What's Wrong with America Part 2.5: Creationists

[hohotread]

I don’t have a problem with creationism in principle. Religious freedom is a necessary component of any free society, so people can believe whatever they want so long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. Two things make creationists a problem in America, however.
The first problem is that creationists have radical contingent which

Comments

[qfish]

While I agree that the huge amount of seemingly willful ignorance of science combined with a mass political will is a threat to America, I question both how willful it really is and your proposed solution

[hohotread]

"The evolution skeptic attaches herself to the Creationist label with the flat-earther because she doesn't want to take any stand whatsoever that she believes to be against God

[qfish]

You entirely missed my point. The reason I used the example of the flat-earther as the extreme of the Creationist camp is precisely because they used to be the dominant group among Creationists, they are currently an insignificant minority, and the transition happened without the sort of mass abandonment or reinterpretation you speak of. It simply happened slowly over time that enough people came to accept the science and the center of the movement adjusted accordingly. Sure, some sort of reinterpretation must have happened along the way, but it came from within the movement, not from outside, and, more importantly, it came as a result of people accepting the science as science, rather than accepting the science because a particular reading of the Bible could be read as supporting it

[hohotread]

Yes, people should leave a church if the leader of that church vehemently opposes the very basis of modern society. If a religious leader started preaching, say, human sacrifice, with half the fervor a creationist opposes science, most of his congregation would be gone before his sermon was over (I hope). Rational people should not continue to support someone who espouses something that goes against the very fiber of their being just because the rest of what the wacko says is okay. That's how some of the worst parts of history have happened. It's cliche to say, but that's exactly how the Holocaust occurred; "Well, rounding up the Jews is wrong, but Hitler's been good for Germany, and I'm not a Jew, so: meh." It worked for Charles Manson, too. The list is very, very long. Just because these people aren't preaching murder doesn't mean what they're preaching isn't horrible for society when science and critical thought are the foundations of modern life

[qfish]

Now this brings us to the second point, why your idea of a counter-interpretation is no solution at all. Actually, I've already mentioned this in essence: the problem is the anti-science attitude not the view towards individual facts. A counter-interpretation would merely address the problem of individual facts while doing nothing towards changing the underlying attitude. Sure, perhaps some people will go from this sort of interpretation that is in conformity with current theories to a general appreciation of scientific knowledge, but I doubt it. What happens when, if, current scientific theory changes? What if new evidence is found that suggests the Big Bang isn't the origin of the universe, evidence that the Universe didn't even have an origin? What if those fossil rabbits in the Precambrian are ever found? Don't ask me what such evidence might look like, but if it were found, it would be seriously difficult to bring Genesis in line with it. And that's the point, interpretation of Genesis does nothing to address the problem of the

[hohotread]

Firstly, to claim "religion" never discovered anything is akin to claiming "science" never discovered anything. PEOPLE make discoveries, and people eventually accept those discoveries as true, if they seem to be. If religion motivated, influenced, and/or funded those people who made the discoveries, and the subsequent acceptance as fact, then religion is as responsible for the discovery as science ever could be. To claim scientific method is the only way to discover something ("Religion, lacking a method of any sort, cannot be meaningfully said to discover anything") implies that before Feynman, no one knew anything. People could not notice that without a ram, a ewe would not get pregnant and discover sex. People could not know that striking a spark on tinder would start a fire. People could not cross a sea and find a new land where humans had never been. These people knew less of science than they did religion, and whatever motivated them to make these discoveries and, more importantly, pass them on, is what is responsible for the

[qfish]

I won't argue much over the question of the interpretation of Genesis except to say that I know you don't hold it as truth, my idea was that if a person were to attempt to hold it as true and interpret it as describing the current scientific picture of how the earth came into existence, there are still many serious problems with the attempt. Two key problems are as follows

[qfish]

Let us look at your sentence, without your parenthetical quotation of me: "To claim scientific method is the only way to discover something implies that before Feynman, no one knew anything." I've already dealt with the question of whether I ever claimed that "scientific method is the only way to discover something". But you go on to claim that this somehow implies that knowledge is impossible, as if scientific discovery is the only sort of thing called knowledge. I don't recall making any sort of claims about knowledge here, and certainly didn't conflate a mere means of acquiring knowledge with knowledge itself or as the sole means of acquiring knowledge. OK, so maybe my "method of any sort" covers all means of acquiring knowledge, but again, I never claimed that was scientific method alone. As for the Feynman reference, I don't know how you got that, as even were I speaking of scientific method, and even were I making the implication you ascribe to me, surely there is a more historically accurate representative, say Galileo or