Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
That's the idea.
They suck at it. "Oh, when you look at the universe, you see how small and insignificant you are", etc.

AFAIK, no one. Many have been influenced by it, though.

Note: there isn't really such a thing as "simplified" history.
strange semantics


So the students would learn this "simplified" history independently? Are you sure you'd like that? What's the use, besides to sideline the educational establishment?
What makes you think they would? The fewer people using a dumb historical theory as a crutch the better.

Please list the harms you believe come from both. I'd be interested in hearing that.
No. I've already spilled an inappropriate amount of ink. I could have left it at the Dawkin's tweet.

Bias against them all makes you no less credulous than others.
I'm not biased against them, I care more because it's the mainstream among powerful people. If creationism was then I would care more about it.

Quote Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name View Post
I know of instances it was used to justify terrible things, but the issue is not with the theory but with the people who wield it. You can't claim modern evolutionary theory is bad because people use it for justifying bad conclusions. We would all condemn organized religion if that was the case. But we shouldn't. Hence, why I complain about the fundamentalists as opposed to Christianity.
If people are wielding things, it matters what they are wielding. In our culture at this time religion is not a very dangerous thing to wield. Scientism is. Notice I made the same kind of distinction you are making between fundamentalists and christians, except with science...I specifically said "credulous/utopian".

Interesting. This might cause you distress, but my uni world history class has us reading a book called "Maps of Time" by David Christian. The purpose of the book is to combine the various sciences and social sciences together to make a coherent "Big History" of humanity, starting from the origin of the universe. A modern, scientific creation-myth story he semi-jokingly calls it in the intro.
You're being ripped off. Did the professor assign his own book or something?

On some level, people don't want to think. OR at least, they do the bare minimum in order to survive. Whether it is at uni, or in their daily lives. What I want to know is why you are so concerned about the overzealous science supporters who demand money for ventures that at least have the benefit of giving us cool new stuff to play with and yet write off the fundamentalists who actively attempt at dictating people's lives and the information they do/do not get?
I don't care about the money or the new stuff. Look below:

Quote Originally Posted by Kralizec
Science is supposed to reflect our knowledge of the universe and everything in it, including ourselves. Science researchers are supposed to advance our knowledge. An "intelligent design" supporter would argue that evolution is a bad theory, or at least a questionable one. He would not question the concept of "science" as such, just the prevailing view on this particular subject.

The odd part is that while layman supporters of the evolution theory would characterise creationists/ID supporters as anti-science as name calling, you seem to accept the label as a legitimate position.
Science is for studying the physical and natural world. The humanities are the study of people. In science its often very difficult to find something out, but when you find it out you can show it objectively. In the humanities many things are very easy to see, but it's often hard to convince anyone, let alone prove anything. So, if you want to convince someone of something, what do you do? You can argue, write history, use art or literature or storytelling, etc, religion usually uses all of those. There's nothing wrong with that as a method, it just ossifies over time and people rely on doctrine. Priests are recognized as people who have special insight through some trait of theirs or through intensive study, so people take their word for it. Today science takes that role for many people.

Science is an inappropriate tool for studying the humanities, but it has so much prestige in our time because of the technology it has created, and because people imagine that it overthrew religion (not true). So you have:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

And the counterreaction in our own century has been bad as well--behaviorism, blank slate theory. You think we are past that and that modern psychology (of the kind that tries to answer humanities questions) is better?