But if we care about science and believe that it should play a crucial role in decisions about our future, we must steadfastly oppose further politic… - Chris C. Mooney

As perhaps the chief public face of American science during this period, Carl Sagan wasn’t merely a popularizer but a fierce advocate for the proper use of science in the real world. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan necessarily became his chief foe, for Reagan brought anti-science into the American political mainstream as never before.

The Right’s war on science also spreads a massive amount of misinformation, and sometimes even fosters outright ignorance. Consider the creationist quest to thwart the teaching of the theory of evolution to public school children. Science has managed to answer one of the most profound questions around—where does the human species come from?—but religious conservatives don’t want anyone to know about it. And with the spread of ignorance and pseudoscience comes a decline in critical thinking—a lapse in our collective capacity to cut through all the lies and distortions and determine which ideas we should trust.

As three of Meyer’s scientific critics have noted, “‘An unknown intelligent designer did something, somewhere, somehow, for no apparent reason’ is not a model.”