(June 24, 2014 at 11:02 am)LogicOrDie Wrote: I just wonder how the belivers come to be so blind to any reason.In my case it was ignorance. Raised by a strict fundamentalist, my only information about evolution was via the JW organization, and their stance is that it doesn't happen. Or at least, they use the old micro/macro split to accommodate evolution while dismissing most of the theory. They also use the "it's just a theory" argument, which works quite well on people who don't understand what the word means in the context of scientific research.
Combined with the mental block produced by being raised to believe that there is a god and it is the god of the Bible, it creates a scenario where any doubt can be attributed to the devil's attempts to draw people away from god and from his salvation. Fear and ignorance complement each other nicely under those circumstances. A very effective pair.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
