PHOTOGRAPH BY FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/GETTY

It’s a shame that there is no provision in the Constitution of the United States that would permit Pope Francis to serve as the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Or, for that matter, that there’s no way for him to lead the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Instead, it looks like we are going to have Republicans James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, and Ted Cruz, of Texas, in those jobs.

That’s too bad, because the Pope believes that science, rational thought, and data all play powerful and positive roles in human life. The senators seem as if they do not. Last month, Francis made a lot of news when, in an address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he said, essentially, that the Catholic Church had no problem with evolution or with the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe. “When we read the account of Creation in Genesis, we risk imagining that God was a magician, complete with an all-powerful magic wand. But that was not so. … Evolution in nature does not conflict with the notion of Creation,’’ Francis said.

This comment was widely interpreted as a radical departure for the Church. It wasn’t, as Kara Gordon, among others, has pointed out in compelling detail. The Church has, for decades, taken the position that faith and science need not be opposed to one another. As the Catechism states, “methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God.”

Still, this Pope made a point of talking about evolution—and to do so at a time when the men and women we have chosen to represent us in Washington often equate support for Darwinism with eternal damnation. After all, according to a Gallup poll earlier this year, forty-two per cent of American adults believe that "God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Among some groups—Republicans, for example—the figure is much higher. Perhaps we should at least be thankful that Congressman Paul Broun, of Georgia, who described evolution and the Big Bang theory as “lies straight from the pit of Hell,’’ lost his Senate race.

But the denialists don’t really need him; their bench is deep. They have Inhofe, who, beginning in January, will possess the authority to interfere with nearly any scientific initiative that the Obama Administration introduces. You can find the particulars of his position on climate change, and scientific research generally, in his 2012 book, "The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future." Inhofe frequently invokes Genesis in his battle against science because, well, he is a humble man: “My point is, God’s still up there,’’ he has said. “The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is, to me, outrageous.”

So a man who believes that the international scientific consensus is a “hoax” will be in charge of the committee that approves funding for scientific programs in a nation desperately in need of improving its scientific literacy. If anything, the appalling Cruz is worse; he won’t address evolution directly, but he is an energetic climate skeptic, an opponent of NASA funding, and, of course, the man who, last year, almost single-handedly shut down the government of the United States, which, as Scientific American has pointed out, caused serious and permanent damage to American science.

Intellectual achievement used to be revered in this country, not detested. For hundreds of years, progress has been defined by a reliance on independent inquiry and the study of objective data that could be tested, analyzed, and repeated. That process is usually described as the scientific method and, more than any religion, person, or movement, it has transformed the world. In America, the fruits of scientific collaboration have been particularly bountiful: investments of billions of dollars made the United States the most advanced nation in nearly every field of scientific activity, from physics to farming.

Political leaders never used to care who scientists voted for or whether they believed in God. Scientists were not seen as Democrats or Republicans. (This change did not begin with Cruz and his Luddite colleagues.) In 2006, I wrote a piece for The New Yorker on the Bush Administration’s war on science. It noted that “Vannevar Bush was a conservative who opposed the New Deal, and not quietly. Yet President Roosevelt didn't hesitate to appoint him, or to take his advice. In 1959, after Dwight Eisenhower created the position of science adviser, in the wake of Sputnik, the Harvard chemist George B. Kistiakowsky assumed the post. Jerome Wiesner, a Democrat who subsequently became president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sat on the Science Advisory Committee—which met each month with Kistiakowsky and often with the President. When John F. Kennedy took office, Kistiakowsky and Wiesner simply switched roles.” None of that would be conceivable today.

Even highly educated people seem to feel the need to mount what Stephen Colbert recently referred to as “an impressive retreat from knowledge.” He was talking about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, one of America’s most prominent intellectual cowards. Jindal, who was a Rhodes scholar and before that received an honors degree in biology from Brown University, was recently asked at a public forum if he believed in evolution. “The reality is I was not an evolutionary biologist,” he responded, as if study in that one field was required to address the issue. He then went on to say that local school systems should decide “how they teach science” in their classrooms.

No, they shouldn't get to decide what qualifies as legitimate science, as even the Pope seems to understand. In his speech at the Pontifical Academy, he said that, at least since the creation of the universe, we have all followed a logical, scientifically defined path—not a path determined by parish priests, reactionary American senators, or local school systems.

“I am happy to express my profound esteem and my warm encouragement to carry forward scientific progress,’’ the Pope said. It would be nice if we could elect political leaders capable of that kind of thought. But, in this country, that might take a miracle.