A Very Inconvenient Truth

In Seattle a significantly large number of parents is protesting the showing of Al Gore's documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, to students in public schools. When I first heard this I assumed that these parents considered Gore's film a bit of left-wing propaganda, its primary purpose being to discredit the current administration, and they felt that this kind of partisan activism had no place in their kids' education. But no, it's way more sinister than that. They don't deny the facts of global warming. In fact, they welcome it as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, an inevitable punishment for the sins of the world. To them, Al Gore's wake-up call is anti-creationism. What I don't get is why the concepts of science and an all-powerful, all-knowing God are antithetical. It doesn't seem a stretch to me to ascribe the genius of natural selection to an Almighty. The brilliant cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker, in his book How the Mind Works, tells of looking at an exhibition on spiders in the Smithsonian and marvelling at the creatures' complexity, the Swiss-watch precision with which they drew silk from their spinnerets to make their delicate webs. "How could anyone see this and not believe in natural selection," he thought. At that moment a woman standing next to him turned to him and exclaimed, "How could anyone see this and not believe in God?" As Rodney King asked, "why can't we all just get along?"