18 January 2013

How I Lost All My FB Friends at the 11th hour

We all have friends that are staunch creationists (and there's nothing wrong with that), but if you really want to get rid of them, link to this 19 year old that raises some good points about SCIENCE!
Then post, "So humans are more creative than God, because we can dream up a self-correcting system, but God couldn't do that with all that time He had before time began?"  Then do another follow up post pointing out how outright nasty these "Christians" are being to this kid over a clearly religious issue.

3 comments:

Nic said...

Why if you word it that way. I like a feedback control. :-)

On the serious side, interesting story. I can't fully agree with either side. For a science class, I would agree that sticking to what observable, testable, falsifiable (he added naturalistic and expandable, but I have never heard that before) science would be best. Not having been in a class that covers evolution, I have only hearsay on how it is taught, but my knowledge leaves me to believe there are many assumptions and inferences taken from the real experiments which lead to the evolutionary conclusions that are taught in class, i.e. the experiment may show the rock has a certain quality, but you assume something about that quality to draw your final conclusion. So why I know there are somethings in experiments which show a factor of evolution, as compared to proving the unifying theory, there are other things missing; likewise, there are scientific parts to creationism or intelligent design, not pure conjecture. So let the purely scientific parts of both be taught.
In ending, I would completely disagree with the concept that a lack of evolutionary teaching hinders us as a nation in science and technology. That is a very specific information set with a limited field of application. More important are general skills like communication (reading, writing, listening, etc.) and critical thinking (math, logic,etc.).

Heydon Hensley, LCSW said...

That's some excellent feedback, Nic. Evolution does brings some assumptions with it about how to age certain objects, etc. I think the real point here is HOW these books approach science. E.g. http://www.11points.com/Books/11_Eye-Opening_Highlights_From_a_Creationist_Science_Textbook
That link has excerpts (in picture format) to show just WHAT these books are bringing to schools. Basically these books set up a FALSE dichotomy, that either you can believe in God OR use science, but not both. And these books argue that all science relies on evolution to be true and since evolution is wrong that science is false, which is (obviously) not true. So that is why the kid says that this curriculum is devastating to the future of critical thinkers in Louisiana.

Molly Whitt said...

My favorite way to lose fb friends over the evolution issue is to simply refuse to argue until they take an intro college biology class. Until you know there are differences between the theory of evolution and the proposed mechanisms of evolution, it's futile to argue.

An excellent opportunity to lose those friends using your sure-fire methods!