The Questioning Librarian

There is a discussion going on right now in the science community about whether or not we should debate creationists: it is a debate within a debate, if you will. There are good arguments on both sides, but I have to think that we should debate creationists, and we should do it as often as we can stand it. Why do I think this? Last week, I saw that Michael Shermer posted a link to a story of a woman who argued this very point. As a former creationist, it was going to debates between Shermer and Kent Hovind that began to convince her of the legitimacy of evolution and of science. I too was once a creationist. Without ever having read anything about it, without it ever having been mentioned in class (I never heard a word about evolution in high school), I was ready to pounce at the merest mention of the topic as false and godless, two of the favorite creationist talking-points. I look back at this self in amazement, at how ignorant and proud of that ignorance I was, how I failed to ...

Creationists love to call evolutionary theory a "fairy tale" almost as much as they love demonizing it as an atheist plot dreamed up by Darwin to deny God. Encapsulated in that little insult is all the scorn and derision that they can muster; evolution is false, evolution is a quaint little "just-so" story that doesn't make any sense at all and certainly doesn't have any support except that thought up by, in the creationist worldview, a host of conspiratorial pseudo-scientists who are misinterpreting what is in fact clear evidence of creationism. They use the "fairy-tale" insult to attack real science while defending their own fairy-tale, the literal reading of the first few chapters of Genesis. Ray Comfort has a book along this line, and I had a creationist recently tell me that science and reason were on the side of creationism while evolution is a "fairy-tale." But evolution is no fairy tale, and creationists of all stripes need to l...

Over at Atheist Central, the blog of Ray Comfort, the esteemed defender of the Faith sees no evidence for evolution and accuses the "atheist believer in evolution" of asserting "mountains of evidence" when there is absolutely none...in his words, " not even a mole hill ." He writes that when the person he was responding to listed diverse fields of evidence (just the fields, mind you, not the evidence within each field) and put "etc." afterwards, it was an indication that "he believes there are even more mountains [of evidence], somewhere." Actually, having answered this question numerous times, it is an indication that the evidence is so massive that a simple, paragraph-length list is impossible. Entire books have been written dealing with the evidence for evolution, both overall and in a topic-specific treatment (like Donald Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters  on the evidence from paleontology and geology...

Over at Creation Moments, the creationists continue doing what they've always done best; lying and distorting the reality of the world and science. They take the occasion of finding that pygmy hippos and early humans existed together on Cyprus to attack evolution. Creation Moments claims that "evolutionists" once thought that pygmy hippos and dwarf elephants arrived on the island 1.5 million years before humans did. Research (the citation is from a 1990 work) indicates that in fact humans existed there at the same time as the pygmy animals did. If they happened to read the title of the article in Science News that they cite, they will note that it says the research "pushes back colonization date." To put it simply, the dig in Cyprus uncovered that humans arrived on the island earlier than previously thought rather than denying the reality of the date of 1.5 million years. What do the creationists turn this into? The spin at Creation Moments is that while we...

Creation Ministries International is having a conference coming up this year in September. Called "Creation not Confusion", an ironic title if there ever was one, it will feature the notorious creationist Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, who answered Richard Dawkin's The Greatest Show on Earth with the resounding propaganda tract The Greatest Hoax on Earth. Sarfati is also the author of Evolution Refuted , which the website claims is the best-selling creationist book of all time (no one tell Ken Ham), though, save for the associated paycheck, that is a dubious honor. The other speaker, Gary Bates, is the current head of Creation Ministries International, and I have to admit that until today I'd never heard of him, but in fact, though the website offers nothing about his educational background, we may surmise that he does not have a PhD given the fact that creationists love nothing more than adding their letters after their name on a book (as Sarfati does). It is as though their...

One of the most common objections to evolution is that it is not science at all but a humanistic religion devoid of God. This objection is also one of the most foolish, the intellectual equivalent of making faces at one's opponent. This objection, like all the others, is completely without merit, save in the minds of those over at Answers in Genesis and all the like-minded creationist organizations. Ken Ham takes a full chapter out of his little book The Lie: Evolution to engage in this stupid, baseless accusation that " evolution is religion ." How is that supposed to work, I wonder? How can evolution, one of the most important scientific ideas in the history of man, endlessly proven with well-supported evidence, continually proven with new discoveries both in the lab and in the field, become a religion, founded on faith and belief rather than evidence? I suppose it must go something like this. Evolution is the foundation of a godless worldview in which man came from...

Over at Answers in Genesis, we lucky internet-users can read all of Ken Ham's book online, for free. Unfortunately, The Lie: Evolution  isn't exactly the material that most of us would choose to read, even if it was handed to us. Be that as it may, I was given a link to one of the chapters, called " The Root of the Problem ." As Ken would have it, the divide between evolution and creationism is based on worldviews...and in fact I have to agree with him, to a point. Trust me, I never thought that I'd be agreeing with Ken Ham...but here I am, saying that he's right about this. The problem is that creationists have a different worldview from those who accept science. But that is the only thing he has right; he doesn't even correctly identify which worldviews are at war. It isn't a question of whether your view of the world includes God or not that divides evolution from creation, because while few people who are creationists do not believe in God (this ...