When “I Don’t Care” Becomes a Worldview: A Fundy Email, a Santa Analogy, and the Difference Between Faith and Evidence

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Introduction

I got an email from a Christian fundamentalist friend that says, in plain terms, “Science is fine when it makes stuff I like, but the second it challenges my theology, I’m not listening. Not even for a second.” He then quotes 2 Corinthians 10:5 about “taking every thought captive” to Christ and finishes by telling me he respects my knowledge, but he doesn’t think I’m wise—so he gives my writing “no credence.”

That’s not debate. That’s a veto.

And once you see the veto, you start noticing how often it shows up: not just in religion, but in politics, media, and modern tribal life—anywhere someone wants the benefits of reality without submitting to the rules of reality.

This post weaves his email and my response into one story, because it’s a clean case study of two competing ways of deciding what’s true:

• one that tests claims against the world, and
• one that protects claims from the world.

I’m going to anonymize the sender and remove personal contact details. The argument is what matters.

The Email

Here’s the core of what he wrote to me (lightly edited for clarity, but faithful to the meaning and tone):

He starts by praising science when it’s useful:

Science, the object of your faith and undying devotion and loyalty, has discovered many wonderful and useful things in and about God’s marvelous creation. I am thankful for every one of them. Our lives have been made infinitely easier, softer, better as a result of them.

Then he draws his line in the sand:

But none of that compares to the knowledge of the very God who made it all possible.

Experimental science has indeed discovered many wonderful things for which I am thankful. But when science uses its position to advance mere theories, hypothesis, and conjecture to advance its atheistic worldview, then I close the door and refuse to listen even for a second.

He then makes the refusal explicit:

My friend, I do not care who has what to say whether it be politicians, scientists, professors, teachers, or even you, if they attempt to deny the truth of God’s infallible and inerrant Word.

He quotes scripture to justify the refusal:

2 Cor 10:5 says: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

And he closes with the final insult wrapped in piety:

I have many people of academia—scientists, scholars, professors, philosophers—with whom I admire and do in fact read and listen to… and they know God!!! Though I respect your knowledge Alan, I do not think you are very wise, so I do not give your writings, beliefs etc, any credence.

That’s the email.

Notice what’s missing: evidence.

He’s not making a case that my claims are false. He’s declaring that if my claims conflict with his sacred conclusion, he won’t evaluate them. He will “close the door.”

That’s not “discernment.” That’s intellectual pre-commitment.

And it’s important to name it, because once someone is proud of closing the door, discussion becomes theater. The outcome is fixed in advance.

My Response

My response was blunt, because I’ve heard this move a thousand times: “Science is your religion.” It’s a rhetorical trick. It tries to lower science down to “just another belief system,” so religion can claim equal footing without doing equal work.

So I answered by translating the structure of his thinking into a form that exposes the logic without the religious costume.

I used Santa as the stand-in.

Here’s the response I sent (again, edited only for formatting):

So, again, all you ever do—instead of debating with evidence—is try to tarnish me with the notion that somehow science is a religion, and it is my form of worship, and my faith…

You sound silly.

Here is how you sound:

“Look what Santa brought me, Alan—look what he did for me!”

“Sorry, but scientists made those widgets.”

“Yes, they made them with Santa’s imparted knowledge and blessing. It was his will.”

“No, man spent eons building on what went before, and when he finally broke the shackles of Santa’s control and lies, he was able to learn and do great things.”

“No, man discovered Santa’s laws, his math, his everything! Man is just reaping the rewards of Santa’s world…”

“Have you ever seen Santa?”

“No, but I know he’s real. I have a special relationship with him… He saved me when I was an infant when the doctors had given up. I know people who know people who say their lives were changed. I have a guardian elf too…”

“So it couldn’t have been something else, quite possibly not Santa?”

“No! My parents told me everything that could be done was done, and they prayed and Santa came through… It could only be Santa! You don’t know because you don’t have Santa’s secret sauce…”

“Ok, however, my grandma—who was devout—prayed for my uncle when he was in a car wreck the year you were born, and guess what? He died a painful death…”

“Alan, no one knows Santa’s plan… Santa does not do our bidding…”

“Rash, no one has ever seen Santa…”

“I know, Alan, that proves he exists because millions believe…Without proof! With our special sauce and secret knowledge, we are able to understand and believe a virgin gave birth, the sun stood still, a flood soaked the earth, slavery is legal, Santa created the North Pole in six days, the elf named Moses parted the sea freeing the black elves… you should believe!”

“That’s idiotic…”

“You don’t know Santa like I know him!”

That was my point: if your belief system has unlimited escape hatches—mystery, special knowledge, “plan,”

unverifiable relationship, the claim that doubt itself is moral failure—then your belief can never lose.

And if it can never lose, it’s not competing with science. It’s evading science.

What This Really Is: A Dispute About Rules, Not Conclusions

People get stuck arguing about the conclusion (“God exists” vs “God doesn’t exist”) when the real fight is upstream: the rules of belief.

My friend’s rule is:

If something contradicts God’s Word, I refuse to listen. I take the thought captive.

That’s a rule designed to produce one outcome: permanent certainty.

Science’s rule is closer to:

If something contradicts the evidence, we update or discard the claim.

That’s a rule designed to produce humility—because reality is the final editor.

These aren’t two “opinions.” They’re two operating systems. Two methods of handling uncertainty.

Science, as major scientific and educational bodies describe it, relies on empirical evidence and explanations that are testable against the natural world.  That doesn’t make it perfect. It makes it accountable.

My friend’s rule is openly anti-accountability. He’s not embarrassed by it. He’s proud of it.

That’s why the email is useful. It’s honest.

The Trick: “Science Is Your Faith”

Here’s why the “science is your religion” line is a dodge.

Science is not a faith commitment. It’s a method for building reliable knowledge by coordinating evidence, logic, skepticism, and reproducibility.

Does science require trust? Sure, in the ordinary human sense that you trust a process that has repeatedly delivered results. But that trust is conditional. It can be revoked. The whole point is that claims are open to correction.

Religious faith, especially the fundamentalist kind, is not conditional. It’s a loyalty oath. It’s belief as virtue. Doubt as sin.

My friend even spelled it out: he “does not care” what scientists, professors, or I say if it conflicts with scripture. That’s not “truth seeking.” That’s enforcement.

So when he calls science my “faith,” he’s not diagnosing me. He’s leveling the playing field by insult: “You’re doing the same thing I’m doing.”

No, I’m not.

If tomorrow solid evidence overturned a major scientific claim, science would eventually adapt. That’s how it works—messy, slow, argumentative, but self-correcting.

Fundamentalism cannot adapt without ceasing to be fundamentalism.

That’s the difference.

The Word Game: “Mere Theories, Hypothesis, Conjecture”

This is another classic tactic: take scientific words and use their casual meaning.

In everyday language, “theory” means “guess.” In science, a theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, incorporating facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.

So when my friend says science advances “mere theories” to push an atheistic worldview, he’s not engaging with science. He’s engaging with a caricature of science.

And this matters because this is exactly how you keep a door closed while pretending it’s rational:

• redefine your opponent’s strongest terms as weak,
• declare victory, and
• retreat back into certainty.

Science doesn’t claim infallibility. It claims a disciplined way to reduce error.

Religion, at least in the “inerrant word” style, claims infallibility from the start.

These are not parallel.

Methodological Naturalism vs “Atheistic Worldview”

There’s a deeper confusion behind his email: he treats science’s limits as a conspiracy.

Science focuses on naturalistic explanations because that’s what can be tested against the natural world.

That’s not “atheism.” That’s method.

Methodological naturalism says, “When we do science, we explain phenomena using mechanisms that can be observed, tested, and potentially falsified.”

It doesn’t pronounce on ultimate metaphysics. It doesn’t say, “Therefore God doesn’t exist.” It says, “If you want to do science, bring claims that can be tested.”

My friend hears that as an attack because he wants his sacred claims treated as if they are scientific claims while remaining immune to scientific standards.

He wants the prestige of truth without paying the price of falsifiability.

The Miracle Story Problem: Why Anecdotes Feel Like Proof

My friend points to “God saved me” style narratives as if they end the discussion.

They don’t.

Anecdotes are emotionally powerful, and they’re real experiences—but they’re not controlled evidence. Humans are pattern-detecting machines. We notice the hits. We forget the misses. We tell the story that comforts us.

If a child survives a crisis after people pray, believers call it God.

If the child dies after people pray, believers call it God’s plan.

That’s exactly the escape hatch I highlighted in the Santa dialogue.

A claim that explains both outcomes equally well is not an explanation. It’s a label you can paste onto anything.

And once you see that, you also see why the prayer argument never ends: it’s not allowed to end.

2 Corinthians 10:5 as an Epistemology

Let’s talk about the verse, because it matters.

“We take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

People can interpret that spiritually, personally, morally—fine.

But in practice, in the hands of a fundamentalist, it becomes an epistemology: a command to subordinate reasoning to a preselected conclusion.

That is the opposite of inquiry.

It’s also why you see the same posture everywhere outside religion now—political tribes, ideological cults, media bubbles. Different sacred texts, same psychological machinery.

When your identity depends on never being wrong, you don’t evaluate claims. You police them.

Why My Santa Analogy Works (And Why It Offends)

It works because it exposes the structure.

People get angry not because the logic is unfair, but because it’s too fair—and too clear.

Santa is culturally coded as childish, so no one wants their beliefs mapped onto Santa. But I wasn’t calling him a child.

I was calling out a system with these components:

• an invisible agent
• asserted personal relationship as proof
• anecdotal validation
• immunity to disconfirmation (“plan,” “mystery,” “secret sauce”)
• moral pressure to believe
• dismissal of skepticism as defect

If you can’t tell the difference between “I believe because it comforts me” and “I believe because it holds up under scrutiny,” then you’re not arguing about truth anymore. You’re arguing about loyalty.

And that’s what his email really is: a loyalty statement.

The Hidden Consequence: Selective Trust

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss.

My friend says he’s thankful for science’s discoveries. He enjoys the fruits of the scientific method.

But he rejects the method the second it conflicts with his sacred narrative.

That’s selective trust: “I trust the process when it gives me insulin, antibiotics, smartphones, and surgery. But I distrust it when it touches origins, history, or claims about the natural world that collide with my interpretation of scripture.”

This isn’t just inconsistent. It’s corrosive—because it trains the mind to treat truth as something you choose based on identity.

That habit doesn’t stay in the church.

It spills.

You start seeing it in:

• vaccine debates,
• conspiracy thinking,
• political rumor cycles,
• “my sources are true, your sources are propaganda,”
• and the general collapse of shared reality.

The disease isn’t “religion.” The disease is the refusal to be corrected.

Fundamentalism is just one of the cleanest examples of it.

If You Actually Wanted a Conversation, Here’s the Only Door That Works

I’m not naive. Most people who write emails like this aren’t looking for truth. They’re looking for dominance or closure.

But if the goal is a real conversation, there’s exactly one workable question:

What would change your mind?

If the answer is “nothing,” then you’re not in a discussion. You’re in a sermon.

Science has an answer to that question: “Here are the observations that would falsify this hypothesis.”

Fundamentalism often doesn’t. And my friend openly doesn’t.

He “closes the door.”

So if you want to keep your sanity, you stop arguing about the conclusion and start arguing about the rules:

• Will you consider evidence that challenges you?
• Will you apply the same standards to your beliefs that you apply to mine?
• Will you admit any scenario where you might be wrong?
• 
  

If the answer is no, then the debate is over—whether either person realizes it or not.

How to Respond Without Setting the Relationship on Fire

If you’re reading this and thinking, “Yeah, but that’s my dad, my cousin, my lifelong friend,” I get it.

You don’t have to be cruel to be firm.

Here’s a calm version of what I meant:

I’m not asking you to stop believing. I’m asking you to stop labeling my evidence standards as “faith” just because you don’t want to meet them.

If your position is that no evidence could ever change your mind, then this isn’t a debate. It’s a declaration.

I’ll discuss specific claims with specific evidence. I won’t participate in a conversation where you preemptively refuse to listen.

That’s not hostility. That’s boundaries.

The Larger Point: You Can Have Faith, But You Don’t Get to Redefine Evidence

People are allowed to have faith commitments. People are allowed to draw meaning from religion. People are allowed to pray, hope, and interpret their lives through a spiritual lens.

But none of that gives you the right to redefine science as “worship” because you don’t like what it implies about your sacred stories.

Science is an evidence-based method for building explanations that can be tested against the natural world.

A scientific theory isn’t a “guess.” It’s a well-substantiated explanatory framework supported by evidence.

And quoting “take every thought captive” isn’t an argument. It’s a confession that your mind is under orders.

That’s your right.

But don’t call it reason.

Criticism Isn’t Hate

From my view as an atheist and a secularist, Christians often hear criticism of doctrine as personal hostility. I get why it feels that way—religion isn’t just a set of propositions for a lot of people. It’s identity, family, community, purpose, and comfort. So when someone challenges the claims, it can sound like they’re attacking the person.

But critique isn’t hate.

Criticizing a belief system doesn’t mean I hate the people who hold it. It doesn’t mean I want them harmed, discriminated against, silenced, or pushed out of society. It doesn’t mean I want to “stop them from living their lives” or prevent them from worshiping. In a free country, you get to believe what you want, raise your kids in your tradition, go to church, pray, evangelize, donate, build a community—live your life.

What it does mean is simpler: I don’t grant religious claims a special exemption from scrutiny just because they’re sacred to someone.

If a worldview makes factual claims about reality—miracles, prophecy, a global flood, a virgin birth, the resurrection, demons, divine commands, “inerrant” text—those claims are either true, false, or unknowable. They don’t become true because they’re comforting, ancient, or popular. And they don’t become “beyond criticism” because believers feel offended.

This is where the fundamentalist posture becomes a problem. The email I received didn’t say, “Here is the evidence you’re wrong.” It said, “If you deny my book, I won’t listen to you even for a second.” That’s not confidence. That’s insulation. It’s a declaration that the belief must be protected from evaluation—and that’s exactly why the Santa analogy fits. A claim that can’t be challenged is not a claim competing in the marketplace of ideas. It’s a protected artifact.

And yes—this is my view—Christian dogma comes out of ancient, pre-scientific cultures that did not have anything like modern methods of evidence. Much of it was transmitted in a world of low literacy and oral tradition, formed by pastoral societies and reshaped over centuries by institutions with power. Calling that “inerrant” and then demanding modern secular society obey it is a category error. It’s trying to govern a 21st-century nation with mythic frameworks forged in a radically different world.

That said, here’s the key: even if I think it’s myth, I’m not trying to control what you believe. I’m trying to keep the public square anchored to shared, testable reality—because that’s the only neutral ground we all have.

A Secular Nation Isn’t an Anti-Religious Nation

This is where Christians (especially the politically activated kind) often misread secularism.

Secularism is not “atheism imposed by government.” It’s not “banning God.” It’s not telling people they can’t be religious.

Secularism is the practical rule that government does not pick a religion, enforce a religion, fund a religion as the state’s favored creed, or use the machinery of law to compel religious conformity. That principle lives in the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses: government can’t establish a religion, and it can’t prohibit free exercise of religion.

In other words, the system protects believers and nonbelievers at the same time.

That’s why the separation idea matters. Thomas Jefferson famously used the “wall of separation between church and state” language in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists.  You don’t have to treat Jefferson like scripture to understand the point: the wall isn’t built to persecute believers; it’s built to stop government from becoming a sectarian weapon.

James Madison made a similar argument in opposing state-supported religious assessments—religion is not the proper domain of civil authority, and using government to sponsor faith turns religion into an engine of policy and division.

Even in early diplomacy, the U.S. government affirmed a non-sectarian posture. The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli includes language (in the English text ratified by the Senate) stating that the U.S. government is “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”  (People argue over historical nuances and translations in online debates, but the ratified English text is plainly there.)

So when I say “keep your myth separate from the reality of our nation’s daily secular life,” I’m not saying, “Be quiet, keep it private, and don’t exist in public.” I’m saying:

Live your faith freely—but don’t use the state to make other citizens live under your faith.

That’s the line.

You can preach. You can persuade. You can vote your conscience like anyone else. But you don’t get to treat your scripture as a legal code for people who don’t share it. You don’t get to force sectarian doctrine into public institutions as if it’s neutral truth. You don’t get to demand that biology, medicine, education, and civil rights obey a religious narrative that cannot be tested, corrected, or falsified—especially when the theological “answer” to any contradiction is, “I won’t listen even for a second.”

Criticizing religion is not hatred. It’s the price of living in a free society where no idea gets crowned immune.

And insisting on church–state separation is not hostility toward Christians. It’s respect for everyone’s freedom—including Christians—because when government starts picking winners in religion, it always turns into coercion, corruption, and conflict.

Why This Matters

A society can survive disagreement. It cannot survive millions of people who are trained to treat doubt as sin and obedience as virtue.

When someone proudly says, “I do not care what scientists, professors, or you say; I will not listen for even a second,” they are announcing a worldview that makes shared reality optional.

That worldview doesn’t just affect theology. It affects:

• medical decisions,
• education,
• civic trust,
• and the basic ability to resolve disputes without force.

If you care about truth, you need beliefs that can be corrected.

If you care about freedom, you should be suspicious of any ideology—religious or political—that demands you “take captive” your thoughts to obey a preselected conclusion.

Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are opinions of the author for educational and commentary purposes only. They are not statements of fact about any individual or organization, and should not be construed as legal, medical, or financial advice. References to public figures and institutions are based on publicly available sources cited in the article. Any resemblance beyond these references is coincidental.

References

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. “Science Produces Explanations That Can Be Tested Using Empirical Evidence.”

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. “Evolution and the Nature of Science” (science as a way of knowing; explanations inferred from confirmable data).

National Science Teaching Association (NSTA). “Nature of Science” position statement (naturalistic explanations supported by empirical evidence; observations, skepticism, peer review, reproducibility).

Science Council (UK). “Our definition of science.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Scientific Method.”

National Institutes of Health / NCBI Bookshelf. “Science and Creationism” glossary (scientific theory definition).

BibleGateway. 2 Corinthians 10:5 (NIV).