I got a little shock today at Google News.

It seems that I have something in common with the "father of creation science," Henry Morris, who died today aged 87.

We went to the same school.

Now it should be admitted up-front that the Rice University I attended in the 1970s was quite different from the Rice Institute Morris went to in the 1930s. It was integrated, for one thing. (The school had to break Mr. Rice's will to allow non-whites in, starting in 1966.) And it was, when I was there, a haven for intellectual eccentrics, strangely rugged individualists. One of my classmates lived in a tree. (There are wonderful live oaks on campus.)

I sort of "minored" in Rice history, so I know that the school Morris went to was inbred, centered almost entirely on the needs of the oil industry, and deliberately conservative in all things. (Even as late as 1969, when the students finally got the gumption to protest something, they did it in jacket-and-tie, demonstrating against the appointment of a Rice alum as the school's President.) Beyond engineering, which was still the only thing you could get a "science" degree in when I went there, there were the (mostly) ringers who played the football, and debs who peopled the literary societies, and not a lot else. As to the campus, the trees were much smaller then, and it was thought to be outside Houston -- now it's in the inner city.

Still, the idea that someone who actually had a Rice degree (and later taught civil engineering there) could say something like this in later life shocked me:

"If the Bible is the Word of God -- and it is -- then it must be firmly believed that the world and all things in it were created in six natural days and that the long geological ages of evolutionary history never really took place at all."

No other quote I've ever seen has summed up the anti-science mindset so succinctly.

As I've said before, science doesn't ask who or why. It asks how. It starts with evidence, applies theories to that evidence, and then seeks more evidence to either buttress or contradict the theory. It is constantly changing its mind. The evolutionary science of today is as far removed from Darwin's "The Origin of the Species" as the modern oil industry is from "Moby Dick."

There is, in fact, absolutely no contradiction between science and religion, save the artificial one Morris and thousands of other mental oppressors before and since have created. You can believe that God created the heavens and the Earth, that he looks like Howard Hughes would have in late life, cleaned-up in a robe, and that we will go directly to a literal heaven or hell when we die, depending on how God judges our life at the end. You can believe all that -- quite literally -- and still be a scientist. That is, if when you're acting as a scientist you do science.

Henry Morris didn't do science. He started with a premise, then worked at knocking down anything which contradicted the premise. That is the opposite of science, it's anti-science. It can result in nothing useful, nothing replicable, nothing to build on. It's only science if you're allowed to disprove it. To put it in terms Mr. Morris might have understood, you can't engineer anything based on "creation science."

Few men in the 20th century did so much on behalf of confusion as Henry Morris. Then again, the Rice I went to was a fairly peculiar institution. So maybe we weren't that far apart.

Let me state one more thing which I believe is important.

The Rice of Henry Morris was relentlessly conservative because the people who funded it were that way. As long as they lived liberalism and liberal attitudes were kept down fairly effectively. Today the men who gave the money to create Rice would likely be founding different institutions, more conservative, and see Rice as some liberal aberration.

But it isn't. Rice has grown beyond its founders, and become a real intellectual haven, something its founders pretended to support but didn't -- not really.

And that is just what will happen, in time, to every single institution of learning the conservatives of today are founding. Liberty University, Oral Roberts, all those Bible colleges -- they will either become liberal, accepting science and true intellectual study -- or they will wither after their founding generations pass.

Because you only learn when you change your mind. If your mind won't change, as Henry Morris's would not, as today's conservatives will not, it can't learn. And a mind that's unwilling to learn is as wasted as any drug addict. More so, because some who won't learn have power.