Ads for Jesus: this ad, titled Creationists Fight Back! was on the Corpse Divine banner today. It is a very typical creationist publication: two guys with PhD's (Brad and Burt) put together a retort (in mostly laymans' terms of course) to an article in US News and World Report. Observations:

• Creationist authors always seem to circulate in popular literature rather than peer-reviewed scientific journals. That must be because they are ostracized from science, due to the influence of Satan.
• They restate ad-nauseum the simplistic bullet-point version of creationism, in response to a simplistic bullet-point version of evolutionism.

In this one they say, "Darwin’s theory begins by postulating that life arose from nonliving matter as a result of some purely naturalistic, completely mechanistic, and equally mysterious process on a prebiotic Earth. Abiogenesis, or as it is known more commonly, spontaneous generation, is one of the foundational concepts of evolution." Actually Darwin's theory is natural selection, not abiogenesis... "Abiogenesis" follows from a conveniently binary classification scheme favored by creationists. The world, according to them, has living things and not-living things. There are single-celled organisms and not-single-celled organisms. Simple classifications yield simple arguments. They just happen to be wrong. Twentieth century biology was practically an exercise in discovering gray areas between life and non-life. What is a virus, for example? Living or non-living thing? Can it "pop into existence" spontaneously? Now that we can feasibly whip up some Polio in the kitchen, it doesn't seem so far fetched to me that nature could just whip up a virus. Creationists spend so much time producing skeptical-sounding quotations from reputable scientists, and making sarcastic remarks about the validity of evolutionary models. What they never ever do is make a decent positive argument for their own system. For them it is as simple as "Well, it didn't come out of nowhere, so we are left with an omnipotent intelligent designer who sets the world in motion from beyond." Why the hell shouldn't we be left with "All life originated in the future. At the end of time there is a time-funnel that sucks organisms back around to the beginning, and they become the ancestors of themselves in a glorious feedback loop." My future-origin theory has just as much evidence as the divine-creation theory: none in particular. I don't know why I'm wasting so much time on creationism. Isn't there supposed to be a war starting?