To have a decent society, we have to respect what people believe about the spiritual world. To have decent politics, we have to respect the facts of the physical world. As a religious believer, Edwin Poots is entitled to his own faith. As a prospective first minister of Northern Ireland, he is not entitled to his own facts.
This is not about intolerance of religious beliefs. It is about the need to recognise that discourse in a democracy has to be based on rationality and respect for evidence.
On a bend in the Shannon in Co Limerick, there is a graveyard with three burials. One of them has been dated by radiocarbon analysis to 7530-7320 BC; another to 7090-7030 BC; the third to 6610-6370 BC.
Except, if Poots is right, these burials are an elaborate hoax. In 2007, William Crawley asked Poots, on BBC Northern Ireland's Sunday Sequence, "How old is the earth?"
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Poots replied: “My view on the earth is that it’s a young earth. My view is 4000 BC.”
If you believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, you cannot then believe in any evidence-based understanding of the world
Poots also scorned the idea of the Big Bang as the moment at which the universe was created. He did so on the basis, apparently, of the IRA’s bombing campaign: “You’re telling me that cosmic balls of dust gathered and there was an explosion. We’ve had lots of explosions in Northern Ireland and I’ve never seen anything come out of that that was good. And you look at this earth and you tell me that there was a big bang and, all of a sudden, all that is good about this earth came out of it?”
Earth calling Edwin: we have a problem. Or rather three problems. One of them is conceptual. The others are political.
The conceptual problem is that if you believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old, you cannot then believe in any evidence-based understanding of the world.
When most people think about the kind of creationism to which Poots and a very large body of fundamentalist Christians adhere, they think of the rejection of Darwinian evolution. This is indeed part of the fundamentalist faith.
But it goes much deeper than that.
In order for the Earth to have been created in 4000 BC, pretty much all the science of the last 200 years has to be fraudulent – not just biology but physics, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, ecology, archaeology, physiology, genetics, zoology, palaeontology, anthropology, the lot.
And this applies, not just to these branches of science, but to the scientific method itself. The whole way of proceeding by testing an idea against evidence, the notion that theories can be disproved by facts, goes out the window.
This rejection of science is not a harmless eccentricity. When translated into contemporary politics, it is the mode of Donald Trump, of Boris Johnson, of Vladimir Putin, of conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers.
Strip away respect for evidence, and the concepts of truth and falsity evaporate. This is the autocratic style: if evidence does not matter, nothing the leader says is open to contradiction. Authority is not earned – it is asserted.
Losing bet
Now, if there is one political party on this surprisingly old Earth that does not need to retreat any further into this mindset, it is the DUP. Its crisis has been caused by its decision to choose belief – Brexit is liberation, Boris Johnson is our loyal friend – over facts. To double down on that losing bet would be self-destructive madness.
The other political problem is British opinion. The whole discourse around Brexit exposed a very widespread ignorance of Northern Ireland, not just among the general British public, but even among professional politicians and journalists.
The Poots problem is that the weirder and more anachronistic Northern Ireland seems, the more excuse there is for this indifference
This ignorance stems from indifference. Last week, a group made up of former secretaries of state and figures such as Chris Patten and Robin Eames had to send a plea to Johnson to "be seen to take an interest" in Northern Ireland. That he would actually take an interest would be utopian fantasy. The best to be hoped for is that he would pretend to pay attention.
But the brutal truth is that he doesn’t even have to fake concern. Giving a damn about what happens “over there” is a product for which there is no real electoral market in England. Very few voters care that Johnson doesn’t care.
And the Poots problem is that the weirder and more anachronistic Northern Ireland seems, the more excuse there is for this indifference. There’s something very convenient in the notion that the place is irredeemably backward. It’s just the way they are, and since there is nothing to be done about it, there is also no responsibility to engage.
If Northern Ireland ends up with a first minister for whom all the main scientific developments of the 19th and 20th centuries are bogus, that disengagement gets easier. The further unionism retreats into crankiness, the further mainstream British opinion will retreat from unionism.
Creationism is a dreamworld, an attempt to keep alive a mode of thought that no longer matches any known reality. If the DUP chooses to be led by Poots that will be a decent definition of the party itself. Whatever planet it thinks it is on, it will not be Earth.