Intellectual Abuse & "Insidious Creationism"
Creationist advocates of intellectually dishonest ideas like "teach the controversy", or "evolution is only a theory" are not engaged in a scientific debate. Neither are they engaged in a debate about how science works. Indeed, they are not even participating in good-faith (no pun intended) discourse but are pursuing their own subversive agenda, no holds barred.
An overt part of those agenda includes recruiting children to their world view. Planting intellectually deceitful ideas in the heads of young children makes those ideas less prone to revision as the child matures.
This is not really a summary, but more some thoughts that arrived as I was listenting to the 30-minute talk by James Williams (his website), lecturer in education at Sussex University, called "Insidious Creationism". (Given on 8 June 2009 at a day conference called "Darwin, Humanism and Science".) I watched it at "The Dispersal of Darwin", Michael Barton's blog.
Near the beginning, this idea of "intellectual abuse" caught my attention (transcriptions are mine):
This is why I apply the term "intellectual abuse" to "creationism": I feel that when a person in a position of power and authority, who claims expertise in science, deliberately provides a non-scientific explanation for a natural phenomenon, knowing that to be at odds with the accepted scientific explanation, then that person is guilty of intellectual abuse.
Later on this fanciful image of a graduate in a "creation science" degree program generated a hearty laugh from the audience:
"Intelligent design" explains nothing. Science fails to proceed if that is the approach we take. Science succeeds where there are things that we do not know, that we don't understand. And the role of science is to find those explanations for natural phenomena.
I can't actually see Oxford, or Cambridge, in the near future offering degrees in "supernatural sciences". I can't see somebody going for a science Ph.D. saying, "Well, I've done the tests, I've investigated, I've read all the papers, I haven't got a clue what's going on, so therefore my answer is: It was designed. Could I have my doctorate please?"
The biggest laugh, however, was for the fanciful picture of Jesus holding the baby raptor, an example illustration from an "intellectually deceitful" book aimed at children.
It's not all laughs, of course, even if the presentation is light hearted and digestible. Creationism would be merely a fringe group of ignorable wackos if they were not having such a disproportionate affect currently on educational discourse and policy in this country through deliberately dishonest and misleading tactics and strategies. "Insidious" indeed.
In case you'd like to listen, I'll make it easy:
In: All, Current Events, It's Only Rocket Science, Snake Oil--Cheap!
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Friday, 10 July 2009 at 03.10
Permalink
It's one thing for parents to inculcate their faith in their children.
It's another thing to present notions rooted in faith as some sort of
science.
You can call it abuse, but it's not just kids being abused. Christian
faith is supposed to uphold honesty/truth. To the extent people present
their beliefs as objective truth to kids, I think they're abusing faith
along with the kids.