So are you saying, “I believe A and not-A at the same time”? I think I will judge you.
For the last time, lekatt, you don’t understand science at all. Please acquire an understanding or leave this thread. If you want to acquire an understanding of even a small fraction of the overwhelming evidence for evolution, start here. Unless you can give a convincing and non-ad hoc explanation of atavisms, endogenous retroviruses, molecular vestiges, etc., etc., etc., then you have *no business at all * commenting on the scientific merit of evolution.
You judge me in haste.
For example, I can say that I have been here for 7 years because I have rock solid memories of the last 7 years of my life (before that it gets a bit fuzzy). Given this logic I can say that I am 7 years old.
However this only represents 17.948% of the 39 years I have actually been around (give or take a couple of weeks).
It would clairify things to restate my sentence as “I am *at least * 7 years old” but that does nothing to change the original math or the original method that I used to get that number. Granted, a Creationist will never try to clairify things because otherwise he would be defaulted into acknowleging the intrinsic seperation of faith and reason.
For me faith is a value, a belief that does not change over time (because, as a value I don’t let it). Reason, on the other hand is not a personal value to me because, by nature of logical debate and increasingly accurate technology, my sense of reason must remain flexable or I am doomed to remain in the past. This is not to say that I do not value reason, on the contrary I hold it as one of my highest virtues. But in order to keep an open mind reason must be flexable. In order to maintain a solid foundation faith, as well as all other personal values, must remain solid.
I would ask a question of faith.
“If the Lord told you to love those who believed in things that you do not, could you do it?”
It’s the part that matters. Creationists are not scientists, and most of them are simply people misled by those who use faith as a tool to earthly power.
Tris
My question:
Why is your self-esteem so low that you need to believe that you were specially created for a purpose?
If anyone, at this point, really thinks that you are going to get through to lekatt on these issues, please open a separate thread to do it.
As with posters who would find a way to condemn President Bush if he rescued a baby from a burning house or posters who would find a way to rationalize his actions if he threw a baby into a burning house, we have all seen. already, that lekatt’s views of the world do not coincide with anything presented by faith or science, so please do not hijack this thread with head-butting-wall posts.
My answer: Mu.
More fully: Why do you assume without evidence that what I believe is dictated by what I need to believe?
Hardly a killer question after all, then. 
If I were dealing with an intelligent design theorist, I would ask, “What scientific evidence, if discovered, would falsify the ID hypothesis?” If he specifies something he at least gives me something I can sink my teeth into. If he can come up with nothing, he is admitting ID is nonfalsifiable, therefore unscientific. (But if you try this, be prepared if he answers a question with a question: “What scientific evidence, if discovered, would falsify the theory of blind, unguided evolution?” There probably is a meaningful answer to that but I’m not sophisticated enough in the field to suggest one.)
This approach would not work as well with a young-Earth creationist, who might cheerfully trot out something nonfalsifiable on its face, such as the Omphalos hypothesis. The ID theorist is at least trying to pretend – especially to himself – that he really cares about science for science’s sake.
BrainGlutton beat me to the punch on this one, so I’ll just add here that “blind” and “unguided” would probably not be words that an evolutionary biologist would use to describe evolution either: selective pressures drive evolution, after all.
At which point you simply dismiss his argument as navel-gazing. 
Yes, but there is no conscious mind behind selective pressure; it’s like water running downhill.
The Omphalos Hypothesis and it’s bastard love child Last Thursdayism are both absurd. Everyone knows terrestrial erosion was caused neither by the hand of God nor the ravages of time but was designed by Slartibartfast from the planet Magrathea. Especially the fjords, gotta love the fine handywork on the fjords.
True; but now we’re out of the realm of evolution (specifically) and into the question of whether anything at all can happen without a conscious mind behind it.
A proposed and not definitely established function.
Anyway, that still leaves such things as Meckel’s diverticula and congenital nevi to explain. Creationists/“intelligent design” advocates would probably still argue that such useless crap in the human body has a majestic purpose we aren’t aware of yet.
Or, simply, that God is an engineer who is not obsessed with elegant designs and is not above using a kludge now and then.
But why do you think they KNOW that? The illusion of design is compelling, and creationism is a fairly intuitive hypothesis. Even Richard Dawkins said in The Blind Watchmaker that he had more respect for William Paley, author of the watchmaker argument, than for many atheist philosophers who hand-wave the problem of design away. Paley had a naturalist’s eye for the complexity of living things.
Evolution is a counter-intuitive hypothesis. A lot of very smart people have thought about nature and it wasn’t till the 1850’s that anyone stumbled on Evolution through natural selection. Evolution makes sense when you consider the evidence, but there’s a lot of evidence to consider, and a lot of study to do.
Creationists often ask intuitively plausible questions. “How could something like DNA come about by random chance?” “Where are the traditional fossils?” All of these questions are answerable, but the answers require some subtle reasoning.
That the structure and diversity of living things can be explained through natural selection is not an obvious proposition. Many creationists sincerely believe it can’t. They may be mistaken, but they are not dishonest.
ETA: I guess I’m thinking more of ID theorists than YEC’s.
Well said, Larry. And part of the problem with threads like these, whose purpose is to point and laugh at those silly Creationists, is that the word “creationist” means different things to different people. I remember once someone started an “Ask the Creationist” thread here. It turned out that he did not believe in a literal 6-day creation as described in Genesis, but that the world had been created by God, and I forget exactly what sort of creationism he subscribed to, but there was no little confusion over the meaning of the term “creationism.”
Even water running downhill is contingent on the effects of gravity, a phenomenon we have yet to fully comprehend.
Note - I do not contend that gravity is contingent on intelligent control or that our lack of full understanding it either proves or disproves anything. Simply that this falls into the “We just don’t know…yet” category.
urgh. transitional fossils.
As Dawkins so beautifully put it, if you fill the gap with a transitional fossil, the ardent creationist will just argue that there are now twice as many gaps.
I can’t boil it down to a single soundbite, but one tactic I’ve successfully used (ok, I’ve only had opportunity to use it once, but it seemed to work):
First, I ask them to pin down exactly what the status of Scripture is. The usual answer is that it’s divinely inspired writing, but transcribed, translated, etc. by humans. It could also be that it was written under direct dictation from God, or that the first copy was written by God, or a number of other points, but the important point is that there was human intervention at least somewhere in the process (in the widespread publishing, if nothing else).
Then, I ask “Suppose I were to tell you of the existance of a book about which there can be no doubt that it was written directly by none other than God Himself, in His own handwriting, in the original copy”. The response is “I would be very interested in reading that book”, or something along those lines.
“Now, what if that book were written in a language you do not know?”
“I would attempt to learn that language.”
I then explain that the Book is all of Creation, and that I (a scientist) have dedicated my life to learning to read the writing in it.