In 1991, Pat Robertson was a recently failed presidential candidate who had given George H.W. Bush a spirited, if brief, run for his money. He was also the founder of the Christian Coalition, which showed promise to members of the Christian Right as an organization that might display a little more political savvy (thanks to executive director Ralph Reed, of Jack Abramoff scandal fame) than Jerry Falwell's now-defunct Moral Majority.
So it was near the height of Robertson's career as someone who wanted to be taken seriously as a political power-player that he wrote a book, The New World Order, that claimed, in complete seriousness, that the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission were in league with the World Council of Churches, the Soviet Union, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Satan himself in a massive conspiracy to bring about the End Times.
Why am I bringing up all of this? Because I think we need some context for what he had to say today about the Ham/Nye Debate and six-day creationism.
According to PFAW's indispensable Right Wing Watch, even Pat Robertson, who once marketed weight-loss shakes and claimed that he could leg-press 2,000 pounds, thinks young earth creationism is a joke.
“Let’s face it, there was a bishop [Ussher] who added up the dates listed in Genesis and he came up with the world had been around for 6,000 years,” Robertson said. “There ain’t no way that’s possible. To say that it all came about in 6,000 years is just nonsense and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this isn’t possible.”
He continued: “We’ve got to be realistic that the dating of Bishop Ussher just doesn’t comport with anything that is found in science and you can’t just totally deny the geological formations that are out there.”
Robertson added that he disagrees with “evolution as it is currently presented” and knocked Creationists: “Let’s be real, let’s not make a joke of ourselves.”
If English hasn't yet come up with a word for an idea that is so completely off the wall that even someone who claims that his prayers
redirect hurricanes thinks that it's a "joke" that "doesn't comport with anything found in science," then I think we should commission the Germans to create one of those 40-letter-long compound ones to do the trick.