How can fundamentalists not wake up?

[Mister Agenda]

Sure you weren't indoctrinated at college and told the truth during childhood? Do you think that your college is impartial, or your professors, or the ones deciding their wages and the curriculem? What do you ground that belief on?

Reading the Bible cover-to-cover twice is what broke me of being a Christian, and it was in college that I realized that at some point I had become an atheist, through a combination of learning more about science, more about logic, and more about religion.

I can even recall the exact semester, though not the day, that it happened: I was taking Logic 201 and Introduction to Religion the same semester. My religion professor was an Orthodox Christian and big on apologetics. My logic professor was big on fallacies. As I learned the various fallacies, I watched my other professor making them in every single one of his arguments. He was an intelligent, learned man, and he had to turn his mind into a pretzel to try to justify his belief. And I see that over and over in theists, especially literalists: perfectly good minds, twisted into pretzels trying to convince themselves that their faith is reasonable.

Some professors may try to indoctrinate you, my religion professor certainly did. But the thing that breaks people's faith in college is finding out what their parents and ministers didn't tell them. Of course, the effect of preparing a child for the revalations of college just means you endanger their faith sooner, if you're a fundamentalist.

Of course, going to college tends to have little effect on the faith of liberal Christians, who weren't taught that evolution is a lie and science is a conspiracy to perpetuate that lie and everything in the Bible actually happened exactly as portrayed. A certain comfort level with ambiguity is a strong defense against new facts breaking your faith.

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Would any of that evidence not require me to have blind faith in the authority informing me of it?

Far from it. In college (except for Bible college, of course) one is generally rewarded for fact-checking.

And Appeal to Authority is only a fallacy if the authority appealed to is an inappropriate one. Appeal to Einstein on the General Theory of Relativity, and you've committed no fallacy. Likewise if you refer to Stephen Gould on a matter concerning biological evolution. It isn't possible to be more of an authority than the people working in the field concerned on everything. Where you run into trouble is appealing to Einstein on theology or Gould on celestial mechanics.

But if you really have a problem with, say, the Theory of Evolution, there is nothing preventing you from learning it backwards and forwards and seeing the evidence for yourself by visiting museums, laboratories, and active digs. Get a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology or paleontolgy and expose the conspiracy from the inside!