It would be hard to deny or overcome the basic observation made by Taz -- hard-core fundies will simply refuse to see, accept or understand evidence. Also, as ICANT has demonstrated (yet again), they will refuse to learn or apply the terminology, or to comprehend the theories and hyphotheses, in the same way that scientists do -- e.g., for the hard-core fundies, macro-evolution cannot be confirmed until we observe a fish giving birth to a frog, or similar nonsense.
But speaking as a U.S. citizen who fully supports the concept and legality of religious freedom, I don't really have a problem with fundies who simply refuse to understand. What I have a problem with is when they feel obligated by their beliefs to impose those beliefs on others, by trying to push absurdities into science classrooms, such as "teaching the controversy", "intelligent design", and other euphemisms for a religious indoctrination that would negate or stifle scientific thought.
In that regard, the problem I have is not just that it stifles science, but also that it directly violates the legal guarantee of religious freedom. The fundie agenda for education is to push a particular interpretation of a particular religious text as The Truth, all their feigned vagueness about an "unspecified designer" notwithstanding. The added fact that their chosen texts and interpretations are particularly untenable in view of sound, observable evidence, is actually a secondary issue.
I'm not so worried about figuring out how to break the wall of ignorance that these people have erected and reinforced around themselves. My main concern is to keep them from putting those same walls around science classes.
They will of course object (yet again) that science is just another form of religion, and this simply demonstrates another aspect of their self-imposed blindness: their overriding sense that everyone in the world surely shares the religious mindset, which cannot accommodate skepticism or allow real-life experiences to alter beliefs.
On what might be a less pessimistic note, I think it's not entirely a job just for the true scientists to keep the trouble from spreading. Obviously, scientists will have the most powerful resource -- observable fact -- for carrying any argument against fundies. But I think there is clearly a role to be played, and assistance to be provided, by those who hold firm religious beliefs while also accepting the validity of evidence in support of scientific theories.
These would include people whose sense of faith goes deeper than a literal interpretation of all biblical text as unquestionable historical record, people who understand that in forming beliefs from the text, they must make deliberate choices about how to interpret it relative to their own personal experience. Many of them are likely to understand that different people, reading the same text, arrive at different interpretations, and that this is a reflection of personal experience and personal choice, as well as social context. I think their mindset is as antithetical to fundies as any scientific or atheist mindset would be.
Even so, I wonder whether these "reconcilable" theists might have a better chance of connecting with fundies in a way that demonstrates how belief can and should change as experience and environment changes.
I find it curious how the fundies manage to lock into a particular "phase" of religious development. Many fundies sincerely acknowledge, and indeed adamantly profess, that their own religious beliefs are the result of many changes that have taken place throughout recorded history as they see it: animal sacrifices to God are no longer practiced, the notion of "an eye for an eye" is no longer a guiding principle, and so on. And yet, having acknowledged so much change over time, they seem to hold firmly that any further change must be a sin against God and cannot be allowed, unless/until they somehow determine that God speaks to them directly and tells them how to change.
Perhaps an approach to consider is to get them to open up a little more, in terms of what they might be able to accept as communication from God... An interesting challenge.
(Then again, there may some who assert adamantly, despite the obvious contradictions, that God's laws have never really changed.)
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