Some time ago, my beloved (and very bright) younger grandson posted (to Facebook) a picture of a 4th grade "science" test. It isn't clear whether this is from one of the (too numerous) "Home School" packages produced by religious ignoramuses, or curriculum from a "Christian School." Because of the resurgence of lunatic Evangelical conservatism and science denial under the red ball caps, and since this "test" is indicative of their mindset, I have reworked this.
Although administered in 2013, one supposes little has changed other than that the 4th grader should now be a graduating high school senior. Unless there has been a reality intervention, this would be one of the most scientifically illiterate grads ever. In the first place, this is a totally true/false test, which is a code for either home schooled or "Christian" school "easy A". In the second place it is rife with supposed "science" questions which were to be answered based on a Bible perspective and are devoid of scientific validity. The test is shown below.
Another reader, unknown to me, then proceeded to defend this test and the discussion spiraled into a discussion of science v. religion, upon which the reader began to discuss the "brilliance" of religious thinkers and the "rational thought" which had been applied to create what we, today, properly refer to as "dogma."
Dogma, defined, is: "A principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true." "Dogma", the movie, makes far more sense and is much funnier.
At this point, my brother in law, an actual scientist and very bright guy, entered the conversation, made several concise, valid points, receiving a somewhat scathing rebuke from the original writer, essentially ridiculing him for using logic to show the flaws on the writer's argument. Of course, I felt compelled to respond, not that my bro needed any assistance in dealing with this mental lightweight, but, rather, because the responder's lack of civility and lucidity astounded me. What I wrote is below:
(Name of the "other guy"), you truly exhibit the messianic zeal of the true believer. In fact, as S**** so eloquently put it, no one has ever debunked any scientific assertion with religion, yet our history is full of the opposite. His point was that Copernicus and Galileo made the observations available to them and theorized possible reasons for those observations. When those theories ran counter to dogmatic teachings of organized religion ("the Church") Galileo was persecuted, and Copernicus had conveniently expired, having waited until the end of his life to publish.
As to your comments regarding the 2000 year old institution of Christianity and the "brilliant minded" men:
Superstitious adherence to a dogmatic position, unfortunately can infect even the brilliant. Isaac Newton, while brilliant , was also hyper-religious, yet believed in alchemy. As Peter Medawar states, "I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not."
Let me simplify that for you. The fact that you desperately want, or have an emotional need, to "believe in" a myth makes it no more true. Yes, Jethro, the sincerity and degree of zealotry associated with any religious or pseudo-scientific belief simply has zero bearing on its being true. If simply believing made it so, many of us would have gotten that pony on our 4th or 5th Christmas.
The contrast in these two positions is that, when additional scientific study shows a theory to be incorrect or incomplete, it is replaced by the rational thinker with the newly revealed reality. Science doesn't claim immutability. Sadly, the inverse is true of religious doctrinal belief.
No matter how many brilliant scriptural experts analyze documents and rethink the validity of allegedly scriptural writings describing "quotes" from Jesus made when he was alone, and no matter how obvious it has become to most modern scriptologists that many of the letters attributed to the Apostle Paul weren't written by him, no matter how ludicrous it now seems that the Crusaders were a bunch of moral Christian knights who only wanted to free the "Holy land" from the Infidel, there are those of the faith who refuse to believe such things.
Two more quotes and then I'll leave you to continue your novena for the souls of unbelievers who choose the Scientific Method over superstition:
“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.” - Christopher Hitchens
The late Isaac Asimov's remark about the infantilism of pseudoscience is equally applicable to religion:
"Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold.' It is astonishing, moreover, how many people are unable to understand that 'X is comforting' does not imply 'X is true.”
A final question for the "test" designer responsible for the drivel above: If you, as you obviously do, believe in a 6000 year old earth with coexisting species which modern science now places eons (millions of years) apart, riddle me these simple questions."
1. If, as you insist, the earth is a mere 6000 years old, then either a) Earth was all one huge land mass, therefore all the species were on one huge continent, or b) The continents were "created" as they are today, separated by vast expanses of water. (Note: Many Evangelicals now "hedge their bets", staunchly clinging to the idea that the split of the continents happened "spasmodically" as a result of the Noah Flood, in other words after creation, when all that lives or has ever lived existed in one place.)
If a) is true, then shouldn't all present day species be present on all continents? They are not. Jaguars and Tigers (for very simple examples) are absent from Africa,Europe and Australia. So are poison dart frogs, which Noah must have handled very carefully. This implies as well, that all the species we now have, must have evolved (gasp) from the originals. There are no fossils or other pre-historic remains of jaguars, llamas, groundhogs, monk seals, pronghorned antelope or almost all Amazon rain forest basin creatures outside the new world. The same is true of tomatoes, potatoes and maize
If b) is true, that explains why T-Rex fossils are found only in North America, but leaves the question "If God created all the critters in one place and they were all coexistent with Adam and Eve, why are there so many variants which exist variously all over the world, but not in the "Holy land?" Moreover how did they, and the humans with whom you insist they coexist, get there? Did kangaroos swim to Australia with koalas on their backs?
Once again, one wonders.
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