And yet, along with Skinner and many others, our education system has been heavily influenced by these atheistic ideas. As Mynym pointed out, at the end of his comment, our schools have become battle zones, where parents can’t be assured that their children will return home safely or, if they do, educated. Our education system, as well as our society, is despotically run by material science, the government and corporate agendas (who, by the way, are in the sack with each other), which have little to do with learning, values, ethics or morality.

Indeed! John Dewey was a psychologist who ended up being very influential in the American educational system. Unfortunately my field bears a lot of the responsibility for both advancements and ills with the modern educational system. Based on my experience with patients, the special educational system, eventually largely developed out of the work of Dewey, and other psychologists, has show much success. However, the general educational principles advanced by psychologists have variously resulted in both negative and positive effects on our culture and the learning of children.

Dewey purported,

“while honoring the important role that religious institutions and practices played in human life, rejected belief in any static ideal, such as a theistic God. Dewey felt that only scientific method could reliably further human good.” (1)

And as DB continues,

Material science wants students who have been been fully indoctrinated into a belief system which denies anything greater than man and, of course, science: the scientist cries, “Where will the tax supported funding come from if someone blows the whistle on our weak theories and science adventures?”

Research on the ‘focus of research’ (meta-research?), has basically shown that it follows the funding. Not only that, but the research outcomes tend to support the viewpoints of the funding source. This oftentimes, has an unconscious basis in human psychology, and needs to be considered in the “critical thinking,” that the commenter Carl Sachs has noted as very important. This pertains to biology, evolution, psychology, and medicine. Although I am not against “basic science,” the ‘where the rubber hits the road’ aspect of research (applied science), ultimately bears more importance in my mind. I pay taxes, and I think I do demand my tax dollars produce some potential real world benefits to human beings as DB has stated in a different way before. So, I continue to be interested, in a critical sense, in the applied value that naturalistic evolution has shown to society. In other words, how have folks living their lives on a day-to-day basis benefited from the highly speculative, and largely less than correlation research, on naturalistic evolution?