You know, I keep hearing that science is about facts and religion is about belief, so why is it that evolutionists cannot seem to get the facts about creationism right? Why don’t they bother to investigate and understand what they so vehemently oppose? Instead they repeat the same half-comprehended [or in some cases, just plain made up] misinformation to each other until they suppose it must be gospel truth.
Recently, columnist Mark Joseph Stern wrote a piece for Slate.com [which was picked up by Fairfax Media] in which he claimed, once again, that the Ark Encounter is being funded with our taxes [not true], that Creationists say that you’ll go to hell if you believe in evolution [pleeeeeeease], and as a value-added bonus that the Creation Museum is apparently on the brink of financial ruin [wishful thinking on his part]!
I really get tired of correcting this kind of credulous garbage, so of course comedian Jim Meyer chimes in with a Grist.org post that repeats the part about the Creation Museum as finiancial Titanic and the Barry Lynn inspired bit about the Ark Encounter being funded out of the state coffers.
Since neither of them had bothered to fact-check their assertions, I left comments on their articles correcting these erroneous claims and went about my day. Out of morbid curiosity, I took a look at Stern’s comments later to see how my comments had been received. Not well, of course. One comment got me. This guy defends Slate’s article by providing links to other “fair and objective” reviews of the Creation Museum… from Vanity Fair, DailyKos and BioLogos, proving that this kid hasn’t the faintest clue what unbiased and objective means.
This got me thinking. In a 2008 blog post entitled, This is the dawining of the Age of Credulity, movie critic Roger Ebert wrote the following:
“We may be leaving an age of irony and entering an age of credulity. In a time of shortened attention spans and instant gratification, trained by web surfing and movies with an average shot length of seconds, we absorb rather than contemplate. We want to gobble all the food on the plate, instead of considering each bite. We accept rather than select.”
Now, as an irony, he wrote that intriguingly insightful paragraph as part of a post in defense of another post called Creationism: Your Questions Answered, a post he wrote because he “hoped to reach readers who were uninformed about Creationism and would find the information interesting. If I had used an obvious slant, readers might have responded according to their pre-existing beliefs. I wanted to fly under the radar. I seem to have been all too successful.”
OK. So he wanted to accurately show what we believed in the hopes that exposure to what we would believe would cause people not fully familiar with said beliefs to re-consider their position regarding acceptance of creationism. He wanted us to look creationism in the eye, see it for what it was and dismiss it as a ridiculous jabberwocky.
Unfortunately, Roger Ebert only ends up evidencing the credulity he so roundly condemns, for he does not quite manage to accurately represent true Creationist positions so much as credulously parrotted straw men positions that no Creationist actually believes.
For example, in answer to the question of how we know the earth is less than 10,000 years old, he quotes Ussher. In truth, no one says Ussher got the dates exactly right, but we do note that if one adds up the genealogies of Genesis and compares it with modern history, we get a universe less than 10,000 years old.
A bigger mistake, oft-repeated by those who credulous parrot what they’ve heard rather than bothering to investigate what creationist really believe for themselves [and “investigating” creationist claims at anti-creationist sites would certainly qualify as credulous], is to conflate the taxonomical concept of a species with the Biblical concept of a created kind [which generally falls at the family taxon]. There are university textbooks that promote this straw man as gospel truth, but no creationist believes that God created all species during the Creation Week as we see them now, anymore than we suppose that Noah needed every species of equine, feline, canine, etc. in the Ark; rather Noah only needed two members of the equine kind, two of the canine kind, etc and these created kinds then displayed a wonderful diversity of expression of their genetic potential, giving us all the species we see today. Furthermore, we do not see CroMagnon man and Neandertal man as distinct creations, but rather as varieties of mankind, as much as human as any other people group.
His assertion that creationists believe that dinosaurs died off in the flood testifies to the fact that he has never seriously investigated creationists beliefs, as does his God-did-it answer to where all the flood waters went. And his answer to how long the Flood lasted… Roger Ebert wasn’t even trying!
The point is that Rogert Ebert, comedian Jim Meyer and colmunist Mark Joseph Stern not only repeat the same credulous lies they’ve heard from evolution-friendly sources, their claims will also be parrotted by other credulous sound byte evolutionists who will suppose they have been given the facts, simply because evolutionists are supposed to be about the facts… and they will be no wiser to the fact that they object to a creationism that never was, that they tilt at windmills of intellectual laziness, that creationists are still standing after they hurl their most devastating attacks at us, in part, because they haven’t been attacking us at all, but simply their credulous straw men understandings of what creationists are supposed to believe… according to evolutionists who are too lazy or credulous to find out otherwise.
Maybe this sorry state of affairs is why Michael Denton has famously admitted that:
“…contrary to what is widely assumed by evolutionary biologists today, it has always been the anti-evolutionists, not the evolutionists, in the scientific community who have stuck rigidly to the facts and adhered to a more strictly empirical approach.” – Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Burnett Books, London, 1985, pp. 353-354.
In the meantime, creationists, be prepared to answer and re-answer the self-same straw men and misunderstandings from evolutionists who really think they know what we believe but don’t.
Defending Genesis 