"We accepted the products of science, but rejected its methods" - Carl Sagan.
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The main reason that so many people reject evolution is that what most people know about science in general and about evolution in particular amounts to little more than barbershop gossip. They have uncritically accepted religious screeds and various web authorities who reinforce what they already believe to be true.
A great deal of what we are told about evolution from the people we trust - parents and church leaders - is false. In some cases, the misinformation is accidental - in others it's very difficult to imagine that the perpetrators are not being intentionally deceitful. Though creationist arguments have been thoroughly and devastatingly refuted, the arguments themselves keep making the rounds. As these poor arguments are repeated so often amongst creationists, it has proven almost impossible to stamp them out. Very often creationists on bulletin boards, chat rooms, etc., will smugly interject a few of these fraudulent arguments into a discussion. This will usually be done in such a way as to indicate that the evolutionist must not ever have heard of this one before. What's worse is that even after they are corrected, many of them continue to periodically put forward the exact same arguments - without ever having responded to the previous rebuttals.
Many evolutionists believe that it is the goal of creationists to disprove evolution. After following this subject for several decades, I'm convinced otherwise. Their purpose is primarily to raise doubt. They continue to promulgate arguments they know are stupid, because they're not addressing scientists or evolutionists. They're indirectly addressing standers-by, school boards, politicians. They want to create in the public consciousness the clear impression that there is a great disagreement among scientists. Of course this impression is false. The relatively small number of scientists who are practicing creationists tend to be from the bottom tier of science. Perhaps I'll go into this more later.
A few of the numerous falsehoods and misrepresentations about evolution in circulation:
Falsehood 1. Evolution is an attempt to disprove god.
Fact: Neither evolution, nor any other scientific theory says anything at all about the existence or non-existence of any god(s). In fact, many , including many pro-evolution debators, believe in god. The Theistic Evolutionists believe that species are formed through evolution, but that God was responsible for it. They are very clear that the evolution part of their belief is science and the theistic component is religion. I applaud their integrity.
Falsehood 2. Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed.
Fact: This is a complete fabrication that was made up by a leading evangelical christian of Darwin's day. The people who were actually present at Darwin's deathbed have said that this story is false and that the perpetrator of the lie was never even present at Darwin's deathbed. And yet this myth is continually repeated and uncritically accepted by anti-evolutionists. Even if this story were not a base lie, it would still be irrelevant to the scientific merit of evolution.
Falsehood 3. The Second Law of Thermodynamics disproves evolution.
Fact: This is utterly false. In the vernacular, the second law says that order cannot arise from disorder. This is not true. Order arises from disorder all the time in nature. If this common understanding of order were true, then the second law would be disproven and therefore not a law. The second law actually is represented by a simple inequality that applies to an isolated system. If that inequality is not violated, then the second law is not violated. No creationist has ever once shown how the inequality is violated. Instead they twist the argument into a philosophical one and skilfully avoid showing the math. "If you see a jumbo jet in the desert, you know it's created!" or some such variation. This is a very persuave argument to many creationist followers. I'm reminded of William James' observation that "Most people think they're thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." This particular fallacious argument is especially interesting to me as it was investigating this one as an engineering student that convinced me that my former creationism had been misguided by people who were deliberately misrepresenting the truth.
Falsehood 4: Evolution is merely a theory.
Falsehood 5: Intelligent Design refutes evolution.
Much more to follow. I'll be talking about Intelligent Design, a scientistic theory being pandered to various school boards about the country. Scientism is that which has the veneer, or outward appearance of science, but is not science. I'll try to talk mostly about creationist methodology at first. Eventually, I'll get more into specifics. But it's important to understand things.
The primary impediment to accepting evolution is understanding it. Most evolutionists need only talk with creationists for a very few minutes to realize that they don't know very much about this theory they reject. The creationist intelligentsia does everything they can to try to get people to reject evolution before they understand it.
I also intend to discuss a few of the techniques used by creationists. For example, they very commonly will claim that characteristic XYZ could not possibly have evolved by random chance and that therefore evolution must be false. Examples of this technique are myriad - the bombadier beetle, the tongue of the woodpecker, the head and neck of the woodpecker, DNA, and eyes. The most common technique these days is to use some obscure pseudo-fact to justify the claim, "Scientists can't explain" or some such rubbish. I intend to review these and other claims later.
I'll give pointers to good information and specific cross-references from false and dishonest arguments on creationist sites to those on actual science sites.
I'll also give a general discussion - with references - to the methods of creationist argumentation. Creationism is a type of scientism - something that has the veneer of science without the depth. I'll give pointers to refute some of the alleged "research" they bandy about.
The central point to remember in these discussions is this: Creationists are not trying to win. They are trying to create doubt in the minds of people whom they believe are too intellectually lazy to do anything remotely resembling actual study on the subject. This is how they can be so successfull by giving their flip and nonsensical criticisms of radiodating, the fossil record, and so forth. They are not trying to win: they just to get people to believe and repeat "evolution and creationism are both *just theories*." They do this by misrepresenting what science is and how it works, by telling outright falsehoods on occasion, and presenting faulty and debunked science as widely accepted. They also misrepresent what evolutionary theory says. Essentially most of the time when you hear or read a creationist who starts a sentence with "Evolution says X," there is a high probability that evolution doesn't say anything remotely close to X. But there will be time for this. I'll try to make a short essay every couple months.
The vast preponderance of available scientific data is explained by and supports evolution as both a central fact of biology and a powerful unifying theory - on par with the germ theory of disease and the theory of gravitation.
The educated scientific community understands well that Darwin lit a candle in the darkness for all of humanity and that creationists have spent the last 150 years attempting to stomp it out.
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