Are Religious Believers Just Nerds of a Different Stripe?

Is there really a difference between religious people and Trekkies? College Humor’s video looks at the similarities and the differences.

Julian Sanchez’s comments, quoted on The Daily Dish under the video, ignore the differences altogether in order to make the new atheists seem irrelevant and off-the-mark.  “…Richard Dawkins is a little like that guy who keeps pointing out all the ways that superhero physics don’t really make sense,” he writes.

Well no, that’s not actually what Richard Dawkins is up to. Anyone who has read his books would know that. He’s addressing people who actually believe that an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity created the cosmos only a few thousand years ago. We needn’t think for a moment that the so-called “young-earth creationists” are an insignificant minority of believers. They comprise 40% to 50% of the U.S. population. It may be fun to point out ways in which these believers are like Trekkies, but let’s get serious. Trekkies have never attempted to take over school boards, eliminate evolutionary science from state science textbooks, and have Star Trek episodes shown in science classrooms—as science, no less. This is a major difference, and Julian Sanchez is doing a disservice to scientific literacy when he fails to acknowledge that.