One of the most interesting things to me is the nature of Creationism as an idea which evolves in a rather protean fashion in reaction to the broader cultural selection pressures. For me the weirdest example of this was an interlocutor who kept bringing up Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection. This sort of argument is well above the standard set of talking points which are easily rebutted with Talk Origins. But to some extent it isn’t what people say, but how they say them. One reason that Creationism seems to be a position of the dull is that it is a position of the dull, and the dull are not as eloquent as the smart.
So I invite you to watch a clip of Richard Land defending Creationism (Intelligent Design) below:
First, some of Land’s assertions are not really true. In relation to evolution Americans seem to be split down the middle. On the specific points many of the positions he outlines are total nonsense. But he’s very fluid and confident, as would befits a man with a Princeton and Oxford education. His utilization of terms like irreducible complexity is about as substantive as chanting abracadabra, but probably just as effective in convincing fellow travelers already sympathetic to his position as shamans were in the days of yore. If you came back at Land with the full armament of modern evolutionary biology, you’d be accused of wielding black magic!
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