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Pharyngula: How to respond to requests to debate creationists
A professor at the University of Vermont, Nicholas Gotelli, got an invitation to debate one of the clowns at the Discovery Institute. Here's what they wrote.
'Creationists declare war over the brain' by New Scientist - RichardDawkins.net
Clearly, while there is a genuine attempt to appropriate neuroscience, it will not influence US laws or education in the way that anti-evolution campaigns can because neuroscience is not taught as part of the core curriculum in state-funded schools. But as Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, emphasises: "This is real and dangerous and coming our way."
He and others worry because scientists have yet to crack the great mystery of how consciousness could emerge from firing neurons. "Progress in science is slow on many fronts," says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. "We don't yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn't mean cancer has spiritual causes."
And for Patricia Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, "it is an argument from ignorance. The fact something isn't currently explained doesn't mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics."
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"Progress in science is slow on many fronts," says John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley. "We don't yet have a cure for cancer, but that doesn't mean cancer has spiritual causes."
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The fact something isn't currently explained doesn't mean it will never be explained or that we need to completely change not only our neuroscience but our physics.
Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution
A large part of the reason why Creationist arguments against evolution can sound so persuasive is because they don't address evolution, but rather argue against a set of misunderstandings that people are right to consider ludicrous.
Confessions of a Quackbuster: The atheist: Interview with Richard Dawkins
...the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it... But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas... religious customs, will also be passed down the generations.
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