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Originally Posted by Robert Tulip
An issue here is a clash of values, resulting in communication failure. Scientists value truth, whereas for creationists, and all fundamentalists, the central value is the moral cohesion of their community.
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Nice post, Robert. But creationists do value truth. However, truth can only adjudged from within a particular linguistic framework system (cf. Carnap). They take a literally interpreted Bible as absolutely true based on a mystical expericence of God. Therefore, they are faced with reinterpreting scientific findings "come what may" (cf. Quine) in order to make them logically consistent with their interpretation of the Bible. Theirs may not be a very parsimonious system, but it works for them within that system, and everything is logically consistent and true.
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The key for them is that the Bible provides moral certainty, creating a world view in which children can be protected and raised with strong values.
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Well, at least their not trying to reinvent their ethics from scratch. That's the problem with secular humanism--the morality is too easy, too selfish, too anthropocentric.
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Creationists see their worldview as a tapestry for which the unravelling of one thread will rapidly unweave the whole. To them, science is just a stalking horse for a liberal value-free agenda which promotes critical thinking that subverts community standards.
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That's a bit unfair. Sophisticated theists (including IDists--and why are we talking about young earth creationism? it's pretty much a straw man these days) are very good critical thinkers. Hang out with some ultraorthodox Jewish guys sometime.
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Hence the truth of scientific claims is irrelevant to them, because the creationist ideas are only designed as a defence for a moral community, a way of holding the moral framework together, with the main 'Bible-based' ideas being in the New Testament, not the Old.
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You're selling them short here and you'll get squeezed. Creationist ideas merely interpret the
empirical observations of science in a way consistent with the Bible. And since
scientific theory is underdetermined by the evidence, mainstream scientific theory is not logically entailed by the empirical, observational evidence.
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Genesis is therefore primarily a defence of Saint Paul, not a scientific theory.
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Huh? I thought Saint Paul didn't come around until long after the time of Genesis.
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I . . . see that creationists are often loving, successful and rich, demonstrating that their beliefs are somehow adaptive.
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And some are also good doctors, engineers, physicists, and biochemists and sundry other scientists. They don't make good evolutioanry biologists, however.
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Rather than mocking them as stupid, I think it is important for scientists to recognise the social function of creationism instead of approaching it through an epistemic lens. Expecting them to care about scientific truth fails to see the moral agenda which drives their beliefs.
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That's pretty much it. I would add that maybe secular humanists might benefit from a self-examination of where their moral agenda comes from. Because it's certainly not science, and it's certainly not God, and so that leaves either Satan or themselves.
Nice post, Robert.