Ah, finally, I get to sound off. Dealing with the "Christian deficit" is almost useless, as you know. But to let these headless morons run around splashing pseudo-intellectual slop on everyone they pass, is, admittedly, a hard discipline to learn.
Truth is, I'm tired of the conflict, and would rather focus on the neurophysiology of belief, with the goal being to understand how people can so willingly truck in so much nonsense. The superficial arguments have all been made, but the curiosities of our brains that hold the key to rational processing failures are left unfunded for the most part. I can simply say that in any debate with a believer, I am more interested in how such person processes information and can twist it into the necessary classic pretzels that come out as religion. This mental exercise with all its crossed-connections and rational fallacies fascinates me. A great part of it is surely biological and wired into our genes, but with all the knowledge we can now access, why is the brain so resistant to reprogramming when the subject is mystical.
As information processing machines, we exhibit nowhere near the precision as a computer (though we do have other gifts not granted -- yet -- to computers). I don't know how many time I have witnessed confusion in simple syllogisms: Whales are huge; whales are mammals; therefore, all mammals are huge.
I often think that if we really wanted to teach children this thing called "critical thinking", it is logically impossible not to condemn all religion as rationally untenable. And I then muse that maybe many teachers fail in its instruction because they know it would quickly lead to a conclusion that there is no support whatever for religious beliefs.
Jumping somewhat off-topic, I am sad that we have no science courses (which bears heavily on critical thinking skills). If I were developing a program to teach the physical world to secondary school students, I would re-brand all elementary courses in biology, chemistry, and physics as "nature study" courses. I would then introduce two new offerings: In the 9th grade, students would take Science I. This isolates "science" as that process used to explore the natural world. For example: What is a controlled experiment, a double-blind study, an empirical vs a deductive examination? What are probabilities and statistical significance. What is a normal curve, a standard deviation, etc.? Students would then learn such concepts as testable hypotheses, the nature of evidence, and over-arching it all -- the moral imperative of intellectual honesty. And learning science is where we best learn critical thinking.
High school juniors and seniors could take Science II. Here students learn to apply the rules of controlled observations and statistical analysis. They would be tasked with running a real scientific study, setting up hypotheses, parameters, data collection, and statistical conclusions. The term paper is the "published", and peer reviewed, article for the school rag. Now these students would learn real SCIENCE, and the true meaning of the word.
And it might even help some of them think their way out of religious indoctrination.
This is my boy Vincent: talkin' the talk and pullin' the plug!!
Ah, finally, I get to sound off. Dealing with the "Christian deficit" is almost useless, as you know. But to let these headless morons run around splashing pseudo-intellectual slop on everyone they pass, is, admittedly, a hard discipline to learn.
Truth is, I'm tired of the conflict, and would rather focus on the neurophysiology of belief, with the goal being to understand how people can so willingly truck in so much nonsense. The superficial arguments have all been made, but the curiosities of our brains that hold the key to rational processing failures are left unfunded for the most part. I can simply say that in any debate with a believer, I am more interested in how such person processes information and can twist it into the necessary classic pretzels that come out as religion. This mental exercise with all its crossed-connections and rational fallacies fascinates me. A great part of it is surely biological and wired into our genes, but with all the knowledge we can now access, why is the brain so resistant to reprogramming when the subject is mystical.
As information processing machines, we exhibit nowhere near the precision as a computer (though we do have other gifts not granted -- yet -- to computers). I don't know how many time I have witnessed confusion in simple syllogisms: Whales are huge; whales are mammals; therefore, all mammals are huge.
I often think that if we really wanted to teach children this thing called "critical thinking", it is logically impossible not to condemn all religion as rationally untenable. And I then muse that maybe many teachers fail in its instruction because they know it would quickly lead to a conclusion that there is no support whatever for religious beliefs.
Jumping somewhat off-topic, I am sad that we have no science courses (which bears heavily on critical thinking skills). If I were developing a program to teach the physical world to secondary school students, I would re-brand all elementary courses in biology, chemistry, and physics as "nature study" courses. I would then introduce two new offerings: In the 9th grade, students would take Science I. This isolates "science" as that process used to explore the natural world. For example: What is a controlled experiment, a double-blind study, an empirical vs a deductive examination? What are probabilities and statistical significance. What is a normal curve, a standard deviation, etc.? Students would then learn such concepts as testable hypotheses, the nature of evidence, and over-arching it all -- the moral imperative of intellectual honesty. And learning science is where we best learn critical thinking.
High school juniors and seniors could take Science II. Here students learn to apply the rules of controlled observations and statistical analysis. They would be tasked with running a real scientific study, setting up hypotheses, parameters, data collection, and statistical conclusions. The term paper is the "published", and peer reviewed, article for the school rag. Now these students would learn real SCIENCE, and the true meaning of the word.
And it might even help some of them think their way out of religious indoctrination.