Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
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?
And the alternative method is?...
If a flawed method still gives benficial results (and it does, otherwise you wouldn't even be able to detect the previous mistakes), then a proper alternative needs to be discovered before abandoning the old method.
Besides, the real problem is keeping proper critical thinking, which are more or less an impossible goal, but one important goal to strive for.

And that's what is horribly lacking when it comes to creationists. Their answer is already written in stone, no matter contradicting information and logical consequences such assumptions has with already established facts.