No, no. I'm not saying creationists belive in spoon bending. Off topic, sorry. I just think a class in critical thinking would be valuable to students. Creationists and evolutionists alike say critical thinking is missing in high school students. Sending students out to do experiments on spoon-bending, ESP and all that crap, learning about double-blind experiments, analyzing the results, looking for statistical correlations, talking about correlation vs. causation... would be valuable, to both sides, and especially to students.
That would be the whole math department. You might want to give bio students a tour of the building. Or at least directions on how to get there.
"I just think a class in critical thinking would be valuable..". ~ crail
Here ya go.
"....Darwin's dangerous idea is really two ideas put together: philosophical naturalism together with the claim that our cognitive faculties have originated by way of natural selection working on some form of genetic variation. According to this idea, then, the purpose or function of those faculties (if they have one) is to enable or promote survival, or survival and reproduction, more exactly, the maximization of fitness (the probability of survival and reproduction).
Furthermore, the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable (i.e., furnish us with a preponderance of true beliefs) on Darwin's dangerous idea is either low or inscrutable (i.e., impossible to estimate). But either gives the devotee of evolutionary naturalism a defeater for the proposition that his cognitive faculties are reliable, a reason for doubting, giving up, rejecting that natural belief. If so, then it also gives him a reason for doubting any beliefs produced by those faculties. This includes, of course, the beliefs involved in science itself.
Evolutionary naturalism, therefore, provides one who accepts it with a defeater for scientific beliefs, a reason for doubting that science does in fact get us to the truth, or close to the truth. [ 14 ] Darwin himself may perhaps have glimpsed this sinister presence coiled like a worm in the very heart of evolutionary naturalism: "With me," says Darwin,
'the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?' [ 15 ]
Modern science was conceived, and born, and flourished in the matrix of Christian theism. Only liberal doses of self-deception and double-think, I believe, will permit it to flourish in the context of Darwinian naturalism."
Darwin, Mind and Meaning --Alvin Plantinga May, 1996 Full commentary and bibliography here: http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/library/plantinga/dennett.html