A month ago, I had a bit of fun at Sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio’s expense over his “I’m not a sci­en­tist, man” response to GQ’s ques­tion about the age of the earth.

I brought up his com­ments again in my talk last week at the Amer­i­can Geo­phys­i­cal Union meet­ing, to much audi­ence amuse­ment. It served as a per­fect exam­ple of the Pil­lars of Sci­ence denial, and the geol­o­gists were espe­cial­ly intrigued by his view that the under­stand­ing the age of the earth “has noth­ing to do with the gross domes­tic prod­uct or eco­nom­ic growth of the Unit­ed States.” Accu­rate­ly dat­ing rocks and know­ing how that fits into geo­log­i­cal his­to­ry is a big part of oil­field geol­o­gy, not to men­tion hydrol­o­gy and seis­mol­o­gy, top­ics with fair­ly obvi­ous eco­nom­ic relevance.

A cou­ple days after my talk, Rubio clar­i­fied his view in an inter­view with Mike Allen:

RUBIO: There is no sci­en­tif­ic debate on the age of the earth. I mean, it’s estab­lished pret­ty defin­i­tive­ly, it’s at least 4.5 bil­lion years old. I was refer­ring to a the­o­log­i­cal debate, which is a pret­ty health debate. And the the­o­log­i­cal debate is … how do you rec­on­cile with what sci­ence has defin­i­tive­ly estab­lished with what you may think your faith teach­es. Now for me, actu­al­ly, when it comes to the age of the earth, there is no con­flict. I believe that in the begin­ning God cre­at­ed the heav­ens and the earth. And I think that sci­en­tif­ic advances have giv­en us insight into when he did it and how he did it, but I still believe God did it…. I just think in Amer­i­ca we should have the free­dom to teach our chil­dren what­ev­er it is we believe. And that means teach­ing them sci­ence, they have to know the sci­ence, but also par­ents have the right to teach them the the­ol­o­gy and to rec­on­cile the two things.

Now, I think his answer is still prob­lem­at­ic.  He does­n’t seem to have changed his view about whether know­ing the age of the earth has any eco­nom­ic val­ue, and he still is treat­ing sci­ence and the­ol­o­gy as equal­ly valid ways to answer the ques­tion “how old do you think the Earth is?”

That’s a prob­lem, and, despite what he and a cer­tain reporter at Slate seem to think, it marks a clear dif­fer­ence between him and Pres­i­dent Oba­ma.