Those Pesky Creationists

Throughout my time at grad school, there have been various activities that have distracted me from my work, such as Magic: The Gathering, Poker, and, my latest obsession, reading message boards dealing with creationists and their attempts to discredit the theory of Evolution. Let me be clear about where I stand: I am a mathematician, and a friend of scientists, and, as such, I side with the people who use reason, logic and evidence, ie the so called "Darwinists."

Now, right off the bat, there is trouble with that phrase, since it implies a certain degree of hero worship. We don't call people who believe in relativity "Einsteinists" or people that believe in quantum mechanics "Bohrists." There is also the fact that science has progressed a whole lot since Darwin's day, and, while he was an incredibly influential genius, he did get some things wrong and we continue to go far beyond his original theory.

But anyways, that is a side issue, and while calling someone a Darwinist is very flawed, at least it expresses clearly what side of the debate I am on. Now, I never really enjoyed biology, and have participated in calling it a "stamp collecting" science. However, and this is some insight into the abyss that is my brain, a year ago, at Christmas time, my cousin Julie was saying some ridiculous things about evolution, and, since I was fairly clueless on the matter, I didn't really have anything to say in rebuttal. That led me to online searches about evolution to be able to better argue my point, and, in the process of trying to be right, I actually learned a bunch. One of the better sites I found was Talk Origins, which gives a lot of information about the science and the insanity of the arguments against it.

Unfortunately, at least for my productivity, I also found some interesting message boards, such as After the Bar Closes, which I just cannot turn away from. Part of it is that I like to feel superior, and it is not hard to feel superior to a lot of these creationists. But I also like to make sure I really think what I think I think, and in that respect, the more I read about the different sides of this issue, the more I realize that I am on the right side, and I do think what I think I think. Now, if only I could stop using this as an escape from work, and actually read the stack of math books I got from the library...