Hi Bill. I'd agree with you up to a point, but there's a lot of good scholarship developed out of that sort of upbringing. Bart Ehrman tells in "Whose Word is it?" how his initial acceptance of a literalist interpretation led him to a completely new and much wider understanding of the sources and method of transmission of the texts. In David Kotz's "Words on Fire: the unfinished Story of Yiddish", he makes the case that cycles of Orthodoxy within the Jewish community have created the circumstances that led to Jews being able to contribute to a greater degree to the various non-religious disciplines in succeeding generations. A similar case has been made for the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment being fueled by the Puritanism of the 17th.

Having said that, I've never come across an argument for Creationism which didn't make the case for the accepted theories of evolution etc, then claim that they'd proved creationism with a quite 'elegant' non-sequitur.