By the time people finish reading this, they will tell me in condescending tones that I am too smart to be a creationist. (Assuming for the moment that anyone reads this, anyway 
) If you’re not interested in a brief argument, skip a bit and scroll down to the colorful part at the end, in which I explain how the controversy can be settled.
A post by the Rottweiler, reacting to the latest stupidity of the ACLU, might be characterized as a ‘carpet-bombing’ of the Anarch0-Communist Litigation Union. His one mistake was to mention their rabid defense of Darwinism. At least it seems like a mistake to the considerable number of conservative Darwinists. Because after all, they are sure that doctrine happens to be correct. Even granting that hypothetical possibility, it is still a fact that Darwinism was never properly scientifically introduced. It was shoehorned into the public education system with a great deal of assistance from the ACLU.
I could go on about some interesting bits of evidence, which I freely admit have been gleaned off of biased websites like Answers in Genesis or TrueOrigin, their nature invalidating the value of the content because they were written by a bunch of religious fanatics pretending to be scientists.
I could mention the salt content of the oceans suggesting that the Earth isn’t quite as old as ‘every scientist’ insists (‘Every scientist’ being of course, orthodox neo-Darwinists because accepting such doctrine is a prerequisite for being a ‘real scientist’).
The amount of helium (generated by alpha decay of radioactive elements) retained in zircon crystals in rocks, when considering the known rate at which helium diffuses out, indicates that the rocks probably younger than ‘all the real scientists’ think–not to mention indicating that our understanding of the mechanics of radioactive decay is not as complete as we thought it was.
I could mention some of the physiological problems involved in the evolution of cetaceans from Ambulocetus, including the fact that the nose couldn’t be moved in gradual increments from the snout to the top of the head–a serious restructuring of the skull would have to have occurred at some point.
I could mention the obvious gross inadequacy of mutation and natural selection to accomplish everything evolutionists claim. If a species can reproduce and not get killed off, it survives. That’s it. If the mutations it suffers are mainly tiny bits of degeneration that barely affect survival over a single generation, the species will survive, but accumulated over multiple generations the species will become weaker and less able to adapt to different environments. Nature isn’t so much a vicious battle between species to gain advantages over one another, but a vicious (and futile) battle between species to keep from losing what they still have. That’s the nature of an information system, such as the DNA/RNA system underlying all organic life on Earth. A vast proportion of the system’s energy must be poured into error control. This is not to say that scrambled information will never make sense and mean something different–there certainly can be instances of that, but the general and overarching trend will be that the system will decay without intelligent maintenance. I suspect this argument is why it seems like every other creationist scientist is someone with an education in engineering rather than natural sciences.
But anyway, yes, there’s a great deal of evidence of adaptation in some organisms, which occasionally manage amazing things like avoiding being killed by antibiotics and some toxic chemicals, which is frequently and nauseatingly announced as proof that creationists are a bunch of idiots. Worms develop a resistance to cadmium poisoning. Methycillin resistant staph. aureus. Of course, creationists are saying that organisms tend to lose information, not that they never adapt. But that’s beside the point. It’s all right to misrepresent the creationists and move the goalposts around because they’re a bunch of idiots anyway. You could point out the discovery of how the worms survived the cadmium–the worms had lost the ability to regulate the enzyme that bound up cadmium, and their cells were cranking out the stuff like crazy. Great if you’re living in a toxic dump site, but a waste of energy anywhere else. Nobody’s disputing that it’s a beneficial adaptation (in certain circumstances), just that it represents something other than a loss of information.
What about antibiotic resistant germs? I’m not too well versed in microbiology, but it is frequently pointed out that the resistance exists in (a portion of) the germ’s population before it is ever introduced to an antibiotic, so in many cases it’s pre-existing information being manipulated by selective breeding. In many cases, antibiotics depend on the target organism possessing certain receptors that render it vulnerable to the drug, in which case a loss of those receptors would improve drug resistance (though also reduce its ability to use those receptors for other things, which may prove a disadvantage in other respects)
Of course, people say that human history proves the Bible wrong, but verifiable recorded history gets extremely fuzzy going back farther than around 2000 BC. Incidentally, the Ussher timeline places the global Flood at 2348 BC, and there is evidence indicating that even the most supposedly ancient civilizations, including Babylon and Egypt, were actually founded after this time.
Of course, what’s the point of repeating all this? It’s just regurgitated sound bites from various creationist publications, the consensus in the scientific community is that humanity is a million years old, the Earth is four and a half billion years old, and the universe is thirteen billion years old. Sure, there are nutjobs who dispute those numbers, but they’re not ‘real scientists’. The issue has been settled a century ago, it’s time to move on.
Except obviously it hasn’t been settled. Despite the superhuman efforts of the ’scientific community’, there are still several thousand people professing to be scientists, who think they know something different, and millions more laypeople who think they’re right. Admittedly, they might be affected by religious beliefs. Religious beliefs can make people crazy and stupid, I won’t dispute that. Seemingly unreligious beliefs can under some circumstances become like religions in their effects. Otherwise, there would be no explanation for Muslims, Scientologists, or communists. The problem is that at least the scientists, and a few incredibly wise laymen (some of whom even make dubious claims to be prophets) seem to do a reasonable job of being rational, which does cast some doubt on the notion that creationism is a quaint artifact of primitive religious behavior.
So how does one go about rectifying this? There is a great deal of confusion whose presence is largely thanks to the ACLU for using other-than-scientific methods to get people to accept a ’scientific theory’, and to this we owe the fact that evolutionists with their ‘mainstream’ science publications can wail about the ‘demise of science’ and whine with relative impunity whenever a creationist book makes it onto a science bookshelf, all because a few unwashed illiterate hicks still believe that God is an actual being that does things (as in “performs activities” or “implements processes”, a far worse sin than just believing in God). The first step to resolving a controversy, or any problem for that matter, is to recognize that it exists.
The Genesis Project
The solution is relatively simple in its design, but will be rather expensive in its execution. It requires getting the two main factions in this controversy to have some dialogue. The most effective way to get people to do something is to pay them money to do it, and that’s where I get stuck because a vital prerequisite of executing this plan is acquiring a massive pile of cash to fund it.
1: Select 60 scientists with Ph.D.’s in a wide assortment of scientific fields. Thirty under the “naturalistic evolutionist” label, and thirty under the “biblical creationist” label. Admittedly there are many doctrinal variations within and beyond those two camps, but most of them lie somewhere between these two “mainstream extremes”.
2: Each side draws up a list of experiments, many of which will be repeats of famous ones done in the past (Miller-Urey experiments come to mind) because all data will be required to come from experiments done under the Project. Each experiment will be supervised by an equal representation from both sides.
3: Prior to every experiment, all scientists prepare a prediction of the results. Score will be tallied based on which predictions are best met by the actual results.
4: The experiments will be scheduled so that there can a monthly 2-hour program on the Discovery Channel on the whole thing, for those without broadband Internet access that would allow them to get up to the minute reports of everything. Every month would include a general debate between all the scientists.
Some of the details could be easily subject to adjustment, like the manner in which the project is publicized, or the exact number of scientists to be involved(though I wouldn’t recommend going any lower than 40 total scientists), but there should be absolutely no compromise on these points:
1. The management of the Project should be conducted with the utmost impartiality to any doctrinal camp.
After the Project begins there may be many groups of people from all sides of the issue who will accuse the Project of being a circus for the ridicule of one side or the other, or of any misconduct in favor of one side or the other. The Project must be unimpeachable in this respect.
2. The Project must be well-publicized.
A multimedia website, a television series, and books are all seriously recommended.
