Jon Stewart & Marilynne Robinson: Disappointing and Disingenuous
I'm very disappointed in Jon Stewart. He passed up a great opportunity to stand up for science and reason, and instead he promoted ignorance and confusion. It happened a few days ago, when he interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson , who was promoting her new non-fiction work, Absence of Mind . The discussion was about the public conversation on science and religion. Robinson claims that both religion and science have been poorly represented in the public domain. She says can help us understand both, and why both science and religion must work together to help us understand ourselves and the world. She doesn't spend any time criticizing religion or religious leaders, however, so it's not clear what problem she has there. She's a Calvinist , in fact, though she says she loves science. She tells Stewart that the "new cosmologies and so on are among the most beautiful things that people have conceived." (As I'll explain, I have ...