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1:21

(In »Everything is religion«)

In so far as this sort of nonsensical reasoning is gaining ground, there is of course good reason to criticise religion. Anything of this kind sooner or later inevitably leads to a more or less brutal oppression of dissenting opinion, which in turn leads to a wholesale destruction of knowledge in the name of God. Which of course unarguably implies that ignorance in important areas is a necessary prerequisite for at least some types of religion. When, for example, Christian fundamentalists try to launch creationism under the ridiculous label of intelligent design as an alternative on an equal footing with Darwin’s theory of evolution – that is, as a sufficiently respectable alternative in order for it to be part of the curriculum in American schools – this is in fact a case of intellectual sabotage of the worst kind. Genuine knowledge is pitted here against bizarre nonsense. Anyone who seriously claims that “intelligent design” is an adequate “theory”, deserving of being discussed in the same halls of learning in which the evolutionary process through natural (and sexual) selection is studied – which according to this reasoning also is just a “theory” – does not know what actually constitutes a theory, and refuses to understand what the theory of evolution actually says and explains.