Everybody wants to know what Scott Walker and Sarah Palin think about evolution, but almost nobody is asking what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama think about homeopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and the like.

(source: Stuff and Nonsense, Gammon and Trotters! | Hang Together)

Not to re-enact Pascal’s Wager, but the more I think about this well-made point, the more I think someone should point out that–whatever their errors, and the consequences of those errors, are–people who think like this or even like this simply do not rise to the levels of repellent, foolish, monstrous lunacy we regularly find among people who think like this or this or this or this.

Among the pagans, attitudes like this were matter-of-fact for millennia:

Hilarion to Alis his sister, heartiest greetings, and to my dear Berous and Apollonarion. Know that we are still even now in Alexandria. Do not worry if when all the others return I remain in Alexandria. I beg and beseech of you to take care of the little child, and as soon as we receive wages I will send them to you. If-good luck to you!-you bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is a female, expose it. You told Aphrodisias, ‘Do not forget me.’ How can I forget you? I beg you therefore not to worry. The 29th year of Caesar, Pauni 23.

(source: WLGR)

While at least some Christians, and all authoritative Christian teaching, have long maintained the contrary.  

Faced with a choice of mountains to climb (make no mistake you are faced with such a choice), you really must not fail to understand the religious and philosophical and historical dimensions of your choice of companions, methods, and reference points: 

Father McClorey [who wrote the opposing view in the magazine] may think it better to abandon the garden to the weeds, naively confident that geniuses will make their appearances regardless of heredity and environment. But no student of genetics, no one who has even superficially observed the achievements of scientific horticulture and animal breeding, can consider seriously that the road to human perfection can ever be attained by abandoning scientific control and reverting to a childish reliance upon the blind forces of uncontrolled procreative instincts.

(source: Pelosi Getting Award Named for Woman Who Called Children ‘Human Weeds’ | CNS News)

Calling a pagan disregard for humanity “science” cannot make it so; and calling one’s religious commitment to a materialist definition of “human perfection” by “scientific control” secular does not make it rational.

And those whose religious commitment is to a self-disclosing Creator of an intelligible universe, of all people, ought to be capable of understanding what God hath wrought.