Re: Do belief systems evolve?

MarkA wrote:
> I got to thinking about "home schooling" today.  It's no secret that a
> sizable number of home schooling parents do so because they have
> strong religious beliefs, and wish to avoid having their children
> exposed to a competing belief system.  The obvious example of that is
> Creationism vs Evolution.

I'd be really surprised if this limited example is a serious driver in
homeschooling. We homeschool for cultural reasons - I'm really keen on
keeping my children from being exposed to sexual harassment, bullying and
counter-educational values (cheating, multiple-choice testing, factoid
worship, pointless competition, adulation of sports) - and I don't see why
someone with strong religious beliefs shouldn't be allowed to homeschool for
their personal reasons. It's not a question of a "competing belief system"
at all - it's a matter of avoiding exposure to a belief system we find
objectionable.

> It occurred to me that, as a rationalist, my approach to such
> conflict is to examine both belief systems as completely as possible,
> and let the stronger one prevail.  Hiding from a belief system that
> may be stronger than your own makes as much sense as ignoring a
> breast lump, pretending that it isn't there, instead of dealing with
> it head-on.  That approach is similar to natural selection, in that
> no belief system is treated with any special reverence.  They
> compete, and the "fittest" survive.

Actually, our ability to "examine both belief systems as completely as
possible" is really extremely limited. For example, very few of us are in a
position to duplicate the work of any one specialist claiming to have
refuted examples quoted as favouring the Intelligent Design "theory", which
means that nearly all of us are taking their claims on faith. Also, you're
using the term "stronger" without defining how you measure this.

> One difference from natural selection is that the definition of
> "fittest" is more subjective.  In the natural world, fitness means
> having traits which increase your chances of survival long enough to
> reproduce.  When it comes to belief systems, the definition is not
> quite so clear cut.

Here, on the other hand, you're guilty of positively British understatement.

>  Part of the conflict between Creationists and
> Evolutionists is that they are using different criterea for fitness.
> Scientists want to understand the Universe as it is, regardless of
> any belief in any dieties.  To them, a belief system is "fit" if it
> accurately predicts the behavior of a natural system.  Creationists,
> OTOH, are convinced that the bible is true, and so a belief system is
> "fit" only if it agrees with scripture.

Your use of "Creationist" is badly lacking in nuance. In any case, none of
this has anything to do with homeschooling, or even Christian homeschooling.
If you want to argue about that, the place to do it is on talk.origins.