roxrkool

Excellent posts Zira and Conchobar!!! I truly enjoyed reading them.

We all seem to understand what the problems are, but does anyone have solutions?

One place to start, in my opinion, is to get the scientists out of the lab and into the public. They need to become more involved in their community by speaking out at community meetings, volunteering at schools, promoting their research, and educating their fellow non-scientist neighbors and friends. This Creationist movement should be a call to arms, so to speak, for all scientists.

Creationists have the advantage of being able to speak to the public because they also have a ready-made audience that is conditioned to blindly place their trust in the hands of religious leaders. Without another voice to dispel the lies and misrepresentations so common to Creationism, we will lose the war.

caravelair

the eye isn't, and never has been, a problem for evolution. even darwin made the observation that creatures today have eyes in all stages of development.

are you under the impression that science is not respected? as for theory and fact, evolution is both.

all the answers to what?

joedad

I often use my siblings as touchstones toward understanding this phenomenon and it seems to me that the answer is as simple as others have already stated, namely, scientific literacy – or scientific illiteracy – or maybe more accurately, scientific interest.

My oldest brother is a good case in point. He is christian, but openly states that the christian theology is "primitive." He likes to use the words, "higher power."

We often ramble in our discussions. One day while discussing the size of the universe I asked him to tell me how long it would take – all logistics aside - to travel, in the fastest craft ever launched by humans, to the nearest known star, Proxima Centauri, and return back to Earth. To his credit, he really wanted to be able to figure it out by my giving him information, such as its distance and just how fast this "fastest" craft could travel. But of course, that was part of the question, as anyone interested can do the math. His answer was "a few weeks."

When I told him the real answer was 140,000 years, he replied, "Sure, that's what they say, but how do you know?" There was a kind of distrust and suspicion of the knowledge involved, and this from a college grad holding a teaching degree. In this particular case, the end result of his lack of knowledge and interest was a stunted appreciation for the size of the universe.

I've seen this attitude (don't you just love my being judgmental?) in my wife's sister as well, who is a computer programmer making a 70K salary. She's a bit of an anti-intellectual in the end, and repeatedly states that scientists just pull information out or their asses. I'll be damned if I can explain this attitude.

joe

The Lone Ranger

A lot of people simply don't want their comforting fantasies to be challenged. As Conchobar perceptively noted, there are those to whom the scientific outlook is threatening because they don't want things to be explained.

After all, the more that is explained, the less room there is left over for their god(s). I think that many New Agers and Fundamentalists reject pretty-much all of modern science (though they're perfectly willing to make use of antibiotics and computers and whatnot -- go figure) because they can't bear the thought of living in a world in which they aren't watched over by a loving, interventionist God, or by guardian angels, or by the Fates, or whatever.

As difficult as it is to believe such people exist, I know a philosophy professor who stoutly insists that science is "just another worldview," that scientific methodology is no more useful for understanding the world around us than any other "way of knowing," and that reality is shaped by our beliefs. I once asked her, given that she claims to believe that, why she drives a car to work every morning (and complains about the commute); shouldn't she just be able to teleport herself? She said I was being close-minded and changed the subject.

For over a week now, I've been engaged in an online debate with some Creationists/IDers at a different website. It's not that they're unintelligent, but it seems to me perfectly clear that they don't want to believe anything which challenges their notions of how the world works. They simply refuse to accept that any evidence which contradicts their beliefs exists.

They will insist that the Earth is only 10,000 years old and designed by God, and that this is proved because the fossil record shows that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, for instance. I'll provide links showing this to be untrue, and they simply ignore them.

They'll then insist that "irreducibly complex" molecular assemblages cannot be the product of evolution, and must have been designed. So, I'll walk them through a step-by-step progression by which such a system could have evolved. They ignore it and repeat the claim.

Anyway, the point is not just that they're ignorant; it's quite clear that they're deliberately ignorant. Many of them simply will not consider the possibility that they're wrong, and are utterly incapable of accepting evidence which contradicts their beliefs. Debating with such people is an utterly hopeless task, but I'm hoping that it does the lurkers some good.

Those of us in the scientific community really do need to stand up to the Creationists, frustrating as it often is to deal with such people. Otherwise, they will win by default.

Cheers,

Michael

Albion

Joedad, I wonder if your siblings would recognise themselves in Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" or if they'd just think he was tralking about the uneducated masses.

Religious hierarchies and scientific communities are asking the exact opposite of people - religion requires obedience and the ability to accept whatever the religious authorities tell you, and science just demands that you follow the evidence, however uncomfortable the results might be, and that you question things and use critical thinking. That's so different from what the churches demand of people that of course the churches are going to attack science; they don't want a rival authority structure out there.

It reminds me of one of the first creationists I came across in this country, who told me that creationism was true because the pastor said so but to believe in evolution you had to be able to read (and the idea of just going out and reading and thinking about what you read was not a good thing in her little world, not when you had the pastor to tell you what to believe).