The single greatest point Derbyshire made, to me, was that after a century of debate, hell, after twenty years of debate, with all the modern tools of communication and research available, why hasn't the "truth" of creationism won more converts? If it is true, more than 1% of the people who devote their lives to scientific study should have signed on by now.
And I'm not buying the argument that the Darwinian Establishment has too much to lose. Not all of them. Most of them have the same values we do. And what about the young scientists who are still idealistic, those most prone to work on radical ideas that overthrow the established order? They should be signing on in droves.
As I said, I lean to the creationist side. But creationists who try to evade the rules of debate by taking the argument out of the sphere of science get what they have due. Free speech means that the merit of the speech is up for debate. If creationism is true, science will support it. I'd like to hear more about that science, if it exists, and less of the rhetoric from both sides that ultimately says nothing but, "Trust me, you're wrong. And you're an idiot."
The single greatest point Derbyshire made, to me, was that after a century of debate, hell, after twenty years of debate, with all the modern tools of communication and research available, why hasn't the "truth" of creationism won more converts? If it is true, more than 1% of the people who devote their lives to scientific study should have signed on by now.
And a well made point it was. And so it bears repeating. Creationism isn't concerned with winning more converts, at least any beyond the age of about 15. It's concerned with loosing converts it made before they were about 15 and recruiting as many before that age as it can.
Also consider the emeritus professors, the retired, the independelntly wealthy, et al. The establishment can't intimidate them any longer. Think of Copernicus, who waited until he was dying to publish; surely if there were anything to CR or ID, someone in one of these groups would have spilt the beans by now.
Indeed. To believe that creationist has scientific merit you have to subscribe to one or more of the following propositions:
So somehow hundreds of thousands of individual scientists for 150 years have managed to cleave to an obvious fiction for.... what reason exactly? Maintaining a conspiracy of 10 people for any length of time is virtually impossible. Lifelong fame and fortune awaits anyone who supplies tangible objectively convincing evidence supporting a young earth, a global flood, or the idea that biological species are grouped into distinct "kinds". Curiously no-one can manage this. Instead research supporting Darwin's ideas as modified by Mendel, Crick et al just keeps piling up into a veritable avalanche of confirming data. If creationism is true then the creator sure went to a lot of trouble to make it look as if the mechanism used was evolution and billions of years.
What is worse is that so many of the supposed objections, "evolution contradicts the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics", "no mutation is ever beneficial", "no mutation adds information" can be understood by a layman. Puhlease. If any of the obvious objections had any merit then how is the conspiracy of atheist scientists (many of whom we are told by the more nutty creationists are only pretending to be Christians) holding together?
Practically every way the data could have come out would have blown evolution out of the water if evolution were false. Linneous (sp) tried to create nested hierarchies of natural-world objects in the 18th century. The only success that he had in this endeavour was with biological species. Darwin's contribution was to come up with a natural explanation for observations that had already been made, that life on earth appeared to have evolved over geological time. Why would a Creator design all life (but nothing else) in a nested hierarchy that slowly changes over geological time (as measured by depth in the geological column, and more recently confirmed by radiometric dating)? Remarkably the nested hierarchy created using morphology has been mirrored by the genetic evidence. This isn't code re-use, this is a nested hierarchy that gives extremely similar results whatever techniques we use to build it. You cannot build meaningful nested hierarchies of classes that don't share common descent.
Derbyshire did get something wrong though. It isn't 20 years of debate... Creationism was the dominant paradigm ever since human societies started to form, and has remained a competitive paradigm for the last 200. So it isn't 20 years of failure to produce any result of note for creationism, but 10,000 years of failure to produce a coherent explanation of how the Creator worked and make real-world predictions of (for example) what fossils will be found where and (more recently) how comparative species genomes will look. After 10,000 years creationism is batting zero for its predictive power. If there was a Creator then it seems that what He created was evolution.