Even in the 21st century, creationism in the form of intelligent design seems to be active and alive. Its supporters seem to be very passionate about their position and refuse to give up, even though there is no scientific evidence to defend the likelihood of an intelligent agent. For example, to accept “intelligent design”, one must question, “who is this intelligent agent, anyway? What is the importance about it? Can learning about it be beneficial to mankind? How can it be useful? How can one test intelligent agents in the laboratory? How can one observe intelligent agents in nature? What are all the known characteristics of intelligent design, and why do some people believe that nature is created by a so-called intelligent agent?” I have checked out Of Pandas and People at my local library for recreational reading (and to understand why and how this book supports intelligent design), and I have found out that the book compares intelligent design to markings on the sand, “John loves Mary.” It describes that the forces of nature cannot arrange themselves in such a way so some intelligent agent must be the answer, but the question is, WHAT IN THE WORLD IS AN INTELLIGENT AGENT? In my opinion, I am beginning to think that the intelligent design movement and its proponents of the 21st century are similar to the so-called vitalists of the 18th and 19th centuries, both of which are unchangeable doctrines that beg the question by making up some random name to describe a phenomenon. I don’t know about you, but I am getting the impression that the so-called intelligent agent who writes “John loves Mary” is actually a human being. An average human being would be fairly intelligent, I presume, and it can write “John loves Mary”. No guesswork there on who the intelligent agent may be. A better example would be holding a bucket of sand, and removing the sand from the bucket, grain by grain. At one point, one would realize that the bucket’s sand is slowly disappearing by decreasing quantity. As time goes by, the entire bucket would be free of sand. Who is the “intelligent agent”? A human being. In other words, a human being, acting as an intelligent agent, can slowly change form of a species. This is called “artificial selection”, and it is used in the domestication and husbandry of plants and animals. If artificial selection is truly the ultimate goal of creationists, then creationists need to look no further! Biology textbooks already discuss “artificial selection”.
Their goal might be to never face challenges to their irrational beliefs. Getting proved wrong all the time makes them feel stupid for some reason.
To force mandatory Christian evangelism in public schools.
They’ve invested a tremendous amount in the belief system that says the Bible is inerrant, the story of Adam and Eve is true, etc. If something comes along that suggests that isn’t true, then everything else that we believe in also might not be true, and that simply cannot be accepted. The science must be false, or else our ancient way of life is all wrong.
The same applies for being anti-gay.
If their goal really is never to face challenges to their irrational beliefs because these challenges make them feel stupid for some reason, then the best way, I should think, is to change or question why they are adhering to such strong beliefs in the first place. Re-examination of their own logical fallacies may be the key to help them realize that creationism in the form of intelligent design is not a substitute for evolutionary theory rather than insisting that it is.
If their goal really is to force mandatory Christian evangelism in public schools, then what is the point? Converting everybody to Christianity? Even if everyone is converted to Christianity, which denomination of Christianity, and what benefit do people get from being Christians?
You don’t know much about Christian fundamentalism do you? They are not going to change their beliefs. They expect you to change yours.
I just figured it was mostly a way of showing their faith.
Ie if it doesnt make sense, it must be that they got something wrong, because god is infallible and wouldnt fib.
Which is why ‘thinking rationally’ as an argument tends to run into problems.
Otara
Exactly.
People hold on to a literal interpretation of the Bible out of fear. They are afraid to question anything. Because if you doubt one thing, another one will follow. Then the whole jenga puzzle will come tumbling down and you’re left with nothing.
If there was no Adam and Eve, then that means there was no fall of man from the Garden of Eden, which means that humans weren’t destined to a life of hell, which would render Jesus coming down as the redeemer totally unnecessary. For fundamentalist Christians, something as simple as Adam biting into the apple directly relates to Jesus being nailed on the cross. The Bible is not just a bunch of stories. They are a historical record. Like all historical events, one flows from the other. Jesus did not just pop into the world for no reason.
Protestants do this more than Catholics because the former does not trust interpretation to a hierarchy of superiors. They believe the individual has the power to obtain the truth of the Word just as well as any pointy-hat-wearing dude at the Vatican. This is all well and good, but what sometimes happens is people become afraid of their own intelligence. So they do try not to interpret or view the Bible too abstractly, because they don’t want to do it “wrong.”
It’s like reading William Faulkner on your own. If you don’t have a learned authority to guide you, you will tend to read everything literally and superficially. You may suspect there’s deeper meaning embedded–with symbolism and foreshadowing and all that literary jazz. But if you free yourself to look for those things on your own, how do you know if you’re not misinterpreting Faulkner’s message? If you listen to someone who’s just a regular guy like you, how do you know he’s not misinterpreting the message either? Isn’t it better just to stay on the surface and not question stuff you can’t know the answer to? If you’re wrong, then so be it. But it’s better to be like a child and believe everything you’re told than to question stuff all willy-nilly and risk believing the wrong thing.
That is the fundamentalist thought process. I think it’s a childish way of thinking about something that you claim to take seriously, but it is completely understandable from a psychological point-of-view.
Although the subject of this discussion is more about creationists and proponents of intelligent design and a possible goal that they may have in mind, I see where you are getting at. You associate creationism with Christian fundamentalism, and rightfully so, it seems that many supporters of creationism are Christian fundamentalists, conservative Christians, or members of the Christian Right. However, the reason why I mentioned “change” in the previous post was that I saw them as human beings, and experience tells me that human beings do change when they see something incorrect or inaccurate about themselves. So, I assumed that certain individuals who irrationally reject the theory of evolution and looked forward to accepting some other explanation of life’s complexity would see that their position just would not correlate with evidence and countless observations; therefore, they would change their opinion and try to reconcile the Christian faith with evolution. 
Observation is not an opinion. Interpretation is. Natural selection can be directly observed in an introductory biology course in high school or university by locating colorful dots on a multi-colored, floral blanket. Dots that blend in with their surroundings are less picked than dots that do not blend in with their surroundings. Now, a color-blind person may come in and see no difference between red and green… well, in that case, that person is under selective pressures to choose any dot blindly and not be so selective based on color. 
However, I see what you mean. I am beginning to think that creationists view science as nothing about widely supported opinions rather than observations and hypotheses.
Their goal is to spread their personal brand of The Truth™ just like anyone else who goes and confronts other people with their beliefs (argumentative atheists, evolution proponents, etc). That’s not to say this is all subjective and their truth is The Truth™ from a certain point of view. They’re wrong, I just don’t think there’s some deep ulterior motive, they just want the people around them to be well informed and not be ignorant (by their standards).
… and where do they get the truth? :dubious:
Ask them. To me, it’s rather immaterial to the question you asked in the OP. The point is that they truly believe they’re right and that the people who propose alternate beliefs (i.e. Evolution) are wrong and misinformed. We just don’t know the evidence, we probably mistook some easily debunked gobbeldygook as fact, so they need to correct us.
It’s the same motivation for teaching people about anything else, they just happen to be the people who are wrong.
It does? I’d like to live where you do.
But in general, no. Cognitive dissonance means they have to find a way, any way, of convincing themselves that the evidence against their position is invalid and that for it is incontrovertible. As has been said often here, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
When someone has such an idée fixe it can only be changed by them being talked out of it by someone they already trust, that is by someone who shares much of their world view already (obviously apart from the issue in question). This is why places like Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are having success “treating” convicted jihadists by exposing them to moderate imams who can explain the error of their ways in terms they can understand and respect.
I think one needs to be careful about using the word “wrong” with religious fundamentalists. “Wrong” can have a moral connotation, so one can interpret the word as if they are immoral criminals. Also, one’s sense of morality may not be the same as, say, another’s sense of morality. One of the claims supporting intelligent design is that the theory of evolution promotes genocide, especially in the Holocaust. This is a moral statement. Because creationists are using morality against evolutionary theory, using the term “wrong” may lead them to think that the evolutionary theory is all about morality and nothing about empirical evidence. Perhaps, “inaccurate” or “misleading” or “unsupported by the scientific community” would be better terms to define the claims of those creationists.
No it wouldn’t. Aren’t you getting the idea that these are irrational people? They insist their claims are not inaccurate, or misleading, because they correspond to to the biblical creation story. And they will tell you that the scientific community are the pawns of satan.
It’s a proxy battle that is part of a wider war over cultural hegemony.
Fundamentalists could just as easily have chosen to accept that evolution is howgoddidit. The bible says pretty much nothing about how their god made life and any minor problems (like time periods bible vs evolution) could have been retconned by treating the bible as allegorical in relevant respects. They do this all the time about other things in the bible. They could have accepted evolution and left their beliefs untouched.
Instead they chose to (and ever more fiercely continue to) take a stand on evolution because they see it as the vanguard of a whole way of thinking - empiricism - that is anathema to a faith/religious authority based culture.
They are in essence the extensions of the religion that has infected them; their minds have been subverted into vectors for spreading that particular religion. They work to push their dogma for the same reason someone with an organic disease coughs & sneezes; to spread the disease that has infected them. As believers, that is their only function; to protect and spread the religion that has subsumed them into itself.
They are - or at least, they are at best amoral on anything touching their religion. They refuse to (or can’t) do anything but mindlessly follow dogma, and you can’t be moral if you are just mindlessly following a set of rules. And it’s a rather vile collection of dogma created by long-dead barbarians, so yes their actions tend to be immoral in effect if not always in intent.
None. They aren’t being converted for their benefit; they are being converted for Christianity’s benefit. It needs human minds as hosts. You might as well ask what benefit people get from contracting AIDS.
Not going to hell, obviously. And the converters also get to not go to hell because they did what they were supposed to.
As for which denomination: ideally the one the person is a participant in, but the various denominations have different opinions on which other ones are also okay. And individuals vary in their opinion even more.
This is Christianity 101. You actually sound like someone who has completely not learned anything about the religion. You remind me of this girl from India who was in my sister’s graduating class. Did you grow up in the United States?
No, they couldn’t gloss over it like other things, because it’s considered vital to the faith. Putting Adam and Eve into question very much makes it possible that Jesus didn’t need to die for all of us. Adam and Eve’s sin are attested multiple times in the New Testament.
By comparison, sexism was not so ingrained, and so is largely not a part of fundamentalist thought anymore. (Racism was even more loosely based). I predict that homosexuality will eventually be glossed over, too, for the same reason. It’ll just take longer due to being more explicit than the former stuff.
Also, don’t forget that Old Testament stuff that is overlooked is done so because of the supercession of the New Testament. Not everything from the Old Covenant was incorporated into the New Covenant.
Hence the main theme of glossing over Scripture: that command only applied to a certain audience. There is no such argument for a Creation story.
The closest would be in how Revelation is treated, but it very clearly uses the language of prophecy, likewise used by the Old Testament prophets. The Creation story is unique in the way it is told, and thus there is no precedent of making it figurative.
It may appear to outsiders that anything can be discounted as easily as anything else, but, from the inside, it’s pretty obvious what can and cannot be overlooked.
From the inside it may well appear immutable but the long outside view says that none of it is as immutable as the more sheepish insiders realise or pretend. Probably not so much the leaders, who know they can shape the message as it suits, within quite broad bounds.
I don’t think Adam and Eve have to be incompatible with evolution. Plenty of Xtian religions don’t think so.