Beliefs of anti-evolutionists

Jay Manifold at A Voyage to Arcturus offers his list of things people have to believe in order to oppose the teaching of evolution. It is reproduced, in full, as he requests. (Though I suspect I'm not the target of this particular admonition.)

In between items, I will mention some of the counter-arguments I've seen used.

You must believe – like the postmodernists – that the historical sciences are merely an artifact of the pre-existing worldview of investigators, fundamentally subjective and ultimately arbitrary.

Well, of course they do. After all, no one was around to watch it happen, and inferential methods are just too much work.

Part of the problem, if you're in a battle with a professional creationist, is that it can take a very long time to explain any given inferential method, and by the time you're done with the first one, you've lost the audience, and used up all your time.

This is death when going against a trained showman who depends on razzle-dazzle to win over an audience.

You must suppress your awareness of the immense practical benefits of the historical sciences, even while taking advantage of those benefits.

No problem there. Simply deny that evolution had anything to do with the development of those benefits. The animal rights extremists deny that animal experimentation made any difference, and that the alternatives they advocate would have given us the same results at least as quickly. (Maybe even sooner, since we'd have gone down fewer blind alleys.)

Further, you must ignore the moral implications of a Universe created filled with (take your pick) deceptive appearances of age or a complete lack of cause-and-effect relationships (read Van Till for much more on this).

They're perfectly willing to lie for a higher purpose, why shouldn't their Lord be?

Not to overlook the obvious, you must believe in an immense conspiracy, going back a century and a half, among astronomers, biologists, geologists, and paleontologists, to prop up their contrived model and suppress alternative explanations.

But of course there's a conspiracy. Haven't you been listening? It's being brought to bear in Kansas right now, and Imax has been caught in the ire of the Grand Conspirators, too.

(Perhaps, being themselves conspirators, they're inclined to see conspiracies everywhere.)