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quid est veritas?

Posted by kit on 2017-January-18 05:23:43, Wednesday
In reply to Re: Calm down, Martha posted by MWM on 2017-January-17 22:03:15, Tuesday

The real problem with this paper, it seems to me, is not that it is not true (plenty of things we're taught at school aren't true), but that it isn't science. It doesn't particularly bother me that children are being taught a religious history of the world - a history which may well be far more useful and meaningful to them than the claim that the earth is unimaginably ancient - but rather that this religious history is being packaged as scientific truth.

This annoys me not just because it threatens to pollute the pristine spring of scientific knowledge with the mud of superstition, but also because it seems like a massive capitulation to the pretensions of science as the ultimate arbiter of truth. This is not a claim that most scientists make, incidentally, but it seems to be a conviction shared by certain evangelical atheists and the more hardline sort of Creationists. The real problem with Creationists is not that they lack respect for science, but that they give it far too much credit: they have a credulous (and unscientific) faith in science as a means of access to unmediated truth, and so they rashly conclude that the old wine of revealed religion has to be poured into the new wineskins of scientific method if it is to retain any sort of credibility at all. And inevitably, the results are messy (and sometimes risible).

I don't for a moment think that the people behind the "Answers in Genesis" curriculum - which this paper is apparently drawn from - are 'lying' to children. They are not 'lying' in the sense of telling deliberate untruths; they themselves doubtless believe what they are saying to be true. All they are guilty of (IMHO) is a defective theology and a lousy philosophy of science.

Still, if children are going to 'brainwashed' - and, one way or another, they all are - there are probably worse kinds of brainwashing than evangelical Protestantism, even of the irritating "Answers in Genesis" variety. For instance, the idea of pledging allegiance to a flag at the start of a school day has always filled me with a cold dread. Some people around here went to schools with their own army cadet forces. Some schools - not mine, thank God - even enforced compulsory dancing. But then I guess we all have our own private nightmares to wrestle with in the long dark hours of the night.

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