In which I rant (and you have been warned)

The new Asimov's has a short story by Frederik Pohl called "Generations". I liked it enough to read it all the way through. I particularly liked the way it was structured, the narrative flow if you will. But I have some problems with it that are bugging the hell out of me.

Synopsis: Scientists discover that the constants like the speed of light are changing. They decide it is the work of some Experimenter (who needed a model the size of his universe to study, which is our universe). This leads people all over the world to abandon their religions.

My problems: First off, if more than 200 years of science cannot convince half of Americans that evolution is true, I don't believe they'll be trusting the scientists on this one either. As for the scientists themselves, they'd be scrambling to explain what they've found rationally, not writing it off as the work of an Experiementer whose existence cannot be proven.

Not to mention, wouldn't changing the constants be catastrophic? I don't really know, honestly; my knowledge of science is smallish. But I read that Lee Smolin book that postulated that universes evolve, and it certaintly sounded like life as we know it required our constants to fall within a very small range. I can let this one go since I don't really know, but a paragraph in the story explaining why changing the constants had no effect on anything would have been nice. He mentions the measurement of the distance to the moon was considerably short since c had changed, but not that anyone was perceiving it as being larger in the sky. No visible effects brings me back to point 1, the general population not believing the scientists.

Now I'm getting into the nitty-gritty. For background, I would consider myself a nonchristian univeral unitarian, a pagan, and a pantheist. I don't like labels, but that should give you the general idea. And I do not forsee myself ever taking part in an organized religion, pagan or otherwise. So keep that in mind when I say I'm a little tired of the condescension being delivered to people who are religious, portraying them as unthinking, gullible sheep. At the very least it's lazy writing.

Say everyone in the world took the scientists at their word, all the way down to believing that some cosmic Eperimenter was changing our universal constants. It does not follow that there is no god. The story concludes with a very Dark Ages church taking over with the idea that the Experimenter created god too as part of his model of the universe. I think that would be the last thing a religious person would believe. At the very least, the idea that the Experimenter was god would come before it. I imagine most people would believe that god stood over the Experimenter, and for pantheists like me, god would include the Experimenter.