By the Numbers

"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one ever was truly harmed. Harmed is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance."

Creationism seems to be everywhere these days. It's scares me when people want to blindly follow anything, especially when they are willing to set logic, reason and evidence aside to do it.

In the spirit of 'knowledge is power', I recently attended a talk on creationism by Ronald Numbers, who is a historian of science and an authority on the creationism movement. It was an enormously informative talk about the history of the creationism movement, and Numbers is an engaging speaker, but the key question of 'Why do so many people believe this?' was largely unanswered. (At least it was largely unanswered by the time I had to leave during the Q&A. Parking meter.)

The arguments against creationism have been well-chronicled elsewhere, and the fight to keep creation 'science' out of the classroom has many strong and able proponents. So why am I talking about it? Because I think that there is a larger problem here that also needs to be addressed. Numbers made a comment after his talk that some teachers of evolution may be using an appeal to authority, rather than a discriminating look at the evidence, as their argument for evolution. I don't know how true that statement is, and it is not my intention to question any teacher's merits, but his comment reminded me though of one of my standard rants about needed education reform. We don't do enough to teach critical reasoning skills. I base this statement on the several years I spent teaching critical reasoning skills and logical analysis to college graduates/near-graduates, as well as classroom teaching of undergraduates.

These are the skills that should be the foundation of a higher education, and yet it's possible to matriculate with an undergraduate degree without a single credit of rhetoric or logic classes. If these skills were a prerequisite for attending an institution of higher learning, that might be one thing. (They're not.) If we could have the reasonable expectation that a student would automatically acquire these skills as a by-product of the process of his/her higher education, then perhaps this wouldn't be an issue.

Why are we surprised that so many educated people hold to views (such as a belief in creationism) that critical reasoning should call into question? Is it any more of a surprise that uneducated people are preyed upon with arguments that are so ludicrous that many in academia are hard-pressed to recognize the level of the problem that these arguments represent? Perhaps because the people thinking about these issues are often the least likely to fall prey to them, it can become difficult to imagine how any person can accept such an argument.

But I digress. How important is critical thinking, and how do students emerge from their education ill-equipped to evaluate the world around them? I'll give you this story to think about... As a new instructor in a department and university that shall rename unnamed, it fell to me to teach the unpopular class 'Experimental Research Methods'. I love the logical analysis involved in designing and evaluating experiments, so this was no hardship for me. But I took an enormous amount of flack for refusing to use multiple-choice tests in this class. Apparently multiple-choice tests were the standard M.O. for this class. As nobody really wanted to teach the class and nobody really wanted to take it, multiple-choice tests were probably an easy way out for everyone. I required that the students be able to articulate their reasoning in their own words. Not a popular choice... (sigh)

I personally think we should do more to teach critical thinking skills in high school, if not before. I think that teaching a child or young adult to actively engage the world with his/her mind is one of the most important aspects of education. It is an important component of raising our overall societal level of awareness, and it's becoming an increasingly more necessary skill as our world becomes increasingly more complex. 'Yes, sir' responses to authority are not an acceptable substitute for knowing when and how to ask 'Why?'.

But don't take my word for it. ;)