Entry 901, on 2008-11-30 at 17:29:07 (Rating 3, Religion)
Whenever I debate creationists they tend to reject any source of information I use. For example, if I quote a scientific paper they often say something like "well all the scientists are cooperating to support their beliefs and reject creation science", or if I use Wikipedia they might say "anyone can edit Wikipedia so we don't need to believe it", or if I use a specialist site like Talk Origins they could say "that site is biased".
All of these objections have some truth in them (however small it might be) and creationists specialise in remembering the tiny anomalies while rejecting the huge bulk of evidence. Anyway, I thought I might try looking at a mainstream news source with a certain amount of credibility and a reputation for being relatively unbiased, so I used the BBC News web site.
I searched that site and found many news items describing new discoveries which supported evolution, but the news items about creationism were more about politics and religion: there was no new evidence which supported the truth of creationism at all. So even a mainstream news site rejected creationism. But even that wasn't good enough! Here's why: "You can do better than the BBC. Also Owen ask about there [sic] reporting in the middle east. Its like a real estate agent claiming he is unbiased while looking at the large commission check..." Pretty lame, eh?
Now, before I go any further let me say that I don't hate creationists and I don't think they are bad people as a rule. The person I am debating in this case is a friend from many years back and this is just a debate which he almost always starts by sending me creationist propaganda. But I do think religious people would be better off if they abandoned these silly myths. I think there is some merit in a lot of Christian philosophy but there's none I can see in creationism, which is a completely different thing.
So back to the news sites. After having the BBC rejected I thought: OK, I'll play that game! So I asked him to give me another mainstream web site which was acceptable to him and that I could research. That was about 8 hours ago and I haven't got a reply yet. That's fair enough, because apparently some people have regular activities they do on Sundays. But it will be interesting to see what he comes up with (if he actually replies at all, because a common creationist tactic is to ignore the hard questions).
I think its unlikely he will find any sources which list news items supporting creationism because those items simply don't exist. Its only in the fantasy world of creationism that they do exist and the sites which include that material aren't mainstream.
So really the creationists have to resort to the grand conspiracy theories. Not only are "Darwinists" against them (whatever a Darwinist is, I don't know) but so are almost all biologists, geneticists, biochemists, microbiologists, botanists, geologists, cosmologists, astronomers, chemists, anthropologists, paleontologists, physicists, zoologists, and practically any other area of human knowledge you can name. But its worse than that because general information sources, like Wikipedia, are also against them. But there's even more: it now seems that all the mainstream news sources are in on the conspiracy as well!
As I have said in past blog entries: not all conspiracies are false, but grand conspiracy theories on this scale always are - at least so far. But what would you bet on: a few nutters putting their carefully cherry picked evidence on a creationist site or the vast majority of information on every science, general information, and news site?
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