"...to be a philosophic belief?"
There are many people who hold beliefs that run contrary to the evidence on a variety of subjects from all educational backgrounds.
"...because this self selected group trends towards higher SAT scores seems to miss the point."
If it does, it's a point that hasn't been made yet. This entire post is about test scores, which is the way education is measured. If you're contending that public schools produce better reasoning than religious schools, then please provide that data.
"but we shouldn't have tax paid educators and curriculums participate in the cognitive crippling of children if our goal is to have a functional and productive society."
This part left me unclear, as this is also the same sort of complaint many parents are having about some of the ideologies being taught (or how they're being taught) in public schools, which are publicly funded. Most states do not publicly fund religious/private schools.
"Do you think that it is wise to spend time and money formally training "high potential" people to have such deeply systemic errors in reasoning to the point that they flat reject peer reviewed, high confidence data and methods as a positive?"
So how did your example achieve a PhD if he contradicted the peer reviewed evidence? I assume the review board and degree was from a secular school and you have implied the secular school process doesn't permit these sorts of reasoning flaws. Perhaps their reasoning on most subjects is solids and they have a few blind spots. This is generally true of most people, including those from public schools. Also, let it be known that many successful scientists have challenged existing positions successfully to discover new things. Science encourages challenging existing positions as part of the process to make new discoveries. This is one of the reasons there are so few "laws" in science and so many "theories".
"We aren't talking about religious beliefs as most christians support radiometric dating, we are talking about educational materials for the young that reject following the data in pragmatic, well documented, well confirmed, high utility fields and rejects them out of pocket with untestable unobservable and sometimes demonstrably false alternatives."
Ok... so what is your point? The vast majority of religious schools support radio cabon dating just as you admit that most religions do. I'm pretty confident that my comment chain has been using qualifiers to indicate that there may be outliers, but that in general religious schools do not have lower academic standards as indicated by the test score data. There may be outliers in any of the various school types, but the data is pretty clear that the current measures of academic success are test scores and post-secondary education, for which religious school score at least as well on. This refutes the original comment that religious schools have academically lower standards. Unless someone has actual data and not just anecdotal that says otherwise.