It occurs to me that one of the reasons that creationism and ID gain a lot of public support is that they do not require close examination of much of anything.
Not everyone is willing to learn enough about science to have an understanding of it. We see that in all of these threads when people are unwilling to even discuss the TOE in terms of its own ideas.
It's very comforting, I suppose, to accept a simple account, such as the Biblical account, of creation. One needn't think a great deal about it. It can all be told in a few hundred words, and that's it.
It can be very uncomfortable for some folks to have a far more complex theory to deal with. It's confusing. So, when a religious leader states boldly that the Genesis account is how it happened and that's an end to it, he'll naturally get followers who will accept those statements because they are easily digestible and easy to wrap one's mind around.
All else, then, is foolishness, if you accept that account as the whole truth. For many folks, that's the end of it. For others, though, it becomes a contentious issue, since it's so apparent that the simple Genesis account is not accepted by most folks. So, in the spirit of converting one's fellow humans to one's own religious beliefs, it becomes a campaign to discredit the more complex theory.
That's what I see here, and part of my evidence is the paucity of the creationism argument. I see little original thought being expressed by the creationist side, and much outright plagiarism from one website or another. No real thought goes into the arguments, just a repetition of the same statements over and over again...all lifted from Answers in Genesis or one of the other creationism sites.
It's depressing. It's also humorous. But it's mostly depressing.
That's why I try to translate what I learn from the scientists here into simple layman's terms that even I can understand. I know I sometimes get it wrong but, I'm learning. For example I just learned from Ich's previous post... It's "evidence" not "proof"... evidence not proof... evidence not proof... Nothings ever proved but there's lot's of evidence...
Taken individually I find the posts and attitudes humorous. There is a rich vein of comedy in creationist "insight". Taken as a totality creationism seems to be a profoundly depressing nihilistic worldview however. Must we really be constrained by the campfire tales of Bronze-age goatherds, who probably didn't even believe the stories themselves, if they thought much about them?
A depressingly humorous placemarker.