When I hear about the conflict of ‘world views’, it seems the extremes are those with a deep-seated emotional need-to-believe, and those with an intellectual desire to understand. The only way to improve understanding is to seek out the flaws in your current perspective and correct them. So the latter group wants to know if and where they’re wrong and why, but the former group really doesn’t. They want to believe what they want to believe, and they get mad at me for dispelling the fantasy. They say I’m ‘hurting’ people who want to keep believing things that can’t really be true.

If I suspect I’ve gotten something wrong, I’ll investigate to find out. But if I offer to prove evolution to some creationist’s satisfaction, that challenge is refused, and defenses go up so they can’t be reasoned with. I’ll ask what evidence they’d look for to answer a given question, but I’m told they wouldn’t look, because the evidence doesn’t matter. They already have a answer they’re happy with, and they won’t doubt it.

When they try to make me believe, they talk about what science got wrong or can’t explain, as if I could trust faith more than reason. Even in the rare instance that I can’t correct them on a given point, it doesn’t matter that science can’t yet explain the first cause, for example: because that can’t change what science has already explained, and that we can prove is factually correct. No matter how life began, we can still prove that life has certainly evolved since then, that we’re still apes, and the Bible is still wrong on every testable claim that it makes. These perspectives have very different interests and can only talk past each other, which is why this debate is still going on. —Aron Ra