So my wife was talking with some friends of her's at work. One of them is a devout liberal, and the other behaves as if he is politically agnostic (but leans liberal). As you can imagine, being soundly brainwashed by our illustrious public school system, these guys both believe firmly in evolution. However, I would suggest that they should be open minded, as their youth and liberal tendencies dictate. Not surprisingly (to me anyway), they both said evolution is *fact*. You heard that right. The *theory* of evolution is *fact* now. Being the kind and caring person that she is, my wife wanted to educate them. She offered to lend them a CD discussing alternatives to evolution. The speaker on the CD presents his arguments using scientific reasoning and sound logic, with no political slant, and no references to God. The content is strictly factually-based, and presented in a very organized and straight-forward way. Both of these guys are programmers, so you might assume that they would be interested in learning about things from a logical, reasoned standpoint. Well, you would be wrong. The liberal bias in their world would not allow them to see beyond their own belief system. They literally refused to listen to the CD because, well... evolutions is fact, of course.
This whole scenario leads me to more of a big picture question: What are they afraid of? Are they afraid that their opinion of my wife might be swayed? Are they afraid of what other people might think if they know they're listening to this CD? Or maybe, just maybe, are they afraid that they might actually be convinced? I suppose I can understand why something like this might cause someone discomfort. Imagine that you have believed something as fact for years and years, and then someone or something comes along and genuinely causes you to question that view. To me, this begs another, even bigger picture question: Why are people so afraid to admit they're wrong? Are we really that arrogant? Well yeah, we are. As a species humanity is insanely arrogant.
So what? (you might say). A little arrogance is good now and again. Well, I think the families of the people who died on the Titanic might say otherwise. In fact, I would suggest that most of the catastrophic, man-made events in history are based on plain and simple arrogance - wars, genocide, economic collapse - all caused by arrogance.
Perhaps this is bit more philosophical than some people are comfortable with, and I don't have all of the solutions, but I am hoping to make the world a little bit better place if people are willing to suspend their stubborn nature... and listen.