That’s a different answer from the one Mr. Goodyear, a chiropractor and minister of state for science and technology, gave The Globe and Mail when asked the same thing during an interview published in Tuesday’s paper.

“I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” he said at the time. “I do believe that just because you can’t see it under a microscope doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It could mean we don’t have a powerful enough microscope yet. So I’m not fussy on this business that we already know everything. … I think we need to recognize that we don’t know.”

In all fairness, I don’t think there is much to object to in the above statement, unless we simply assume that any person associating himself/herself with a religion is a creationist. Note that this may be a legitimate definition, although I don’t think it is the one we use. I didn’t see the original question, and am not sure if it was actually “the same thing”, but note that any augmentation of the context (not unlikely to have been somewhat skewed by Globe and Mail, which is not exactly a centrist paper) would probably render the statement much less “preposterous”.

Well, I am a scientist, and the last thing you could accuse me of is being a creationist, but I find it difficult not to agree with the simple observation that there are lots of things we still do not understand. So if we agree that it is legal for Mr. Goodyear to be admittedly Christian, I see nothing wrong with his opinion, especially that its context appears somewhat obscured. Note that Globe and Mail would only be too happy to “expose” this sort of conservative backwardness, so the fact that they have been able to find only this much should be viewed as their failure.