It Was the Best of Times, It Was the End of Times

Below are excerpts from a September 3, 2008, entry on the blog Progressive Alaska. In it, blogger Philip Munger details the few informal meetings he had with the woman who would become the current Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin. The key issue raised in the piece—and the thing that frightens me most about her—is that she is apparently among those who regard the end of the world as a good thing. Considering how easily that can be helped along by Republican hawks with a nuclear (let the spelling guide your pronunciation, Sarah) arsenal, these beliefs are anything but innocuous, and they certainly do not suggest to me any firmer moral foundation than what is possessed by a rationalist nonbeliever who does not require the threat of damnation to motivate his good works. More after the excerpt.

I first met Alaska Governor and GOP Vice Presidential aspirant Sarah Palin when she was on the City of Wasilla Planning Commission. ... Of the encounters I've since had with Sarah Palin, two that brought up her faith, have become important, in light of the possibility that she might someday soon be in charge of thousands of thermonuclear weapons.

In June 1997, both Palin and I had responsibilities at the graduation ceremony of a small group of Wasilla area home schoolers. ... Palin had recently become Wasilla mayor, beating her earliest mentor, John Stein, the then-incumbent mayor. A large part of her campaign had been to enlist fundamentalist Christian groups, and invoke evangelical buzzwords into her talks and literature.

As the ceremony concluded, I bumped into her in a hall away from other people. I congratulated her on her victory, and took her aside to ask about her faith. Among other things, she declared that she was a young earth creationist, accepting both that the world was about 6,000-plus years old, and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time.

I asked how she felt about the second coming and the end times. She responded that she fully believed that the signs of Jesus returning soon "during MY lifetime," were obvious. "I can see that, maybe you can't - but it guides me every day."

Our next discussion about religion was after she had switched to the less strict Wasilla Bible Church. ... Once again, we found ourselves being able to talk privately. I reminded her of the earlier conversation, asking her if her views had changed. She was no longer "necessarily" a young earth creationist, she told me. But she strongly reiterated her belief that "The Lord is coming soon." I was trying to get her to tell me what she felt the signs were, when she had to move on.

—Philip Munger, Progressive Alaska, September 3, 2008

Let me take a moment to say something about young-Earth creationism, just in case anyone believes it to be a defensible alternative to the scientific view. If it were true that Earth is on the order of 6,000 years old, it would mean that our basic understanding of fundamental physics is mistaken. The casual reader may not see a problem with that. But one of the ways that science shows that it is working is by having its facts confirmed over and over again, often by different methods being applied in different fields by researchers looking into very different things. When it comes to the age of Earth, there isn't just one way of getting the answer. Numerous, fundamentally different ways of estimating Earth's age are possible, and all of those methods agree on the answer. The take-home lesson is that they agree on the answer—that Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old—because the answer is probably pretty accurate.

These methods are based on a web of knowledge that forms our current scientific understanding. And, put simply, if we are wrong about the planet's age, then we are also wrong about most of physics. Your very ability to read this sentence on your computer depends on technology whose theoretical basis is the same system of physical principles responsible for the various methods of finding the age of Earth. The upshot is that our technology—and that includes your computer—would simply not work if our understanding of these fundamental ideas were so flawed. The ideas are so interwoven, in fact, that you cannot simply say that perhaps only our understanding of the physics behind the age of Earth is flawed. It doesn't work that way. The preponderance of the evidence, which includes your day-to-day experience with technology, shows that the young-Earth story is pure fiction.

Back on the topic of Sarah Palin, I could say more, but I think Matt Damon sums it up pretty well in this video clip: