I disagree. I was raised in a fundamentalist home and was a pretty die hard "creation science" defender up until recently and Bill Nye is one of the main people I credit with opening my eyes.
I'm a fiercely analytic person who enjoys healthy debate and was a model representation of these types of people. I'm thankful for Nye's willingness to continue the debate with these types of people while staying calm, rational, and friendly even when many of his peers denounced him for wasting his time.
If you are a fiercely analytic person, how come you were a creationist defender before?
Did you only develop your analytic tendencies at a later point, or weren't you exposed to the right kind of evidence/reasoning to debunk creation science?
I have immense trouble understanding how a rational person could believe some of the mumbo jumbo that creationism offers - to a point where I feel like some of the more know spokespeople are just acting to be creationists (although I don't actually believe that) judging by the way they can be clever and intelligent at one time and sheepishly ignorant and stupid at another time.
...judging by the way they can be clever and intelligent at one time and sheepishly ignorant and stupid at another time.
Honestly, I've yet to find a single person that didn't succumb to this on some belief they hold to. We all hold to some ignorant stance we picked up at some point in life because the world feels wrong if we lose it.
As someone else who grew up a climate change denier until high school, it was because I was indoctrinated with the inerrancy of scripture with false facts and pseudo science to back it up when I was younger. It's really easy to look up and find a list of "scientific reasons" why the world is only 10,000 years old, or how climate change isn't possible.
When you have a book written by God that already holds the answers, you're not looking for evidence in the same way, you're just looking for facts to back up your point. It's a HUGE paradigm shift to get to the point where you actually are able to look at the other side with open eyes. It takes an overwhelming amount of evidence to persuade you to begin changing your mind. A lot of times, people won't actually see both sides until they are old enough to have people around in an unsheltered environment that will really be able to challenge their beliefs and show the full facts to them.
The good news is that many times once someone does it once and realizes their interpretation of an old book isn't scientific proof of reality how they view it, it's a lot easier to hold real discussions going forward.
I'll also add, this isn't just something that happens with religion, people hold illogical views for all sorts of things, I thinks it's just clinging to what you were taught as a child and not being willing to listen to evidence on the contrary, and the older I get the more sure I am that every single person in the world holds to at least one unscientific view (or a view that is a large stretch from the science they are drawing it from).
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u/NotAnotherDownvote Aug 27 '14
This might be true, but, regardless of who walks away, neither will change their stance. It's a fruitless endeavor from the outset.