In conjunction with Richard Dawkins new book hitting the Times best seller list here is PZ Myers letting rip on the subject of creationists, scathing but absolutely true.
There are no more excuses. None.
The defining characteristic of all arguments with creationists is how damned ignorant they are. I'm sure many scientists have been stupefied into stunned silence when they first encounter these people; these advocates of creationism are typically loud and certain and have invested much time and effort into apologetics, but when you sit down and try to have a serious discussion with them, you quickly discover that their knowledge of basic biology is nonexistent. It's worse than that. We're used to freshmen entering our classes who don't know much about the basics, and we can deal with that; these, though, are people with negative knowledge, whose brains are so packed with raging falsehoods that we have to struggle to overcome an unfamiliar hurdle.
For example, last year I got into a radio debate with a Discovery Institute creationist, Geoffrey Simmons. He had written a whole book for creationists arguing that there are no transitional fossils…yet he had never heard of any of the major fossil discoveries in the whale series, and seemed to have gleaned all of his understanding from a garbled misreading of a short Scientific American article.
It's infuriating. You want to argue against evolution? Then you'd better have some elementary understanding of what evolution actually says. We've got the same phenomenon going on right now in one of the comment threads, where a particularly obtuse creationist, Sean Pitman, is raving about the inadequacy of natural selection. I wouldn't mind, except that he's a freaking idiot. This goes on day after day — creationists are mired in a pit of ignorance so deep and so black that it takes incredible patience to lead people out of it (and also, some rhetorical boot-stomping against the fools who are trying to drag others even deeper into the darkness).
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2 comments:
You simply cannot argue with people of faith. They are in a frame of mind which does not accept evidence. They are, to all intents and purposes irrational on this one subject, yet may be entirely rational in other areas. They inhabit a different reality when it comes to the Bible.
Bill, I agree, "faith" can be a very dangerous thing; I wonder how many lives have been closed to the beauty and wonder of reality by those three simple words, "God did it".
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