Comment by UltraSane 4 days ago
I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.
Young-earth creationist, as in "God created everything from scratch in 7 days".
There are many scientists out there that believe in that. They are not scientifically ignorant, they just believe different stuff from you, which, mind you, unless you've seen all proof and understand everything about it to the very last detail, you just hold a faith-based belief of what you're told about by a specific bunch of people/books.
People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on.
Not intending to start a flamewar here or anything, but the fact is that even if there's a lot of evidence for many claims about it, the THEORY of Evolution is not failsafe let alone definitely proven.
You can choose to go with it until we have something better, that's your choice.
Allow that same choice for the rest of the people out there.
"There are many scientists out there that believe in that. "
Not any GOOD ones.
"They are not scientifically ignorant, "
They are actually.
" they just believe different stuff from you, "
They believe very stupid things directly at odds with all evidence. All of modern technology is a result of the exact same logical thought that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line? Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
"People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on."
Are you arguing that religious people are scientifically ignorant?
Such religious people like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître?
I think they would be the first to acknowledge they are scientifically ignorant compared to our times.
> Does that make their contributions ignorant
Yes
> or invalid?
no. I don't really understand what your point is. Are you trying to argue:
> They were Christian, thus you can be a scientific genius in your time and still Christian.
? You have to keep in mind, these people were scientific geniuses in a time where people had recently established that the Earth orbited the Sun. The first periodic table wasn't compiled until 1869, hundreds of years later. Given they had no alternative explanation, is it any wonder they were content with answers from religion? I'm not sure you realize this, but the whole separation of religion and science is a recent phenomenon. They used to be the same thing, just explanations for how the world worked. It was only when empirical evidence and scientific theories started explaining the world better than "the gods" that religion began claiming a separate sphere of influence.
So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people? It just seems a bit far-fetched to me for someone who claims to be pro-science, especially given the number of respected religious scientists in the world.
"So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people?"
Not intrinsic but very highly correlated with WHY they are home-schooling in the first place.
They are Evangelical young earth creationists.
I'm not sure you understood my comment (despite quoting it). Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist? What about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or practically any other religious person who home schools?
Your thesis seems to be that religious people are anti-science, which is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype to be pushing in 2024.
Do you think there are many religious parents who choose homeschooling because it lets them reinforce their worldview? GP says he was raised in such a household, I have friends who were homeschooled for that reason. There are probably many religious people who just find public schools uncouth, but I think there are more who homeschool primarily for easier indoctrination. I don't think GP is automatically assuming anything about individuals, they're just pointing out that a significant fraction of the homeschooling population will come from Evangelical Young Earth Creationists.
Based on your comment, I would assume you are religious. Quite frankly, religious doctrines are anti-science, or more accurately anti-epistemology. The Young Earth Creationists are a dim example of this, but even your generic Christian believes in lichs based on two-thousand-year-old hearsay. You say this
> is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype
but why? It seems more true than any religion. I think you could make an argument that it's impossible to convince people they're wrong, so to avoid fighting you should avoid making such comments, but that's empirically not true.
" Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist?"
Because in the US this is largely true. And young earth creationists are most empathically anti-science. I know because that is how I was raised and I have rejected all of that nonsense.
To be fair most high school graduates might recite the “right scientific facts” while having no basis for supporting them. The earth is 4 billion years old. Survival of the fittest drives evolution. Why? How do you know?
Basically just another form of indoctrination. Children are not taught science so much as science appreciation.
Under what circumstances would it matter? As long as people believe the earth is older than around 3,000 years they are going to have more of a problem with general background ignorance than their misconceptions about that specific fact.
If a group of people believing a random untrue fact is a threat, there are a vast number of threats out there. Far more than the school system can possibly deal with. Misidentifying the age of the earth is harmless compared to things like economic misconceptions and there aren't many school systems making a credible effort to correct those.
The neat thing about science is that all the explanations have to fit together. The explanation for why the sun shines so bright for so long can't contradict the explanation for why birds can fly. When you reject an explanation as fundamental as evolution and the ages of the earth you really put yourself at a disadvantage in understanding many other things.
I actually had a young earth creationist say that the sun doesn't use fusion and thus its lifespan is more in line with the creationist worldview and I responded with neutrinos emitted from the fusion reactions in the sun.
On the other hand, my sister is a firm Creationist Christian, has a PhD and had a brilliant career in research (albeit nothing directly related to 'The Beginning of All Things').
Chances are she is less "scientifically ignorant" than many people around here, myself included.
Just like my sister's, yours is a specific case. It's sad that they didn't teach you Creation in a way that wouldn't cancel out Science, as Science itself is something profoundly Christian as well.
"O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!..." - Johannes Kepler