Dinosaurs and Man

[Angrboda]

Oddly enough, I can sympathize with GodsChild's view of the matter as a mere battle between truth and an unyielding scientific dogma. Many times these debates about these questions take on the appearance of a partisan political fight, rather than a rational debate. Politician A gives a speech, and darned if everything he says sounds reasonable. Then politician B takes the podium, and darned if he doesn't refute everything B said, and convincingly. And so it goes. Creationists exist in a river of social interaction that carries with it different epistemological standards, philosophies and values. Secular science does as well. The point to see here is that the disagreements are as much a consequence of uniquely different cultures, as they are about matters of fact. And religious people, and other cultural groups, valuing their lifestyle, seek to insulate it from corruption, by such things as home schooling, separate social activities and so on. We all tend to read and listen to people who we think we will agree with, and it doesn't matter whether you're an atheist, a fundamentalist Christian, or a Hindu. But that is also a weakness, which keeps you segregated within your own particular mental community.

There is a "meta-level" set of behaviors, which I refer to as discourses, which tends to develop socially and intellectually segregated bodies of knowledge. And "just looking at the facts" won't help you deal with this problem. (And people can belong to multiple discourses simultaneously, such as scientists, who look to Christianity for spiritual but not material truth, who say, are big into post-modernist literary theory, and so on.)

I've been now and again working on this question, but I don't have any real answers. Aside from cautioning people not to look at people like GodsChild and creationists as either lying, willfully ignorant, or stupid; they usually aren't. Like people born on different rivers, they actually see what they claim to be seeing (probably). They were just born floating down a river far removed from the one you are floating down, and it may perhaps be unreasonable to expect them to beach the canoe, and head overland toward a land they've never seen. Odds are, a month from now, they'll be on the same river, perhaps a few miles further downstream, but the same river. And so will you.