Tête-à-Tête-Tête

But I can’t vote in the College Station school board elections. Via Little Green Footballs, the self-styled “anti-jihadist” conservative website that has recently run afoul of a number of angry elements on the right who are incensed that LGF isn’t crazy enough (currently fighting off those who have no truck with his unwillingness to associate with neo-fascist causes and to criticize those who do), we learn that conservative Republican, Dr. Joel Walker, is running for the School Board there on a pro-science platform. I really enjoy his statement on his anti-science counterpart’s recent editorial. It eloquently and succinctly summarizes the state of human knowledge about the history of life and the age of the earth, and casually pushes aside the myth that science (the not the fakey Discovery Institute/Answers in Genesis kind, either) is somehow incompatible with religion.

I am a Republican, both fiscally and socially conservative, and attend a local church with my family. I hold a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and teach and conduct research at the university level. I am a candidate for the May election of Place 2 on the College Station Independent School District Board of Trustees.
[...]
The question at hand regards the teaching of “Intelligent Design” in the science classrooms of our public schools. The proponents of this idea are generally careful to avoid explicit religious language, and often cast themselves as the protectors of science, innocuously seeking to probe the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolutionary biology and big-bang cosmology in an open minded manner. Certainly science embraces skepticism, but there is a deep flaw in the vision of science which is being advocated. Skepticism in the face of a preponderance of evidence is only unreasonable doubt.

The stars (by the great expanses across which their shining light has patiently traveled and also by the measurable rate of their recession) and the Earth itself (within its tediously accumulated strata and by residual proportion of radio emitting isotopes) testify in unison to the great age of our planet and universe. The older and deeper places of the Earth hold the remains of primitive creatures which increase in variety and complexity as the hand of geological time winds forward. The DNA of our very bodies tells the history (within mutations of long silenced genes and the remnants of ancient viral intrusions) of our separation by degrees from other creatures of the Earth in a common descent. Imposing a false ambiguity on these facts makes mockery of the precious drops of knowledge which mankind has slowly wrung out of the natural world. It is pure scientific retreat, not progress. [emphasis added]

As they say… read the whole thing. The special needs page of his candidate web-site is also touching, and worth a read.