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Author Topic:   Why Creationists' Willful Ignorance?
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 1 of 5 (628235)
08-07-2011 11:03 PM


I am in the process of bringing my site back up after having been taken down a few years ago by my provider suddenly going out of the business. I am now bringing it back up at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/.
On my index page, I am endeavoring to summarize my position. Part of that is the question of why creationists persist in keeping themselves ignorant of evolution and the associated sciences. I will prsent here what I have posted and open it up to discussion and criticism. I am particularly concerned with my assessment #2, pertaining to the goals of creationist/fundamentalist education.
quote:
In order for a creationist to discuss claims involving science, they need to learn something about the science! Sounds so obvious, and yet it's something that they never seem to do and it's something that they seem to always refuse to do. Or else they back out of the discussion by promising to look into it, which they have absolutely no intention of doing.
Why do they refuse to learn the science when their ignorance works so much to their detriment? Two possible reasons come to mind:
{Item #1 deleted so we can focus on Item #2 below}
2. Another possible explanation may lie in their misunderstanding of what learning entails. According to the 1990 Science Framework for California Public Schools Kindergarten through Grade Twelve:
quote:
We repeat here the fundamental conviction of this framework: Education does not compel belief; it seeks to encourage understanding. Nothing in science, or in any other field, should be taught dogmatically. But teaching about something does not constitute advancing it as truth. In science, there is no truth. There is only knowledge that tests itself and build on itself constantly. This is the message that students should take away with them.
However, it appears that education has a different meaning for creationists. It appears that, in their experience, rather than being for the purpose of understanding, it's for the purpose of indoctrination, of telling the students what to believe. This would mean that they believe that studying evolution would require them to accept it, so they refuse to actually study it.

  1. In "creation science's" "balanced treatment" materials labeled for "public schools", we have repeatedly seen them trying to compel belief, repeatedly urging the students to choose what they believe; ie, compelled them to decide to believe in one thing or the other, counter to the goals of public education.
  2. In creationist rhetorics, they repeatedly describe public school education as "indoctrination" and accusing it of teaching their children what to believe. They appear to be projecting onto public education what they themselves do in their own schools.
  3. In my 25-plus years of on-line discussions with creationists, a number of creationists absolutely refused to learn about evolution, telling me explicitly that studying evolution would require them to believe in it. That makes absolutely no sense to a non-creationist, but it obviously does to creationists.
  4. In 1988, when the ICR's graduate school was being inspected for accredidation, the visiting committee found the school deficient in several ways, including "that the school's doctrinal tenets limited academic freedom" (citation). In one class the committee observed that they were using a standard graduate-level textbook also used in public universities, but the instructor was taking the entire class through the book page-by-page, telling them what to cross out because "we don't believe that."

Is my assessment of conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist/extreme-sectarian Christian education accurate?
Edited by dwise1, : clean-up and adding focus
Edited by dwise1, : fourth item

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by Admin, posted 08-08-2011 7:46 AM dwise1 has replied

Admin
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From: EvC Forum
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Message 2 of 5 (628261)
08-08-2011 7:46 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by dwise1
08-07-2011 11:03 PM


I didn't see any tables in your message. The strange formatting is because you placed blockquotes around your quotes and cites. Remove those blockquotes and I think most of the formatting problems will be fixed.
The remaining problems seem to be sentences that appear intended as part of a single paragraph, but you've included a carriage return at the end of each sentence. And there are a few extraneous carriage returns in the middle of sentences.

--Percy
EvC Forum Director

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by dwise1, posted 08-07-2011 11:03 PM dwise1 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 3 by dwise1, posted 08-08-2011 10:19 AM Admin has seen this message but not replied
 Message 4 by dwise1, posted 08-09-2011 11:47 AM Admin has seen this message but not replied

dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 3 of 5 (628280)
08-08-2011 10:19 AM
Reply to: Message 2 by Admin
08-08-2011 7:46 AM


The table plus shading was for creating a quote box, but here that turned out unreadably ugly so I replaced them with quote tags.
HTML strips out white space, including carriage returns, but this forum does not.
I'll clean that up, plus on second thought I should only post item #2 since that is what I really want to verify. Anyone who wants to see the entire thing can go to my web page.
{ABE}
Done.
Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by Admin, posted 08-08-2011 7:46 AM Admin has seen this message but not replied

dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 4 of 5 (628413)
08-09-2011 11:47 AM
Reply to: Message 2 by Admin
08-08-2011 7:46 AM


I just added a fourth item to the list.
Is there anything else I need to take care of?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by Admin, posted 08-08-2011 7:46 AM Admin has seen this message but not replied

Admin
Director
Posts: 12995
From: EvC Forum
Joined: 06-14-2002
Member Rating: 2.3


Message 5 of 5 (628583)
08-10-2011 7:05 PM


Thread Copied to Education and Creation/Evolution Forum
Thread copied to the Why Creationists' Willful Ignorance? thread in the Education and Creation/Evolution forum, this copy of the thread has been closed.

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