The Dartmouth Review interviews its founder, Jeffrey Hart. He gets to the fundamental question when asked a question about choosing the quotidian.

TDR: What do you think of Sarah Palin’s selection?

JH: I think she is a good woman. She is extremely ignorant. She appeals to the more extreme part of the Republican base, on all the social issues. It hasn’t come up that she is a religious crackpot; she believes in the end of days and what they call the Rapture, in which the just are wished up to heaven and the rest are left with Armageddon.

She believes in Creationism, which is not intelligent design, but a literal belief in the six days of the creation, and God Rested... that is a poem, not a scientific statement. It is just a poetic answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. So they say “In the beginning….” That is an account for creating word and the world, and that is perfectly all right—as long as you understand that the universe was not actually created in six days. The radiation from the Big Bang has been measured, and the universe is about 13.7 billion years old. That still leaves open the question, what was there before the beginning, before the Big Bang: can something come from nothing? In the first paragraph of his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger says that “the question why there is something rather than nothing is the fundamental question of metaphysics.” That leaves the door open to religion, but it doesn’t mandate the God of scripture.

  ¶ 9:52 PM