Creationists switch from pushing ID to... "critical thinking"?

Muldur said:
So all of the following are too stupid to accept your "truth" or are otherwise dishonest?
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Anyone that promotes creationism as science is either ignorant, dishonest, or ignorant and dishonest. There is no middle ground and there is no debate.
 
Dinwar said:
Check out the wording for AiG's survey. It was intentionally misleading.

This is broadly true. However, the issue here is that Creationists are trying to use these few disenters (and this is a VERY short list, by the way--more scientists work in my office than are on that list!), many of who are on there dispite requesting to be taken off, to argue that there's a controversy that requires being taught in schools. This is a transparently dishonest attempt to shoe-horn Creationism into a science class, but the issue must be addressed.

In other words, we're not saying that everyone has to agree--we're saying that these handful of detractors don't represent a genuine scientific controversy. There's a significant difference between those two statements, though Creationists try to equivocate between the two.
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Well stated!!!

yes , one can make a long list and say "look, they disagree so it's not really settled is it?" as a fallacious appeal to authority. However, if there's 50 names on the creation list and 42,000 names on the evolution list (and 1/3 of the creation list were tricked by suspicious questions) then it's not really a debate at all is it?
 
Muldur said:
"Science" HATES it when it gets hoist on it's own petard.

How DARE those kids be taught to think for themselves? Don't they know they are supposed to accept as Secular Gospel the words of the Priests of Godless Knowledge?

:rolleyes:
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Let me get this right - you propose to substitute for Biology, in which the students used to learn about the various denizens of the tree of life and their inner systems, a scientific/political debate in which the participants are given a 1000 page religious historic text and a biology textbook which title they are not prepared to spell, and have them debate the differences given a background of the Merchant of Venice, superficial knowledge of Sumeria, Egypt and China, and skills in fractions and decimal manipulations? And this goes on for how many semesters?

Imagine the context...
 
ThunderChunky said:
Anyone that promotes creationism as science is either ignorant, dishonest, or ignorant and dishonest. There is no middle ground and there is no debate.
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There's a third option. They could have been innocently misled by others.

ETA... who were either ignorant or dishonest.
 
arthwollipot said:
There's a third option. They could have been innocently misled by others.

ETA... who were either ignorant or dishonest.
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That would make them ignorant as well. A creationist cannot be both honest and informed without admitting that their beliefs are unsupported by science.
 
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If they're going to teach the "controversy" over evolution, I have to ask: when will they insist on the teaching of the similar "controversy" over the Holocaust? Or the "controversy" over the Apollo moon landings? Or the "controversy" over 9/11?

If actual evidence doesn't matter, then pretty much every bit of crockery should be taught in the name of "teaching the controversy".
 
I'm not so sure about this gravity thing. How can we be sure God isn't just pushing everything down? I think both sides should be taught.
 
Add a critical thinking class to the program that teaches the skills to analyze arguments and encourages a critical attitude towards everything, including their world views, with a self examination of their origins. No need to mention evolution or creationism. That might go a long way to ensuring the death of U.S. evangelicalism with the new generation.
 
I've noticed that when Bible thumpers teach kids to "think critically," the Bible itself is explicitly exempt from any rigorous form of critical thinking.
 
I think "critical thinking" should be taught. It revolves around scientific evidence, and logic, and why people believe the things that they do despite the evidence to the contrary. Provided that it is taught, and this bill isn't just a ruse, creationism won't stand a snowball's chance in hell.

The problem with religion is that people teach others to accept what they're told, and have faith, et cetera. The people doing the teaching know full well that if you catch 'em young they will believe it, and accept it, and when they grow up, they will fight for it. But this isn't just a problem with religion. Other interest groups attempt to do this too. And all these interest groups will oppose critical thinking.

They won't be too keen on this forum either.
 
Farsight said:
I think "critical thinking" should be taught. It revolves around scientific evidence, and logic, and why people believe the things that they do despite the evidence to the contrary. Provided that it is taught, and this bill isn't just a ruse, creationism won't stand a snowball's chance in hell.
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Well, that's the thing--Creationists have learned to draft laws such that they SOUND reasonable, but once they're put into place they amount to nothing more than a smear attack against evolution and teaching Creationism without any in-depth examination.

Again, these people are not honest. The fact that they are still trying to get Craetionism into schools, despite the fact that it's been ruled unconstitutional, attests to that. The fact that they're hiding behind wiggle-words and loose verbage does as well. And their goal is explicite--they don't want ot teach science or critical thinking, but rather they want to institute a theocracy in the United States. Any time you hear of a law drafted by a Creationists you need to examine that aspect of it.
 
LogicFail said:
Let them teach whatever they want, then when their children are laughed out of college biology classes they can get them all jobs pumping gas somewhere. Serves em right....
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It would be a shame for the kids who have been defrauded of the right to be able to think for themselves.

And unfortunately, doesn't seem to be happening here ...

A growing number of biology and medical students are rejecting the very basis of their chosen subject in favour of creationism.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/8931518/Islam-Charles-Darwin-and-the-denial-of-science.html

It appears you can walk out of lectures with no penalties.

How things have changed, I had real reasons for wanting to miss certain lectures although I suspect the university might not have accepted boredom as an excuse.
 
Tennessee’s Anti-Science Bill Becomes Law

...An alternate approach has appeared in a number of bills (again, all with nearly identical language) that would protect teachers who present the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, although the bills single out evolution, climate change, and a couple of topics that aren’t even theories. Again, the goal seems to be to use neutral language that will allow teachers to reiterate many of the spurious arguments against the widely accepted scientific understandings. Tennessee’s House and Senate had passed a bill that took precisely this approach.

The state’s governor, saying the bill doesn’t “bring clarity,” has decided not to sign it. But he’s decided not to veto it either, which will allow it to become law.
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:mad:
 
Corsair 115 said:
If they're going to teach the "controversy" over evolution, I have to ask: when will they insist on the teaching of the similar "controversy" over the Holocaust? Or the "controversy" over the Apollo moon landings? Or the "controversy" over 9/11?

If actual evidence doesn't matter, then pretty much every bit of crockery should be taught in the name of "teaching the controversy".
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The most irksome aspect, to me, of creationism, is that it focuses on one version out of very many. Why not teach the kids the creationism of various Indian tribes?

Wasn't the grand canyon formed by a giant snake that was angry with a turtle?
 
quarky said:
The most irksome aspect, to me, of creationism, is that it focuses on one version out of very many.
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The annoying thing, I feel, is that there are so many actual controversies in evolutionary biology that are infinitely more interesting than whether or not God had a hand in the creation of the universe.

While I do care about creationists lying about what I do for a living, I don't really care if there is or is not evidence for God or creation or whatever. The phylogenies I reconstruct, and the species I describe, and the evolutionary processes I speculate on work perfectly fine without divine interference, but would not change one bit if there was unequivocal evidence that it was all God's doing after all. There would still be evidence for colour-changing in peppered moths, and beak-size changes in Darwin's finches, and the loss of eyes in cave fishes, and all the other stuff. I would still get the same phylogenies based on the same data, and I would still find the same morphological differences between the same specimen. It simply does not really matter.

What does matter is that the focus is put on the wrong things. The world is wonderful, and animals and plants and physics and chemistry and geology and so on is awesome whether it's all God's doing or not. Pyrosoma won't stop being a jet-propelled sea squirt colony you can swim into, Symbion pandora won't stop having the weirdest life cycle known to mankind, the Rift Lake cichlids won't stop being amazingly diverse, scorpions won't stop glowing under UV lights, the Emperor Tamarin won't stop always giving birth to twins and signalling each other with their long, blue tongues, and Volvox won't stop being one of the most beautiful plants in existence (1) just because you add/subtract God to/from the world.

Even if we were to grant that discussions of God are relevant to biology, the "controversy" over his/her existence must surely be the dullest of all controversies in evolutionary biology. A top ten list of the greatest debates in the history of evolutionary biology would not include that of God's existence. Does orthogeny exist? Punctuated equilibrium or continualism (or both)? Can "ancient asexuals" exist, and if so what does that imply? Allopatric, peripatric or sympatric speciation? What about despeciation and respeciation? What is a "species"? Or a "genus"? Is there a difference between "parallelism" and "convergence"? Why does sex exist? Even the seemingly dull, but oh so prismatic, "Is a species a set or an element?"-debate is more interesting than the question of God, as is the (sort of still ongoing) discussion on paraphyly.

The list could go on for pages, without finding an controversy or an argument that is not both more intellectually fulfilling than the creationism/theories-based-on-data-from-the-real-world-and-actual-logic debate. These are all rewarding debates that would be interesting and relevant to biology whether or not God exists.

It may very well be that some god steered evolution to produce us, or even that everything was created to look as if evolution happened. The God hypothesis is after all just one step less parsimonious than any non-god hypothesis. But why does that matter in the least? Regardless of the answer to the question, "Does God exist?", we still have data which can be, and should be, sorted, analysed, and explained with non-divine methods.

You should be allowed to start your first lecture on evolutionary biology by just saying: "God may exist; he may also not exist. That is entirely irrelevant to this class. Now: do ancient asexuals exist?"

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(1) Note: This is an opinion.
 
Farsight said:
I think "critical thinking" should be taught. It revolves around scientific evidence, and logic, and why people believe the things that they do despite the evidence to the contrary.
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In the states where I've taught critical thinking has been part of the science standards. The difference between that idea and what this type of bill (now law??) does is that it singles out evolution and climate change as areas where this should be done (because apparently these are highly controversial areas of study...)

The purpose of these laws is to make it legal for creationist teachers to shoot holes in evolution for an ignorant audience based the usual pack of lies and misinformation. We also get the bonus of having climate change deniers doing much the same.
 
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