Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Excellent question.

How old is the student?
Mary Anne — (archived)

Please don't forget that the college students for whom you fear are adults -- young adults, true, and idealistic as young adults are prone to be, but adults nontheless, who have had at least 18 years of contact with more long-lasting influences. They are not pushovers.

The students who are the targets of the crowd that wants to turn science into a discipline driven by opinion and belief instead of the scientific method are considerably younger. They won't "troop out of the classroom as blank-eyed fundamentalist troglodytes". They will go home with no understanding of or respect for the scientific method. Kiss their scientific literacy, as students and as future voters, goodbye.

We could get into the First Amendment's non-establishment clause re: Intelligent Design, too (which doesn't cover political speech in college classrooms), but John Jones, the judge who wrote the extensive opinion against Intelligent Design in public schools in the Dover, PA, case, has already done a fine job explaining how the First Amendment pertains to government-sponsored Intelligent Design promotion.

Science as a discipline can indeed be killed at its roots. Make it weak by weakening its standards. Refuse to support a rigorous adherence to its methods because of conflict with religious belief. It will collapse.

It's happened in the West before. Fortunately, the Caliphate was around to hold on to the Greeks until our ancestors got their act back together. Who will pick science up if we decide, as Barbie said about math, that science is hard? You want to pass the torch to the Chinese? They won't give it back.

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