In God they trust - but US presidential candidates lack faith in reason

The infant who became the defender, who subsumes the Bible like the sacred, irrefutable text he believes it to be, is leading Republican presidential candidate Dr Ben Carson.

To enter Carson’s orbit is to enter a world where his stunning medical accomplishments, borne of the evolution of science, mingle comfortably with the metaphysical; where to hold firm to one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs, Darwin’s theory of evolution, would be argued against as it is erroneous and inspired by the devil. 

It is a world where the rivers of blood have flowed since time immemorial, the butchering overseen by a benevolent God who holds mankind to his bosom stroking our head, for his love is undiluted and boundless.

It is a world where God sent his only son 2,000 years ago to be killed to save us – sent to a Roman outpost where illiteracy reigned and our understanding of the surrounds and the cosmos was incipient. He watched as they scourged him, drove nails into him and speared him.

In Carson’s world the words written by intellectual Neanderthals are gospel. It is a delusional world where the Biblical Hebrew slave Joseph built the pyramids to store grain.

Carson is a Seventh-day Adventist – Genesis is sacrosanct. God created the Earth, the universe and life in six days. The Garden of Eden existed. So did Adam and Eve. The Devil in the form of a snake? Him too. Noah gathered up two of every animal before the great flood and Moses parted the Red Sea.

One of the great surgeons of our times, a fantasist deserving of ridicule, defends his beliefs with cocksureness. It defies logic. But logic and a belief in God have been incompatible since science exposed religion for what it is: a superstition conceived by mammals with encephalised ape brains. 

Yet there they stand, the latest line-up of US presidential contenders, Democrat and Republican, peppering their speech with a devotion to God. And as sure as a fat man ate the last doughnut, Carson isn’t the only one of them hitched to creationism.

There may be an alternate plane of existence. Almost a decade ago my father died. It was a horrible death – an emphysema death: years of increasingly desperate breaths, his oxygen-starved body shrivelling until the heart failed as he strained to remain despite the appalling circumstance, like a fish flapping on a pier.

I was in Bangkok when it happened, having delayed a trip to say a final goodbye and more distraught for it. A couple of days later, as I slept next my wife, I saw my father standing at the top of the bed. He looked about 20 years younger, the ravages of illness gone, the face free from pain and fear.

He was dressed neatly, his black hair once again full and smartly parted on the side. He spoke five words, and they were: “Everything’s going to be okay.” He walked to the cot and inspected the granddaughter he never saw in life. He looked at me and smiled and was gone, never to return. I woke crying.

I can’t remember another dream, most gone upon my eyes opening, and I’ve only cried because of one. That dream is the same as all my strongest, ancient memories: fuzzy but clear enough.

So, yes, there could be life after death. But to believe a god judges our behaviour, condemning the woman for the abortion, the man for being gay, is absurd and dangerous. 

Science explains everything about our being, except how something came from nothing; how the Big Bang occurred. When it does, what will the apologists say?

To postulate creation over evolution is disturbing. Carson recently said a Muslim shouldn’t be president because you couldn’t trust them to place the country ahead of Islam. The same could be said about Carson and Christianity.