Good news, everyone!
A new study shows that Americans of 2005 (28%) are much more likely to understand science articles in the news than Americans of 1988 (10%). The study’s author says that the major reason is that more colleges have basic science courses as an entry requirement.
I’ll buy that line of argument. Put more people through basic science courses early, and at least some of it will stick. More people with some scientific knowledge is certainly a good thing. But there’s one little problem – there’s also the issue
that people are giving increasing credence to pseudoscience such as the visits of space aliens, lucky numbers and horoscopes.
Why?
One problem, [Carol Susan Losh of FSU] said, is that pseudoscience can speak to the meaning of life in ways that science does not.
What, does no one read Carl Sagan anymore?
I’m not sure I buy that belief in pseudoscience is up because of some sort of search for the meaning of life. Wasn’t that need just as real in the past as it is today? I might be inclined to buy into the idea that, since pseudoscience is all over the web, people are more exposed to nonsense than they ever were previously.
As silly as I think astrologers and people who claim to talk to the dead are, I don’t worry about them that much. Why? Mainly because most practitioners of pseudosciences like astrology aren’t seeding school boards with candidates to try to sneak astrology into the science classroom.
But there’s one pseudoscience out there whose practitioners can’t keep their mitts off the science curriculum. Creationism.
Back to the article …
[…] there also has been a drop in the number of people who believe evolution correctly explains the development of life on Earth and an increase in those who believe mankind was created about 10,000 years ago.
(emphasis mine)
To believe that the world / mankind was “created” six to ten thousand years ago, you have to throw away the foundations of almost all the sciences. Fundamental facts and theories in chemistry, physics, geology, biology, etc. are simply incompatible with the young Earth viewpoint.
And the numbers of these people are growing? That’s a frightening thought!
This is a reply to your article entitled “Science Knowledge in America.”
I have been pondering the last two paragraphs, about how more people are believing in Creationism. I got from the article that this seems to be in contrast to increased scientific literacy.
About 1992 I started working for geologists. I thought that I wold be hearing about evolutionary processes all the time, since the college professors I had that taught Darwinism were so emphatic on the strata of the earth and carbon dating.
It was the opposite. They referred to the strata with the names I heard in college only once in a while. Usually, in fact, there are localized names for the strata and the substrata within the formations known as “Jurassic” or “Cretacious.”
I soon was working for the leading Geologists in the world, in the top 1% of my field as a Geologic / Environmental Technician. One day, I asked a Geologist why we do not refer to the ages of the strata as we heard it in college, and why there was not more emphasis on the age of the earth as proported in Darwinism and the other associated evolutionary theories. He was a Senior Geologist, who had sat on the Geologists Examining boards of most of the states in the Southeastern United States.
His answer to me shocked me. I came to find out that alomost all of the gologists that study active deposition and sedimentary geology feel this way.
His answer was tha almost all geologists who “actually work ‘in the field’ and have good common sense about sedimentary deposition” and have had to date events by deposition can tell you that dating by deposition is a very weak type of analysis. It can be shot full of holes. The same is true with C-14 dating and any of the other types of dating methods. They can all be shot full of holes. They just do not hold water.”
I asked him why this is and if there was a breaking point in time where we start seeing huge disparities.
He said that the answer is really mathematical. It has to do with extrapolation. Interpolation, the opposite of extrapolation, is interpreting or predicting between two knowns. Extrapolation is trying to predict beyond the knowns. Any “science” he said that extrapolates values based on knowns can be discredited. And, he adds, Darwinism, goes a step further than that, and tries to extrapolate based on conjecture.
He gave me another example of that. One can test a living mullosk with C-14 and it will be shown to be millions of years old.
He said to me that the true scinces that we work in (such as Environmental Geology) have finessed the Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis fields to the point that application of those methodologies to fields such as what we heard in college in the 80’s about Darwinism, and the Big Bang, only reveals the faults of the theories.
Which, he said, is why they are still only theories.
And each and every one of the great “finds” that hurled Darwinism to the top of the charts, so to speak, for the hot topics of collegiate discussion or debate, has since, using Quantitative or Qualitative analysis, (real science that stands up in court, such as Chemistry, Forensic Pathology) has been discredited.
So, the last thing I want to address that he said that floored me, I only mentioned above. It is, simply put, that the breaking point in time seems to be somewhere between eight to fifteen thousand years ago, for the best and most accurate dating methodology. The rest boils down to faulty presupposition–that extrapolation is accurate.
One extrapolative method will be used, the next will shoot it down, and it goes on and on.
I said to him, it seems odd that the 8 to 15 thousand years is the breaking point, that is what creation says… He said that that is where the extrapolation begins, it is the beginning of the historic record.
Interesting comment.
Can you explain to me how one can test a sample using C-14 dating and get an age of “millions of years old” when the maximum age C-14 dating can measure is something on the order of 50,000 to 60,000 years?
That geologist you worked for … would his name be Kent Hovind, by any chance? Because your arguments sound very similar.