Defender's Guide to Science and Creationism

Assertion: Creationist objections to science should be taught in school to help students develop critical thinking skills.

Analysis

(i) This creationist argument is an attempt at misdirection. If creationists were concerned about having critical thinking skills taught in schools, they would lobby for the inclusion of logic as a required public school subject; instead, they try to place the label of "critical thinking" upon a pseudoscience and force it into the science classroom by any means possible. The net result of such efforts is to harm critical thinking, not to advance it.

(ii) Everyone agrees that it is important for educators to help students to develop critical thinking skills. However, it is also important for educators to teach students the best current state of knowledge. If high school graduates do not know what Newton's laws are because they have spent so much time "honing their critical thinking skills" by learning about astrology, alchemy, parapsychology, and creationism, then the education system has failed. Fortunately, as Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne (2005) point out, the dual goal of teaching students both critical thinking and the best current state of knowledge can be accomplished, even in the science classroom, without asking baffled K-12 students to try to make up their own minds between mainstream science and pseudoscience. Dawkins and Coyne explain that there is more than enough legitimate controversy within science to exercise students' critical thinking skills without forcing educators to waste time on the claims of alchemists and creationists, about which there is no scientific controversy at all. In biology, for instance, students who are taught about debates over the units of selection or the informativeness of evolutionary psychology will have their critical thinking skills exercised while learning about real scientific debates; this is far better than forcing students an educators to waste valuable instruction time on the allegations of anyone who has a religious axe to grind against modern science.

References

Dawkins R and Coyne J. 2005. One side can be wrong. The Guardian, 1 September 2005.

Defender's Guide to Science and Creationism
Copyright © 1997, 2012, Mark I. Vuletic. All rights reserved.