I'm watching Tom Coburn debate against SCHIP on C-SPAN2. I love this man. I only voted for Tom Tancredo last November because I wanted to keep Tom Coburn and Mike Pence in the majority. Fat lot of good it did, but it's hard to argue that an OB-GYN that has had trouble with the US Senate Ethics Committee because he insists on returning to his home state to deliver babies "hates children".

One of the most frustrating things I find about Secularists, like Christopher Hitchens and the truly terrible book he endorsed, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, is the ridiculous idea that Science and Religion are in any way either compatible or incompatible. They are different things that are meant to be believed in different ways.

The Scientific Method is a means of discovery, a process for finding the way the natural world behaves on a consistent basis, on the assumption (so far, a pretty good one) that the natural world behaves in a repeatable fashion. There are others, for instance the Evidential Method, which seeks to discover what happened during a particular time in history. Part of the Scientific Method is a distrust of its own past conclusions; only ten years ago we believed that stress caused ulcers and twenty years ago we believed that oil comes from dead plants (in case it's not clear, both of those beliefs are now considered false, details not provided here. Sorry). Everything in Science that we know today is wrong; it's more correct that whatever we knew before, but it's not as correct as what we'll know tomorrow. It's an iterative process.

Religion, on the other hand, is like a Postulate; it's something to be accepted as true until it's demonstrated wrong. In Logic, we must accept certain things as true without any evidence that they are. For example, in Geometry, we accept that "two points define a line" without any evidence that it actually requires only two, and not one and not three (who's to say some very clever person can't define a line with no points but you've never thought of it, Mr. Smarty Pants?). We accept this as true and we derive new beliefs from it, which we call Theorems. If our derivation is logical, it's called "internally consistent"; if our derivation is the same as reality, it's called "externally consistent". If we accept that "it takes three points to define a line" and conclude there's no way to walk directly from my desk to the door, that is "internally consistent" because it's logical, but it's not "externally consistent", because I'm pretty sure I could make it. If a conclusion is logical but wrong, it's not just the conclusion that's wrong, but the Postulate and all other Theorems derived from it. That's why it's important to know why you believe a thing to be true; if some joker comes along and debunks your Postulates, you have to know all of the things that are no longer true as a result of that. It's not any wonder that we get passionate when somebody starts poking around at our Religion; that's quite a house of cards they're mucking with.

So, Religion is our set of Postulates in discussions of morality, of daily action, about living life itself. Logic cannot proceed without a set of Postulates upon which to base Theorems. Eventually, at the bottom of the pile, all logical systems must be based on things that aren't proven and which are not supported by evidence. That's definitive to Logic. No exceptions. So, what is to be made of those like Christopher Hitchens that say that Religion is immoral? That it isn't "reasonable". This is an instant flag to the disciplined mind that they are not logical thinkers. There can be no logical discussion about morality without understanding one's own Religion. No one can really be Secular, because we all try to reason about our actions and Reason (or Logic) must be founded on that which can't be proven but is accepted. But those who claim to be Secular don't understand their own Postulates. If they don't know what it is that they accept as true without proof, but insist that everything they believe is based on proof, they cannot truly defend their reasoning because they can't find the beginning of their thoughts. Science cannot be the foundations of such beliefs, because to accept the accumulated conclusions reached through the Scientific Method as true is to undermine the method itself. It mustn't be done.

Science is believed precisely because it isn't ever accepted as true. That is the foundation of its credibility. Religion must be believed until it is contradicted by reality. Science is a fine tool for providing "external consistency" to Religion; I'm pretty sure the Science has pretty well debunked the idea that life on Earth resides on the back of a giant turtle, as was believed by some Hindi (although, technically, "I went to space and turned around. No turtle" isn't the Scientific Method, but the Evidential Method. Science can only answer the question "Can life exist on the back of giant turtles in space" not "Does our life exist on the back of a giant turtle is space"). The relationship between Science and Religion is often antagonistic, often synergistic, but they are each intended to be believed in different ways. One can never replace the other; that's not how they work.