A rant about the intelligent design ignoramuses.

Just got finished reading yesterdays LA Times article about these ludicrous theme parks popping up all over the country reeling kids in with life-size dinosaur statues and espousing the unbelievably bone-headed belief that dinosaurs and man were contemporaries.  I can't read stories like this without my brain hurting, but this one actually made me scream out loud.  Every paragraph is more and more stupid, culminating, for me, with the following nonsensical idiocy:

"Kids flock to the huge statues. `And it's not like they're crying, 'Oh, mommy, take me out, I'm scared.' They're drawn to it,' Chiles said. `There's something in their DNA that knows man walked with these creatures on Earth.'"

That's right.  "There's something in their DNA that knows man walked with these creatures on Earth."  That statement shows such a pathetic understanding of biology that it hurts my head just to begin debunking it.  I just sit here, agape.  Pastor Chiles, in case you were wondering, runs the "non-denominational church inside the [Cabazon, CA] attraction."

As DarkSyde and others have meticulously pointed out in diaries, the evidence for evolution is overwhelming (which, incidentally, is why it is a theory, which is scientist-speak for "the most believable, consistent explanation years of observation and experimentation have come up with."  Evolution gets compared to gravity a lot because as far as the scientific community is concerned, the two explanations of natural phenomena are in the same league.)  The idea that dinosaurs were in the garden of Eden, and only began eating meat after Eve's sin, and that they were aboard Noah's ark, by comparison, is irrational mythology.  Pretty much the only way to accept such absurd ideas as absolute truth is to completely disregard (in the "LA LA LA, I'm not listening" kind of way) all the evidence to the contrary.

It's obvious from comments like this:

"Darwin `came at just the right time to be the catalyst for a revival of ancient paganism' and...evolution birthed Communism, racism and Nazism,"

that these people have a major problem, not just with understanding the scientific method, biology, and history, but also with the relationship between causation and correlation.  It brings to mind Pastafarians' ardent belief that the rise in Earth surface temperatures is directly due to the decrease in the world population of pirates.

Some people from this movement have a website, Answers in Genesis, which I originally heard about at a friend's wedding a while back from some of her creationist relatives.  The conversation went like this - I'm paraphrasing:

Them: So, what do you do?
Me: I'm in a genetics Ph.D. program.
Them (impressed): Wow, that's really interesting.
Me: Yeah, it's fascinating to study all the differences in organisms that evolve over time.
Them: Well, we're creationists--
Me (stunned silence - I'd never met actual creationists before):
Them: --There's a lot of stuff on answersingenesis.org, you might want to check it out.  It might change your mind about a few things.

So what could I do?  I picked my jaw up off the floor, went to their website, and there found a large collection of cherry-picked facts and pseudo science, set up to prey upon the collective ignorance of the populous.  They start with one or two unrepresentative studies and then extrapolate by using terms and drawing conclusions that sound real to the untrained listener, in order to make evolutionary theory sound just as flawed and implausible as their crackified ramblings.

Because that's the only way they can win this argument.  They don't have reason, they don't have evidence --- they got nothin'.  They have to try to discredit evolution using whatever means necessary, because when evolution and their version of Christian mythology are equally believable, people who don't know any better will decide to be "good Christians" every time.

Every time I think about this, I come back to Penn and Teller's BullShit! episode on creationism.  In the end, they conclude that it doesn't matter whether you believe creationist myths or not --- they are not science, and have no place in a scientific discussion, or a science class.   The beliefs of one person, or even many people, for that matter, do not decide which theories have scientific validity.  If your beliefs are supported by evidence, then you can present them to the scientific community, and argue about it.  If you have enough evidence, then people believe you, and you don't have to have dinosaur statues to shock and awe them into your way of thinking.  And here, I'll say it again, for emphasis.  They got nothing.  The scientific community is not debating this.  This is a debate between people who do not understand, and do not want to understand the scope or credibility of the evidence in favor of Earth's lengthy geological age, or the continuing evolution of species ----and the non-scientist population that up until now, has believed the scientists.