Tusko writes:
In effect it is an unassailable stronghold, but at the same time it remains pretty unpersuasive.
I disagree. I would have agreed with this statement if it was a year ago. However, as I have been talking to more and more people and not interrupt them, no matter how ignorant they were, I have come to realized that the creationist argument in this matter is probably 10 times as convincing as scientific argument. I will explain why.
A week ago, I drove for 5 hours to Ohio to attend a wedding of a very good friend of mine. During the reception, I got involved in a conversation with a husband and wife that were there. The wife I had met a year before and the husband happened to be the sheriff of that town. He remained quiet while I talked to the wife. As soon as it came up that I was a physics college student, the husband started talking for the first time to me.
It became obvious that he never had a proper science professor. He was convinced that professors are like school teachers where they don't really know what they are teaching and that they only teach out of text books. He went on for a while about this belief without being interrupted by me. (I probably should have mentioned that the professors are the authors of the text books he was talking about.)
The point is we have this sheriff (a figure of authority) who is completely ignorant of how well trained scientists and professors are at their fields of discipline. We later talked some more and it became very apparent that he was convinced he knew just as much as professors and scientists in the fields of science (or probably more) because he occasionally tries to read scientific journals.
This is just one example out of many that I have encountered.
Why do I think the creationist argument is more convincing? Because we have become a majority-rule society, and unfortunately the majority is completely ignorant of how the scientific method works or how much training and education scientists and professors have to go through before they get their titles.
There is an old saying that goes something like this: When I was 5 my parents didn't know anything, when I was 10 my parents knew a few things, when I was 15 my parents knew some things, but when I was 20 my parents knew a lot of things.
Unfortunately, most people remained at the age of 10 or 12 when it comes to understanding of such technical fields. They do not have the discipline to constantly remind them that the world is much bigger than what they have seen.
The other side is that the creationist argument's main strength is appeal to people's ignorance. I don't think it is a dispute that creationists are nortorious for making pseudo-scientific statements and make-belief facts to appeal to the majority. With the exception of a few, religious fundamentalism draws its strength mainly from ignorance, and that is exactly what creationism feeds on. A few "I heard somewhere that..." or "A well known scientist once said that..." and we have a "fact" circulating around.
Perhaps this is the pessimistic side of me talking, but with the way things are going I do not see how we can win this debate anytime soon, even if we have all the evidence in the world to show for it. As Faith once demonstrated, people tend to think that because evolution has no proof it must be false, and since creationism has proof (you know what I'm talking about) it must be truth. What people don't realize is that there is no such thing as proof in science. There is only evidence.
Because of this, creationists are finally regaining a lot of their grounds and are marching into our education system.
This message has been edited by Troy, 04-16-2005 11:34 AM
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