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I might not have expressed myself in quite WildTurkey's terms, but I have to agree the level of intellectual honesty among most of the anti-evolution crowd here is not high. People feel free, for example, to claim that Dan Dennett called for instituting 'creationist concentration camps'; to extract out-of-context quotes with the goal of misrepresenting scientist's words, etc.. Upon having gross scientific errors pointed out to them, they simply turn around and post the same nonsense all over again. I think it was PH who wittily compared it to 'whack-a-mole'.

Having done a fair bit of ranting myself, out of frustration, I have to say that I most admire those posters here who manage to consistently ignore the insults and dishonesty and simply argue to the point. I won't name them, lest I leave any deserving individuals out.

But I will note that my opinion of fundamentalist Christians in general has been greatly lowered by my experiences in these threads. More broadly, until a couple of years ago, I tended to discount the differences between social and libertarian conservatives. Now I worry whether the Republican coalition can survive the wave of fundie triumphalism that followed Dubya's re-election. And I'm going to think very hard before I again mark a ballot for a Christian conservative, particularly if there's also a Libertarian running.

WT: ...[dishonesty and deception] are the tools of the anti-evolutionists.
BB: Sheesh, WildTurkey! (There you go again.)

WT may have expressed it in a harsh manner, but he is pretty much correct in his assertions - at least in these threads. I don't believe that every anti-evolutionist uses these tactics, because some are just simply misinformed and don't know any better.

A prime example of these tactics is quote mining. Darwin's writing style of posing rhetorical questions and then answering them makes him a prime target of this tactic.

Another example are the faulty probability calculations that prove that evolution is a statistical impossibility. Even after these have been debunked, the same posters use them over and over.

An really good example of deception in this very thread is the use of a faulty population growth calculation to disprove an old earth. It was supposed to show that if humans had been around longer than 6,000 years than the number of people on the planet would be in the trillions. Unfortunately her own formula resulted in a population of 19 trillion if a 6,000 year value was used. Even though this and other faults with her approach have been pointed out, she continues to use it as "Evidence". Currently, no other anti-evolutionist has called her on it.

Evolutionists will correct other evolutionists if they post incorrect or shaky evidence. Creationists never really do. In the above example, another creationist posted " I like that! They [evolutionists] are forced to ignore so many things." in response to the population calculation post. Once the calculation and approach had been shown to be faulty, that poster never corrected his "cheerleading".