If it seems like I haven't been writing here for a while, it's because I haven't. I have been enlisted to write for a political blog, Demockracy, and as such, have been posting much of my stuff there.

But here's something that wouldn't go well on a political blog. It's about a hand transplant patient. David Savage was 19 when he lost his hand in an accident with a metal-stamping machine. Two years ago, he received a hand transplant from a cadaver donor. Now, he is able to feel sensations in his new hand that he could feel in his old one, something that scientists thought was impossible. It was previously assumed that when a limb was lost, the portion of the brain devoted to sensation in that limb was re-used for other functions. It turns out that Savage's brain reprogrammed itself, and now the part of his brain that controlled sensations for the old limb is performing that function for the new one.

What has brought us this marvel? The ability to take a dead person's hand, connect to a live person, and have that live person feel sensation in the new hand?

I'll tell you what didn't bring us this power: mysticism. Belief in, and subsequent fear of, an almighty, overarching, transcendental and inexplicable being did not attach a new hand to David Savage. Rituals, dances, prayer -- these things did not give David Savage a new hand.

Science gave David Savage a new hand. Human ingenuity, empiricism, logic, and reason all did this. Magic and the supernatural did not.

It's important to keep these things in mind as long as Sarah Palin is the vice presidential candidate. Sarah Palin not only believes in God, she believes in a Christian God who created the Earth 5,000 years ago. She further believes that she should be fulfilling the goals of Christianity through her political office.

A Sarah Palin world would not able to reattach hands. A Sarah Palin world would look very much like the Dark Ages, with man struggling to understand the world around him through a lens of religion.

This is not to say that religion is not valuable; it just turns out that it doesn't create things like new hands, longer lifespans, less mortality, going to the moon, flying around the world, spending extended lengths of time underwater, harnessing the world's knowledge and delivering it to everyone's homes. Religion is incapable of doing any of these things for us. By its nature, religion precludes the use of the observable world for any purpose other than serving as a testament to the greatness of a supernatural creator.

Perhaps the only religion that could be useful to a scientist is one in which the supernatural deity creates a world, gives it a set of rules, and lets it go. This idea of the "clockmaker god" has been embraced for hundreds of years, including by amateur inventor Thomas Jefferson. In this use of religion, the deity can be understood, and the rules that govern the operation of the universe can be discerned by human beings.

Sarah Palin's evangelical Protestantism, however, is no such thing. She believes that prayer can heal the sick, that hoping for a cure is just as powerful as using science to create a cure. She believes that creationism carries just as much weight as evolution and that both should be taught in schools. Sarah Palin could do nothing for David Savage; no amount of prayer can bring a man's hand back. But a lot of science, it turns out, can.