"Why Evangelicals are Fooled Into Accepting Pseudoscience'

Karl Giberson has written a fantastic article about the Discovery Institute and their unabashed promotion of pseudoscience outside of their claimed expertise.

Here is the intro:

Widespread rejection of human-induced climate change by evangelical Christians, of the sort we have seen recently from Rick Perry and others, is a bit of a puzzler. There is no obvious reason why evangelical faith commitments should motivate the faithful to reject climate science. The Bible does not claim that humans cannot affect the climate. God did not promise that the atmosphere will forever be healthy and life-sustaining. No end-time scenarios suggest that Jesus will come back before humans trash the planet.

So why have evangelicals been so ready to reject the generally accepted conclusions of the scientific community on global warming?

I want to suggest that the reason has nothing to do with climate science per se, but derives from the generally dim view that many evangelicals have of science and scientists -- views that make it hard to distinguish credible science from fake challengers.

This is why I am now so hostile to the Discovery Institute. Not because I read a bit more about Intelligent Design and made the decision that it is bunk (though it probably is), but rather because they're promoting other nonsense and this leads people to accept that other nonsense. Climate change is happening and humans are largely responsible. If they are preventing people from seeing that, they are doing something bad. Know them by their fruits.