There we were, almost at the end of last night’s Republican presidential debate, ready to declare that Texas had gotten off embarrassment-free. Then the moderator had to ruin it all by asking Gov. Rick Perry a question about science.
Asked about climate change, Gov. Perry repeated his claim that the idea of man-made global warming is increasingly in dispute in scientific circles (not really), and ….
“Galileo got outvoted for a spell.”
Here’s the video:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKxCMyjb2G8&w=400&h=255]
Buried somewhere beneath this flat, 6,000-year-old Earth of ours, Galileo spun in his grave.
Gov. Perry is actually correct, Galileo (nicknamed the Father of Science) was outvoted. BY NON-SCIENTISTS IN THE CHURCH! The church, as in religious figures who ignored Galileo’s scientific evidence in favor of a literal interpretation of the Bible and gave him a life sentence in house arrest.
Oh, the irony of a governor who has tried to pattern himself as a religious leader and an anti-science crusader invoking Galileo to prove a point.
The church attacking Galileo’s science sounds a lot like Gov. Perry attacking evolution and climate science. We’re not saying President Perry would imprison scientists, but he did already say the chairman of the Federal Reserve would be treated “pretty ugly down in Texas.”
To the church’s credit, it did apologize to Galileo, albeit about 300 years — or 300 revolutions of the Sun around the Earth — later. So maybe in a few centuries, the governor of the Great Submerged State of Texas will issue an apology to science on behalf of Gov. Perry.
