Originally posted by Alliance
Exactly, so why should scientists, or people working on their behalf, simply stand by and let the public hear all the bad arguments from the 17th C. Even if it "lends" credibility to creationists. I certainly see where you're comming from, unfortunately, I view the public as something too great to loose.
Nobody is standing by. Nowhere have I argued that we stop teaching evolution. What I have said is that we should not address creationism or Intelligent Design as a science or in any scientific way.
It is nice that you think the public is too great to loose, but your understanding of how people believe seems to be off. You can't convince someone of something they don't already believe. When you encounter new and conflicting information, it initiates cognitive dissonance, not rational thought. Hearing ideas you agree with initiates mechanisms similar to drug addiction. Not to mention that the emotional salience of religious arguments makes them easier to remember and believe, and that when Micheal Behe stands up beside any learned evolutionary biologist, and says that the bacterial flagellum is proof of design, there is nothing the biologist can say to refute that.
Having evolution presented to the public as an option is not a good idea at all. Science is not very convincing.
Originally posted by Alliance
Occams razor is not a good legitimate precept, sometimes even in thoerizing. Applied to individual facts, it sucks.
Wow... I'd really appreciate it if you went into some painstaking detail about this... You might have revolutionized science... You'll win some major awards... Like Newton!!!!
But in all seriousness, not to just call this preposterous off hand, you are going to be hard pressed to refute Occam's Razor. Clearly it is a heuristic, but to call it illegitimate is ridiculous.
Originally posted by Alliance
Creationists might not want to understand, they simple try to destroy science's credibility. However, this havs been going on for centuries and science is more alive than ever. I believe we have a civil respoinsibility to educate the public, regardless of whether they want to listen or not..if we reach some people...they reach others.
Education would be awesome. You will not educate anyone in a debate. Debate is shown to polarize opinions. Not to mention it creates the illusion of a choice in the matter.
Just the happiness one might receive when they think of themselves as designed may be enough to put enough emotional saliency on the memory that it outweighs the lame rational explanations. We are animals, emotional reactive responses are much more important than cognitive ones.
Originally posted by Alliance
not arguing just proves the creationsist claims that scientists are out of touch with reality. A simple debate is a great way to destroy creationsits credibility, to make them look the fools they are, and to win the moderates, which is all we need.
They look foolish to you because you don't believe what they are saying. To anyone who does, their beliefs have just been affirmed, polarized, and they have learned new memes to throw around in debates, which NEVER change, regardless of what scientific evidence is brought up (re:those 17c arguments).
Not to mention, there are some remarkably intelligent people who can make some beautiful sounding arguments about why the human brain shows design or what have you. The fact that these people are Doctors (NEVER in evolutionary biology) makes people believe that there is a real scientific challange to evolution. To debate them in a scientific forum confirms this, then they believe they get to choose which one is true to them.
Call people as rational as you want, but thats not how they seem when we study them.