though major studies on the fossil were just released in the journal Science this week, the bones were first uncovered in 1994, in the very early days of the Intelligent Design movement, which itself represents an “evolution” of the older “creationist” or “creation science” movement.

But much more importantly, because Intelligent Design is a political movement, not a scientific one, there is no point in using scientific evidence, however new and exciting, to refute it. For those who believe in creationism, there will always be rationalizations for such arguments. Chief among them: sophisticated dating methods used to determine the age of fossils like Lucy are bogus. It’s crucial to combat such misperceptions, but not by relying on whatever the latest scientific news is. As Lynn Copes, TFT’s illustrious Bones correspondent wrote in August, science frequently announces such major, “missing link”-type discoveries.

As I wrote last month in an essay on the Lucy exhibit published on the religion-criticism Web site Killing the Buddha, Lucy needs to be considered in her cultural as well as scientific context, because the this-fossil-is-older-than-that-one method just does not work.

The Lucy exhibit also included a replica of the “Ida” fossil, which at 47 million years old, is significantly older than both Lucy and Ardi. And Ida didn’t stop the creationists, who, as a commenter on Hyman’s piece mentions, are a more appropriate target audience for scientific discoveries proving the age of the earth than is Intelligent Design, which doesn’t particularly care about the age of the earth. Answers in Genesis, the young-earth creationists behind the infamous Creation Museum, immediately published a pseudo-scientific response. Pretending that each of these remarkable discoveries have the power to change minds from theistic to scientific worldviews is futile. Instead, let’s work to improve science education in public schools. Starting with Louisiana.

Why on earth are we still hearing the words ‘death panels’?  Betsy McCaughey and her brainchild, that nonexistent group of unelected bureaucrats that will decide for us who lives and who dies, has been widely discredited. But apparently, not widely enough.

Recently, Sarah Palin herself—or, as Jezebel calls her in order not to give her any more attention, or Google hits, than she deserves—”The Dark Ex-Governor”—was granted space in the Wall Street Journal for a pre-emptive attack on the day of Obama’s major health-care address.

And she had the balls to bring up death panels, again.  This time it’s not about end-of-life counseling, it’s about the Independent Medicare Advisory Council Obama wants to create to monitor costs. They are “an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts” working, as Obama said, “outside of normal political channels.”

She continues: “Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans.”

As The Dark One correctly notes, Congress actually removed the unexpectedly troublesome provision for funding of “end-of-life counseling.” Clearly, the Democrats thought it would be that easy to excise the myth, as well. What the Dark One is telling us is that conservatives are going to locate this “death panel” somewhere in whatever legislation gets proposed, no matter what.

What does any of this have to do with science and religion, you ask? Isn’t this really politics? True. The “death panels” (born of the benign “end-of-life counseling”) are a classic neo-conservative neologism which fit in the canon along with “death tax” (a.k.a. “estate tax”) and “pro-life” (previously known as “anti-abortion”.)  The premise is simple: death=bad; life=good.  Fair enough.  No one likes death.  

But the “death panel” myth seems to me even weirder. Judgments on life or death have traditionally been religion’s territory. Think of the Jewish Book of Life, in which, according to tradition, the names of righteous Jews are written—to be blotted out of the Book of Life means death.

Then there’s Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates with his list, making sure only the worthy get past. (This is a folk tradition that evolved out of the Gospel verse in which Peter is given “the keys to heaven.”)

Even the Grim Reaper, a freelance death-judge not attached to a particular religious tradition, would be put out of a job were insurance companies to take over the business of deciding who’s time has come.

My point is a serious one: conservative political rhetoric is preying an extremely deep-seated anxiety, held even by non-religious people, about death. Death is one of those tricky place in which quantifiable, actuarial concerns—how much will the funeral cost; What will happen to my estate—chafe painfully against impossible-to-quantify fears: what will happen when I die? Will it be painful? What will my family do?

Some theorists of religion have pointed to this near-universal fear of death as a founding principle of religions worldwide—for some, fear of death even serves as an entire definition of religion.  Fear alone is obviously a reductive explanation of religions (I prefer anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s pleasingly vague “system of symbols.”)

But you can see where death has us all, religious and not, in somewhat of the same basket. The great unknown demands faith in something, be it biology or the Bible.

Hi, I’m Brook, your TFT Science and Religion correspondent. Why the belated introduction? I got my first comment the other day, on my piece about the Creation Museum and dinosaurs. It went like this: “How can you have a section called Science and Religion? You might as well have one called “Astronomy and Astrology.” One is grounded entirely in fact and the other exclusively in superstition.” That’s when I realized I should back up a little bit and explain myself.

Firstly, The Faster Times has lots of paired sections—Science and Art, Music and Ideas, Love and Death—and in none of these are the two topics being equated. Not to speak for my fellow dual-beat columnists, but I’d venture a guess that they, like me, are interested in the “And” in our respective titles, that is, the place where the two things intersect.  Granted, I really like to find the relationship between seemingly unrelated things: to me, an Astronomy and Astrology section sounds like a great idea. Science and Religion are not the same thing. But I think it’s pretty hard to argue that the two have no relationship at all.

There’s lots of ways to describe the relationship. The brilliant science writer Stephen Jay Gould famously called science and religion two “non-overlapping magisterium.” I tend to disagree—I think science and religion do overlap, lately in the political realm. Then there’s the “God of the gaps” theory, in which God resides only in the places that science can’t explain, the idea being that in a progressive, scientific world view, those gaps will slowly disappear. The problem with the theory is: religion doesn’t seem to be disappearing. 

The clear implication of the commenter is that science is fact and religion is junk not worth talking about. I know a lot of people who feel this way. But consider the possibility that religion is worth talking about simply because it effects so many people. We need to get better at explaining religion in all its many guises: as a social phenomenon, as a political factor, as a basis for literature, as a comfort for the sick. (I’m not the only one to make this observation. There are now a small army of publications and organizations seeking to do this. See especially: getreligion.org, The Revealer, and the Religion Newswriters Association.)

For the record, I am neither a scientist nor a religious person. I’m not out to promote or denigrate anybody’s beliefs. I just think there’s a lot of gray area between and around the two, and that’s what I’m here to investigate. And I want your help.  Keep those comments coming!

Image from Stephen Jay Gould’s original 1998 essay in the New York Times, “Science and Religion: Bridging the Great Divide.”

Paul Giamatti’s new movie has a wacked-out premise: an actor has his soul surgically removed and put into cold storage in New Jersey so it doesn’t get ruined when he takes on the apparently soul-sucking role of Uncle Vanya. Giamatti’s soul, as it turns out, is about the size of a chickpea.  But (as Anthony Lane points out in his unusually glowing New Yorker review) the joy of the movie comes from the surreal juxtaposition of a scientific impossibility in a realistic movie.

I agree. It’s a juxtaposition that’s not only found in Chekhov and Kafka, but also in science itself, which has long been concerned with putting the metaphysical in physical form. The Christian soul is invisible; it’s the part of you that God acts upon. It can be permanently exiled to hell, or it can of course be saved—although not in cold storage on New Jersey. (There are other religions which encourage physical representation of the soul. In Haitian vodou (voodoo), each believer has a “head-spirit”, chosen from a boisterous cast of semi-divine personalities. One of these, Gede, an old man, wears glasses with one lens missing, because he can see into the lands of both the living and the dead.) But that didn’t satisfy early scientists. There simply had to be a place in the body where our deepest thoughts are formed, without us knowing about it.

Descartes, father of rationality, thought the brain was the obvious choice.  He declared the pineal gland to be “the seat of the soul,” because it was the only part of the brain he found not to be dual—and the soul of course could only be in one place. The pineal gland is in fact about the size of a pea, though I wouldn’t suggest removing it. This begs the question: if the pineal gland is the soul, are the eyes really the window to it? 

Then there’s the infamous case of Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who in 1907 conducted an elaborate series of experience to prove that the human soul a) existed and b) had a measurable mass. He did this by weighing humans immediately before and after death, on the assumption that the soul leaves the body at the moment of the last breath. 

He corrected for many other possible cause of at-death weight loss, including air being expelled from the lungs, and the ceasing of circulation.  His results, as reported by the New York Times: the human soul weights 3/4 of an ounce, or about 21 grams, which is where that movie gets its title. There was no word on its shape or resemblance to legumes.

With the onset of psychology, the “soul” began to dematerialize.  It went by other names: id, ego, personality, spirit, consciousness. But science hadn’t totally given up.  Frances Crick, double-helix man himself, wrote a whole book about the scientific search for the soul. He believed that the neuron was the basis of consciousness, just like DNA was the basis for life. If he’s right, Giamatti should not despair of the chickpea-size of his soul.  A neuron is much, much smaller.

Recently, reports came out that Florida Adventure Land, a Christian dinosaur theme park in Pensacola, Florida, was shut down for tax fraud. Apparently the owner contended that he was working for God, not the federal government, and so was not required to pay taxes.  But let’s back up: what on earth do dinosaurs have to do with Christianity?

Kent Hovind, the evangelist behind Dinosaur Adventure Land, is not alone in using paleontological wonders as a tool for religious outreach. Last October, I visited the Creation Museum in Bullittsburg, Kentucky, a 27-million-dollar pseudo-scientific complex built in 2006 by a group called Answers in Genesis to promote young-earth creationism. Dinosaurs were everywhere, animatronic jaws opening and closing, letting out pre-recorded elephant-like roars on a constant loop. They were hanging out with Adam and Eve in the lush recreation of the Garden of Eden, marching two by two onto Noah’s Ark.

I was confused. Wouldn’t an organization that wants us to believe the earth has only been around for 6,000 years want to distance itself from creatures which have been proven to be millions of years old?

Young-earth creationists have been around forever, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that they had 27 million dollars to throw around on dinosaurs. In the 1980s, what had been an obscure, retiring religious movement began to emerge into the limelight as a political faction, led by Jerry Falwell and others. They advanced, Rip-van-Winkle-like, back into a world of carbon dating, genome mapping, and dinosaurs.

It’s not that the mere existence of dinosaur fossils necessarily vanquished belief in a God-designed planet. In fact, the scientist credited with coining the word “dinosaur”—British Museum director Richard Owen, in 1842—did so entirely convinced that the creatures had been created, and “neither derived from improvement of a lower, nor lost progressive development into a higher type.”

But dinosaurs, along with meteors and early-hominid remains, became some of science’s most compelling discoveries–real, physical evidence of other worlds and other times.  So their co-option by fundamentalist religion struck a particularly sour note. On the fundamentalists’ part, borrowing science’s headline act for pseudo-science was a savvy decision.  Who doesn’t like dinosaurs? Nature’s mysterious giants would bring people, particular 10-year-old boys, into the fold like never before. Dinosaurs were, after all, too big to ignore. Beyond that, dinosaurs proved that this was a modern movement.

By 2006, fundamentalists had amassed so many converts and so much revenue that they had the confidence to create new theology on the fly, without batting an eye. They simply worked backwards: the Bible says (according to their reading) that the earth is only 6,000 years old. Dinosaurs existed. So naturally, they can’t be more than 6,000 years old.

The Museum’s cheerful placards matter-of-factly conclude that dinosaurs co-existed with humans. As a visual aid, a tiny animatronic velociraptor stands next to a giggling caveman child, a benevolent prehistoric pet.  By rewriting the ancient past, Answers in Genesis could show that it was in the here and now. And rewrite they did. There were so many dinosaurs at the Creation Museum that I started to wonder whether they would appear with Christ on the cross.

The theological move is so new that the dinosaur details haven’t been ironed out. Dinosaur Adventure Land contends that the dinosaurs were all killed by Noah’s Flood, neatly explaining their extinction. The Creation Museum posits that dinosaurs did make it onto Noah’s Ark, and were saved. So why aren’t they around today? Past the food court and the gift shop, a plush-seated movie theater showed a 10-minute documentary that claims to prove that dinosaurs actually survived the Great Flood—as dragons. Which are of course real. (How else would Saint George have converted people to Christianity?) A few individual survivors—like the Loch Ness Monster, and the Komodo dragons—were still around centuries later.

It’s unclear what religious purpose this could serve…