Undermining Science - Fundamentalists Attack

There are people and organisations whose only purpose is to undermine the teaching of science and to return the world to an earlier, darker, unenlightened time when God and his followers held sway over our lives. Fanciful, you may say. Overstated, possibly. Perhaps, even, parnoid and delusional. 

Would that it were so but I am afraid that it is not the case, and I will now prove it to you.

You may have heard stories about Creationism (the belief that a supernatural intelligence created the Earth and everything on it in, essentially, the forms we see today) in the United States and the attempts of its believers to displace Evolution as the accepted explanation for the diversity of life on Earth, but have you tried reading their literature? Here are a couple of "mainstream" Creationist websites for you to try:

• Answers in Genesis (link) - these people believe the Earth is about 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs walked the planet with humans and that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. 
  
• Discovery Institute (link) - differing slightly from the Answers in Genesis bunch, these guys prefer to call their beliefs "Intelligent Design", although it should be clear to anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of biology, botany or anatomy that "intelligent" is entirely the wrong word. 
  
• Creation Museum (link) - linked to Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum in Kentucky will give you all sorts of mis-information with which you can retard your children's education, giving them the worst possible start in life. 
  

These three organisations are representative of the large and well-funded right-wing fundamentalists of the Christian faith in the United States. They work hard to create an image of scientific respectability whilst at the same time producting huge quantities of noxious rubbish for consumption by a gullible audience primed from birth to accept without question the ridiculous statements of inexpert authority figures. Between them they are striving to undermine the teaching of science in the US and, if they succeed, we will all be the poorer for it. 

Why is this important? Imagine a doctor trying to treat HIV (a very rapidly evolving virus - see link for more details) with drugs or methods that become steadily less effective as time goes on, unable to understand what is happening because he has no real knowledge of Evolution. How many people would die because of this?

So that's Biology - three stupid organisations, run by people unable to face the real world without a bronze-age guidebook. 

What about Physics? "No", you might say, "surely nobody could argue with the discoveries of modern Physics?". How wrong you would be.

The main example in this category is Common Sense Science, a website that rejects the accepted theories of the structure of the atom, preferring instead to expound a "ring" theory. Exactly what this theory consists of is only made clear if you are prepared to buy their pamphlets (I'm not - I try to avoid reading this sort of rubbish) but let me quote one small section from their site:

Common Sense Science is a body of theory regarding matter and forces that describes the physical world using geometric models, absolute time and Galilean space in a way that strives to be consistent with experimental observations and free of internal contradictions. 

Absolute time? Geometric models? These guys are idiots, shoe-horning God into every aspect of science as if the supernatural was a good explanation of the state of the world. They present no evidence, no mathematics, no convincing arguments for their beliefs. They are, in short, religious fundamentalists, not scientists, and their "theories" can be dismissed without further consideration (if they were really confident in their "theories", they would just publish them on their website).