Creationism

Several readers have asked me to take up cudgels against Bill Buckley’s piece on NRO last Friday, in which WFB spoke up for the Intelligent Design people and their arguments.

I am not exactly going to do that: not because I think the writer’s age and accomplishments place him above cudgeling — I don’t think that, and if WFB thought I did think it, he’d never speak to me again — but because the actual pros and cons of creationism vs. science can be found argued, in far greater detail than a 2,000-word column could contain, all over the web. I generally refer argumentative e-mailers to the TalkOrigins website, which is a handy clearinghouse for this sort of thing, with links to many other sites. (Including 347 creationist ones! If your favorite creationist website isn’t included in the list, the TalkOrigins people make it easy for you to add it. This, by the way, offers an instructive contrast to creationist websites, which rarely link to anti-creationist ones. TalkOrigins links to the Center for Science and Culture, but CSC does not return the favor.)

What I am going to do is to take a glance at the psychology here: Not “What is true and what isn’t?” — a point on which our minds are all rigidly made up anyway — so much as “Who believes what, and why?”