Understanding & Attitudes (ASA Science Ed)

Accurate Understanding and Respectful Attitudes
Students in my high school learned valuable lessons about understanding and attitudes from one of our favorite teachers, who sometimes held debates in his civics class. On Monday he convinced us that "his side of the issue" was correct, but on Tuesday he made the other side look just as good. After awhile we learned that, in order to get accurate understanding, we should get the best information and arguments that all sides of an issue can claim as support. After we did this and we understood more accurately and thoroughly, we usually recognized that even when we have valid reasons for preferring one position, people on other sides of an issue may also have good reasons, both intellectual and ethical, for believing as they do, so we learned respectful attitudes.
But respect does not require agreement. You can respect someone and their views, yet criticize their views, which you have evaluated based on evidence, logic, and values. The intention of our teacher, and the conclusion of his students, was not a postmodern relativism. The goal was a rational exploration and evaluation of ideas in a search for truth.

In this website, we want to encourage accurate understanding and respectful attitudes by avoiding "Monday without Tuesday" indoctrination, by accurately and respectfully describing the main views on each topic. Parts of the website, and even the overall website, may not be perceived by everyone as being NEUTRAL, due to both perception (because many people prefer a treatment that is biased in favor of their own views, and they consider a treatment to be "neutral" only if it is biased in this way) and reality (because it is impossible to say anything substantial in a way that is totally neutral). But we will try to be FAIR by treating different perspectives with respect, and by providing an opportunity for representatives of each perspective to clearly express their own views and criticize other views.
Even though we won't have total agreement about everything by everyone, we can make the process of agreeing (about many things) and disagreeing (about a few things) more enjoyable and productive. We want to use productive communication — in an effort to achieve understanding and mutual respect — in our search for truth.
A search for truth? Yes. This is not a postmodern website. We are dedicated to the rationality of logic and faith, and the compatibility of logic and faith.