Mother Jones recently interviewed Texas legislator Bill Zedler, the fellow who has authored a bill that would outlaw discrimination against creationists. I read the whole thing, and now my head hurts (partly due to the fact that I was up to the wee hours last night and I'm already functioning on a pool of fatigued neurons). Zedler really is an idiot; the entire interview is a series of non sequiturs as Zedler blindly recites from the creationist script. Here's an example:
Mother Jones: Are you a creationist?
Bill Zedler: Evolutionists will go "Oh, it just happened by chance." Today we know that's false. Today we know that even a single-celled organism is hugely complex. When was the last time we've seen someone go into a windstorm or a tornado or any other kind of natural disaster, and say "Guess what? That windstorm just created a watch."
First sentence: No credible scientist claims evolution is a theory solely of chance. It wouldn't be a very interesting theory if it were, now would it?
Second sentence: I know it's false that Bill Zedler has sex with chicken corpses.
Third sentence: Yes, cells are complex. So? Complexity can be produced by chance, so announcing an irrelevant fact does not challenge his strawman version of evolution, anyway.
Fourth sentence: Job 38:1. "Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind". So the last time anyone claimed a windstorm created a watch, it was their god. Scientists aren't the ones claiming that purely chance forces assemble functional complexes.
I have to say that ol' Bill Paley was a smart guy for his time, a persuasive writer, and extremely influential…but every time some clueless creationist drags out a watch analogy, I want to build a time machine, go back to 1743, and strangle him in his crib.
Of course, then someone else would invent some catchy but irrelevant parallel, and creationists would be endlessly recycling the same tired metaphor, whatever it was. It's been over 200 years; can they please come up with something original now?
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