Producing a Potentially Potent Palin Post

[etruth]

Reading some comments around the web regarding Senator Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in case you've been under a rock today, I'm struck by how aghast some people are that she apparently has a favorable view of creationism (right now, I've only found that she supports bringing up both positions in class, but there may be more I'm

Comments

[ktl]

I guess my big frustration with creationism, as a Christian, is that prevents us from confronting naturalism in the public sphere. When creationists make scientific arguments, it's transparent to everyone that the motive for the argument is trying to bring nature into line with a particular text in Genesis, and while Genesis has epistemic weight for Christians it has very little for anyone outside of our faith. It would be like trying to demonstrate the truth of gravity because it makes more sense of the Psalms, not because it's the best explanation for why things fall down. So all this leaves a kind of vacuum in acedemia where Christians should be, and no one is around to make the case that there may be and very likely is something more in the world than the natural and the physical. By rejecting evolution a priori, we leave the interpretation of evolution and evolutionary history to naturalists who want to understand and explain nature as "randomness" and "chance" even though this isn't really an "explanation" at all. Whereas if

[level_head]

As our host here knows, I am a strong proponent of evolution, and have debated creationists for decades.

Nevertheless, I do so respectfully. I've found that in most cases, the exposure to good information is limited, and this is the part that I try to correct.

I am genuinely disappointed to see falsehoods -- and there are high-ranking folks on both sides of the debate that engage in them. The "wannabee-Taliban" comments by people nominally on my side are offputting, and I just as frequently am debating themI think of it as a bit like pyroprocessing. Most people have the opinion that nuclear waste is evil, and the information they get about it is often limited and often one-sided. More exposure to the subject is often very revealing, but few indeed have such backgrounds. So I never consider someone an "idiot" for holding a position against pyroprocessing -- or evolution