The Selective Power of Creation "Science"

Here's an interesting post someone made in the FRDB forum:

It is a near-certainty that any intelligent Christian who seriously studies both secular science and so-called "creation science" will be incapable of remaining a fundamentalist. In fact, they may well end up agnostic or even atheist.

I know. It happened to me.

It is the absurd ignorance coupled with the arrogant self-assurance of Creationists and ID proponents which caused me to begin doubting everything that my fellow Christians said. Since they were so obviously both ignorant and closed-minded about the Theory of Evolution, I began to wonder about the claims they made about the historicity and provenance of the Bible as well. And the more I studied, the more I discovered that I was being lied to.

Granted, most of the time those doing the lying were not aware that the bullshit they were parroting was bullshit. They were simply repeating, with utmost sincerity, the bullshit that had been told them by people they knew and trusted. And many of those people were, in turn, doing the same.

I'm pretty sure that at least some of the people in the "creation science" movement are fully aware that they are peddling a big, stinking Crock 'O' Shit with some sciencey words sprinkled on top for effect, but most seem to be merely gullible dupes who actually believe this crap. And it's no coincidence that this nonsense is most eagerly swallowed in the USA, where science education is the poorest in the developed world. An ignorant populace is the best place to sell snake oil.

So what's this selective power that Creation Science" has? It has the unique ability to cull the intellectually curious from the ranks of Fundamentalist Christians, leaving behind a population which, in the absence of anyone to ask embarrassing questions, tends to reinforce ignorance and reward gullibility.

I've had the same experience that this man has had. Growing I had a textbook that was filled with creationist propaganda (I attended a private Christian school).

I think that, fortunately, the ignorance is gradually coming to an end. As more people go to college and get a good science education, we'll see a small slice removed from the creationist population. More slices will be removed when people come across free educational material on the web. For example, the Talk Origins archive, or the things such as Kenneth Miller's debate with creationist Henry Morris in which Miller systematically exposes the devastating flaws in creationist reasoning and offers a strong case for evolution and an old earth. Even worse damage to creationism will occur when people come across books like Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters in which Paleontologist Don Prothero shows exactly why creationist "explanations" of the Grand Canyon ("It was Noah's Flood!") are baloney and torpedoes the old canard that there are no transitional fossils with a Noachian flood of examples. The books The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution and The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and Why Evolution Is True in addition to the online documents 29 Evidences for Macroevolution and Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective completely annhilate the doubts that any reasonable person might have. And that's what did it for me. And it will be continued as education and information grow, and at some point we will reach a "critical mass" at which creationism will be an extinct or fringe idea.