When my company was owned by Pratt & Whitney/United Technologies, we were obliged to implement an ‘operating’ system of process improvement procedures called ACE, “Achieving Competitive Excellence”.
From my browsing of favorite websites, I’ve gathered there is another ‘ACE’, Accelerated Christian Education, which is a school curriculum based in Tennessee designed to indoctrinate (it can’t be ‘educate’) children into a Christian worldview.
This post, What My Christian School Taught Me About Atheism, is pretty scary. Even English grammar lessons are taught via religious statements designed to constantly reinforce biblical fortitude. The post describes how ACE’s philosophy of education is based on four presuppositions, where are paraphrased thusly:
- Natural laws exist. These must have a cause. That cause can only be God. Therefore, God exists. (The premises are asserted without evidence.)
- The Bible contains no errors or contradictions, and many accurate prophecies. This is a miracle. The only explanation is that it is the Word of God.
- Evolution is impossible (they use ‘evolution’ as a catch-all referring to cosmology, biology, ‘progress’, and almost anything else they dislike). Therefore, God did it.
- See (3).
As the article notes,
If teachers are accepting these fallacious arguments, presumably they believe this is valid reasoning. If this is what they are modeling for their students, I worry about the impact on students’ ability to think rationally in other areas, too.
My interest in this isn’t to harp about religion, exactly, but to wonder, again, about hypocrisy. These four arguments are so obviously lame, having been defeated by reason and evidence for centuries, that you can’t help but wonder why there are still being deployed. What are the possible reasons? That ACE educators don’t *understand* the reasons that undermine these arguments? I.e., they are dumb? Or that they deploy them hypocritically to children under the age of reason, because it’s more important to inculcate children into a tradition of faith, no matter how irrational? (This is actually a very serious question about the potential for humanity to grow out of its evolutionary biased past of tribalism and superstition.)
Isn’t there a commandment about not bearing false witness? Isn’t propagating invalidated arguments false witness, i.e., lying?
