Pat Robertson has long had a tense relationship with the scientific community, even going so far as to tell residents of a Pennsylvania town that in a school board election voted against supporters of teaching Intelligent Design that “if there is a disaster in your area don’t turn to God, you just rejected him from your city…I recommend they call on Charles Darwin, maybe he can help them.” Today on the 700 Club, the televangelist offered a confusing response to a question about the compatibility of science and religion, saying that the “trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don’t know what they’re talking about because they weren’t there.” Robertson maintained that scientists “can’t speculate about the origins of life because they weren’t there” but then claimed it is appropriate to believe a “geologist who tells you something existed 300 million years ago.”
Robertson: God created the world; the laws of nature were created by God. True science tries to find out what God put in the world. The trouble is where scientists speculate about theology and they don’t know what they’re talking about because they weren’t there. They can’t speculate about the origins of life because they weren’t there. If they tell you observable phenomenon then we ought to believe them, and I tell you if you find a geologist who tells you something existed 300 million years ago then you better believe them because he knows what he’s talking about. We don’t want our religious theory go with flat earth.
