In what may be the worst attempt ever to have your cake and eat it too, Sam Brownback offers this editorial explaining is contorted views on evolution and religion. While he makes some salient points:

The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

But then asserts his ignorance by saying:

It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.

Neither science in general or evolution in particular exclude the possibility of design or purpose. They do not require it, but they do not exclude it. These are crucial, not subtle differences. His rhetoric will do nothing to keep the rational public from continuing to believe he’s a couple of fries short of a Happy Meal. I expect his attempt to defer, at least somewhat, to science will not sit will with the hard-core creationists. His only accomplishment was perhaps to appease those who won’t read his diatribe too carefully or don’t care too much about the issue anyway. And those people likely won’t read his editorial, nor did they see the debate, and probably don’t know who Sam Brownback is in the first place.

Stick a fork in him…