What matters most for abandoning creationism: facts, or religious interpretation?

Education in the sciences is unrealistic for young children - some other way of "starting people off" will be the reality under that program.

Discovery, curiosity, exploration of the inhuman physical world by young children, specifically without concurrent reinforcement of fundamentalist dogma (there's a reason fundies all want to set up elementary schools) might be the ticket. Inculcation in fundie religion requires serious efforts - it's usually done by means of a total immersion program for children, and even then it takes years and has a high failure rate. It's not a default state, and one might be able to prevent the majority of victimizations merely by providing alternatives, oases from the immersion.

I think you are underestimating the prevalence of "crazy views" among Catholics - even in the Western sophisticated countries, let alone among the wide realms of Christendom. Likewise among Muslims - the ivory minaret teachings of the top level clerics are one thing, the beliefs of the regular folk are another.

Not only do I think that assertion is an obstacle to extrication of the religiously confused, but I think it is wrong: faith seems to be a basic property of the healthy human nature, as fundamental to scientific inquiry and comprehension as to anything else.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, in other words.

 

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And, upon further review and investigation, we find much of the evil in the world is a result of hate cults and their followers, who only show disdain and intolerance for those who don't share their delusions and bigotry.

 

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Not really, but ok.

 

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I would like you talk to me Synthesis in chemistry, and biochemistry , other wise you talk is like an empty 55 gallon barril.

 

You making two negative word ( equivocation and fallacy ) it is hard for me to understand

 

Creationists believe that every word of the Bible is true.
Good science points towards the truth.
Therefore any science which contradicts the Bible is bad science, and can be disregarded.

There is a kind of logic to it.

 

The confused shouldn't be coddled, otherwise it just causes more confusion. Our commitment should be towards accuracy, not saving people from hurt feelings if we tell them they can't have their cake and avoid cognitive dissonance too. I think you're making the same mistake Arauca is. There is no room in science for faith. Absolute belief in the absence of evidence does not spur scientific inquiry. We may form a hypothesis and have some trust that it's true until we confirm it with evidence, but that's not the same.

 

It's a common logical fallacy in which an argument is wrong because it confuses one meaning of a word with another.

 

The theory works just fine without it.

 

To me Chapter ( one of Genesis ) plus 5 verses of chapter 2 , and science agree , Can you point me to disagreement ?

 

@ Fraggle Rocker;

Re: the Catholic Church. It hasn't made peace with science. Acquiescence isn't the same as making peace. And what is troubling about such acquiescence is that it implies that the Church was lying all those years that it upheld the Bible as literal Truth. It is commonly taught that Popes are given the ability to "infallibly" interpret the Bible. But now...they teach that the Bible is a mere metaphor?

Hard to tell where the lies begin and end so I left it all behind.

 

Yes, I suppose so, roughly. It describes things being created separately, rather than all at once.
But it was not written as a scientific account.

The problem for a Christian who is not a fundamentalist is to figure out how God created the world without being hands-on.
Does he prod the world now and then, like a boy with a toy boat, pushing it in a direction of his choosing?
If you remove the act of creation, then God is dead.

 

Bibiliolatry has chosen its epistemic foundation, just as commonsense realism and the advanced / critical version of that (philosophical naturalism, scientific realism, etc) has chosen its provenances for knowledge (perception, inference, and planned interrogations performed upon extrospective contents). If secular investigation of the current world does not jibe with Bible stories, then bibiliolatrists accordingly conclude that the fault lies with their rivals' interpretations / method / reasoning, or with the empirical environment itself. Just as the latter conclude that the former's Good Book is the bedrock of their errors.

While Philip K. Dick [below] was hardly anything approaching a strict literalist, he nevertheless provides an example of the resources available to such [in general] when they go down the route of dismissing experiential / methodological evidence for scriptural "evidence". They wouldn't necessarily have to even explain to themselves specifically how today's world had come to be a deception (or whatever other hypothesis) -- only that there was one which could be revealed eventually (by God, Devil, Angel, private revelations, "awakening", etc). Thus, it's a futile waste of time trying to "convert" creationists to macroevolutionary views, apart from the rare occasional one that really was wholly a product of conditioning and lacks the fecund inventiveness / borderline hallucinogenic prowess inherent in ardent believers to begin with. But clearly there are anti-creationists who enjoy wasting their time on these efforts; I tired of creationists years ago, but didn't get half-a-brain soon enough to realize the fruitless undertaking.

PKD: . . . And this comes out in my new book that Bantam bought. The guy realizes -- I mean, he's just an ordinary person like us, and it traces him from growing up in Berkeley, and it's semi-autobiographical -- and the satellite which has been orbiting Earth, suddenly reveals to him that it's actually A.D. 70. That it's the first century A.D. That everything he sees is just so much gingerbread over the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire is still in control. And nothing has really happened since the year 70, and that they have just kept plastering more layers of gingerbread over it, and that he has to deal with this problem. He has to deal with the tyranny which is really that of the Roman Empire. And I'm willing to admit that I halfway believe that.

In other words, that I read the new Britannica article on time, and that some of these basic categories of perception that we have, like time and space, are not only difficult to define -- time being very difficult to define -- but maybe illusory. I mean change may be illusory, you know, it may be A.D. 70. It may be that we're still living in the Roman Empire. It may be just that we keep pasting more and more layers of gingerbread to disguise it, so that we think, you know, that there's been these successive changes, and actually there hasn't been, and so on.

If somebody were to take that new book of mine and say, "How much of this book is fact, and how much of this book is fiction?" I wouldn't be able to tell them. I really wouldn't be able to tell them. And when my Bantam editor comes out here, he's going to there's a lot of questions he wants to know, because he's beginning to get the uneasy impression that I believe a lot of what I say in my new book. And when he talks to me, he's going to get an even uneasier impression when I say, "I have a very strong feeling that we're in a kind of maze that has been built for us. And we're being tested, and run through the maze, and evaluated, and hindered from time to time, and notes are being taken." And I always feel that we're being timed. We are being timed. But I really have that feeling very strongly, and so nothing would really surprise me.

I feel as if causality itself has ceased to be. Ever since Hume demonstrated so beautifully that causality is merely custom. Ever since I read the book -- not necessarily since he wrote it, but ever since I read it -- I have had the feeling that perhaps much of what we take to be ironclad chains of events are nothing but mere custom, mere sequence, mere progression, and are not so ironclad.
[...]
And as we wake up, we remember -- it's a form of remembering -- and we remember suddenly who we really are, where we came from, and I really believe in this [...] I remember that I read in ROLLING STONE one time that the Brahmin goes through two cycles: during one part of its cycle, it sleeps, and during one part of its cycle, it dances. We all think we're in the part of the cycle where Brahmin is awake and dancing. In actuality, we're in the part of the cycle where Brahmin is asleep, but, Brahmin is waking up. And when Brahmin wakes up, this world that Brahmin is dreaming, will disappear. And when I read that, I thought, "Well, that just about expresses my basic view, in my books, although I hadn't known that.
[...]
We will understand what right conduct is. And I think that it will spook the Jesus freaks. And I say that as an ardent Christian, but I think it will spook most Christians. I think they will discover that they have been worshiping planes that they made out of tinfoil, to attract other planes. It's not going to be what they expect at all.

--An Interview With Philip K. Dick; Science Fiction Review, No. 19, Vol. 5, no. 3, August 1976 ​

 

The 4th word in. In the Beginning God...

 

Possibly - I admit to a Eurocentric , even UK-centric view. Here we have faith schools funded by the government and forced to adhere to the national curriculum. These are not only Catholic but also Church of England (= Episcopalian) and in Scotland, Church of Scotland (= Presbyterian). So here it is a fact that the main denominations teach evolution in their schools - and hence teach a biblical interpretation consistent with that. Such creationism as we have here is in the wacko fringe, and they often import speakers from the USA, who gain almost zero traction.

 

It can't be because you an I are alive . I don't know how ribose was made I don't know how the amino acid were polymerized, .we don't know why and how purine and pyrideines were made nor selected, and there are many other chemical reaction have taken place to for a cell.

 

In the beginning of earth formation to make livable

 

The problem with Creationism being taught in public schools, is that it is based on religious doctrine. While it might seem for example, that the Catholic Church (and other Christian 'churches') is/are ‘open’ to accepting evolution for example, it still integrates religion into the equation, by injecting the religious dogma that God creates souls, and that humanity is somehow ‘’set apart,’’ and ‘’special,’’ due to this fact. The theory of evolution does NOT support those ideas whatsoever, so…you have two very different schools of thought, trying to blend, and it simply doesn’t work.

On the surface, it would seem that religion and science have found common ground, but when we take a closer look at creationism, it directly opposes science, and doesn’t support it. The same can be said of science not supporting creationism, as well.

It would seem that the Catholic Church is open minded, but it doesn’t accept the theory of evolution in its entirety, because to do so, would mean rejecting God’s role as Divine Creator, and ‘infusing’ man (at some point during the evolutionary process??) with a soul.

Science and religion shouldn't be integrated therefore, (at least in the public school arena) because it places an undue burden on an individual trying to decipher fact from fiction. By attempting to integrate science and religion in the classroom, we unintentionally end up cheapening both the beauty of science, and the mystery of faith.

 

Yes, that is one way round the problem.
To say that God takes part in creation, but we don't know how he does it.
But that is not intellectually satisfying, and sounds like a cop-out.

What wegs has just said is completely correct.
For Christianity to square with evolution, you need to explain how man is a special case.
Or at least have faith that man is specially chosen to 1. exist and 2. thrive.
You are doing the same as the creationists but on a lesser scale.