Re: Smart People Believe Weird Things
That's just it, isn't it.....
It would be so easy to explain away the motivations behinf religion by saying, "All religious people are idiots".
But it simply isn't true!
I still cannot fathom how so many, otherwise intelligent people, actually decide to believe this rubbish.
I guess this book would be a place to start! I'll get around to reading real soon!
I am 100% behind the suggestion that science should be taught, not with emphasis on the discoveries and theories, but on the method.
So when a creationist is telling me that evolution should be taught in classrooms as a theory...in a perverse way I would agree with him!...but I think that EVERYTHING should be taught as a theory! That way the students would realise what a theory is, and would simply laugh in the fact of an argument as feeble as "evolution is 'only' a theory".
Without an emphasis on method, what is science education? It consists of "here is a collection of claims, told to you by a bunch of guys in white coats".
'Contrasted' with pseduoscience:
"here is a collection of claims told to you by a bunch of priests/mystics/quacks/whatever".
Without an understanding of the
method behind these claims (rational enquiry, double blind tests, evidence, falsifiability, etc. vs. authority, tradition, revelation, etc.), science seems no more convincing than mysticism/religion.
I think that having a solid understanding of the philosophy of science is many times more important that knowing the atomic mass number of Argon.
If it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well.
Edited by: CSflim at: 3/28/04 4:58 pm
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