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Sean Faircloth:
Attack of the Theocrats!
I don't think that explanation is very good.
It is logical and inituitive to believe that the moon and the sun circles earth for the straightforward reason that that is what they appear to be doing if you observe them. They both rise in the east, then travel across the sky to set in the west.
There's no similar inituitive reason to believe that "God created humans in our present form sometime in the last 10000 years".
Let's take it apart, starting with the timeframe. What is "inituitive" about "the last 10000" as opposed to "the last 1000" or "the last million" ? I would argue nothing whatsoever, thus the -only- reason to believe in precisely this timeframe, is religious indoctrination.
If anything, I'd say intuition tells you that the parent of a human has always been a human, thus we've been more or less like we are forever. That's even correct, with the caveat that the parent is only generally nearly the same as the child, thus over enough generations significant differences accumulate. But that's a detail in comparison.
Furthermore, belief in creationism varies wildly by country. Why do 80 - 90% of scandinavians agree that "Human beings evolved from earlier animals by natural selection" while only 15% of Americans believe this, if the reason is "intuition".
Are americans having genetically different "intuition" or is the much simpler explanation that they believe differently because they have been taught differently ? I would say it's pretty obvious that the latter is the case.
Permalink Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:00:33 UTC | #946311