Black athletes supposedly have superior coordination and reflexes because of their melanin. Melanin is also responsible for the superior intelligence, the potential extra-sensory ability, and the greater spirituality of Black people. A similar strategy is to claim that myths are accurate eyewitness testimonies about reality. Even in the West, religion was the prime explanatory source for both natural and supernatural phenomena. The success of science and technology, and subsequent disillusionment with religion, have lead to an acceptance of science as an explanatory source, as a validation mechanism and perhaps even as a source of truth.
Science has in fact become the secular religion of the West, in a very particular sense.
However, scientific illiteracy is rampant. One of the possible consequences of believing that myths are as true, or truer, than science is an adherence to catastrophism and Young Earth Creationism. Both fundamentalist creationists and postmodern multiculturalists are forced to deny the validity of most scientific disciplines. A prime example of this is a 1995 book by Vine Deloria, entitled Red Earth White Lies , which claims, among other things, that the earth is very young, that the Biblical flood actually occurred, and that there was single Ice Age. According to Deloria, the Earth's prehistory is described by the following scenario.