Dawkins is entirely correct when he complains about the practice of creationists when they pounce on out-of-context quotes and trumpet them as if it somehow proving their (otherwise vacuous) case. I posted this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating this one extra time:
Henry M. Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, recently made this candid admission [bracketed comments are mine]:
A great need -- but very expensive -- is that of more high-quality scientific research. We have been able to accomplish much significant research with our limited staff and our graduate students, but much more is needed, especially in the various problem areas [hee hee] of geology, archaeology, anthropology, and astronomy. In the secular world, this type of research is very largely funded by government grants. We, of course, do not have access to government funding [I wonder why], and would not accept it if we did [yeah, right], so this is a serious inhibiting factor. In the meantime, even though we do not yet have answers to all the problems in scientific creationism, the answers we do have are better than those the evolutionists and "progressive creationists" have. We can at least do literature research, using the experimental data acquired by evolutionary scientists and reinterpreting such data in terms of Creation and the Flood. The modern creation revival has, in fact, largely been developed by this process.
Source: ICR AND THE FUTURE.
I fixed a mistake in his writing. I hope he doesn't mind.
But I find their excuse that they "have no money" to be rather thin. I'm certian the real truth is that there is no genuine science to back them up, so they refuse to do any.
Why I bookmarked the original.
A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity? What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows. Similarly if a man’s crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this-in order that the crop might be spoiled-but that result just followed. Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity-the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food-since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his ‘man-faced ox-progeny’ did.