…about certain things. Someone named Floyd quotes my post where I explain why I won’t talk much about Creationism and observes:
That sounds pretty fundamentalist to me. Jerry Falwell couldn’t have said it any better. There will be no debate. I AM right. Hey! A secular “I AM” statement! Just like Jesus — the cause of most human suffering and in no way responsible for the greatness of the West.
To be frank, this is the one of the reasons that I am in favor of a website like this. Even on Culture11, where only a minority of readers are likely religious right participants, it was clear that I couldn’t take evolutionary theory as a prior in making arguments in my diaries because many will start rambling about how it is “only a theory” which has been “disproved by modern science.” This is made up stuff from bizarro-world. Unless people want to go back to living in thatched huts they need to be very stingy with the psychological luxury good that is skepticism of the findings of established science. Science does not tell you how you should live in this world, it does not tell us what is important, what is good, what is right, or, importantly, what non-scientific inferences we should make from it. It gives us the basic parameters which frame our position in the universe. Others can expend their marginal time arguing with people about the basic premises of existence in the universe, it’s not my cup of tea….
(Data below the fold on who does, and does not, reject evolution)
I applaud your stance on this, Razib. It is a delight to me — a fairly hardcore liberal — to have found Secular Right. I’m always looking for places where I can find conservative sites that aren’t polluted with endless rehashing of True Conservative (TM) shibboleths.
You might applaud my stance less if you were faced with some of the non-liberal inferences I made from science which we both agree upon…but that’s for another day!
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This is made up stuff from bizarro-world.
Perhaps “it’s turtles all the way down,” and if someone wrote that in some book a thousand-or-two years ago it must be worthy of debate.
“Others can expend their marginal time arguing with people about the basic premises of existence in the universe”
Exactly. I have found it utterly pointless to argue with people about evolution. In almost every case, those who reject it do so out of ignorance, for religious reasons, or some combination of the two. Whatever the reasons, it is best to refer them to TalkOrigins. If they read through everything on that site and are unconvinced, there’s nothing you can say that will sway them.
What is the source of the graph and data therein?
As I’ve aged, I find myself only willing to discuss contentious issues in cases where both parties (including me) recognize the existence of some path down which they *might* be willing to change their view.
Evolution v. Creationism, sadly, is almost never that sort of discussion.
In those irreconcilable cases, I frankly don’t care whether others share my view, don’t care why they disagree, and don’t feel compelled to change their minds. Getting into such discussions is like getting into drawn-out divorce actions: best avoided as a soul-sucking waste of time. Life’s already too short.
If someone rejects evolution, the implication is that the ‘less than high school’ people of the graph have a more accurate insight into the nature of the physical universe than people who are trained in the relevant fields (geology, biology, astrophysics) and have worked in one of these fields for 40 years. That strikes me as unlikely. But that is the implication of the anti-evolution advocates.