An Answer in Search of a Question

My mother sent me this article from a creationist website over the weekend. I know she means well, but I cannot understand how anyone in a career (nursing) that has so benefited from scientific advances, especially from the fields of molecular and evolutionary biology, can so easily reject science in favor of 2000+ year old myths (4000-5000 years in this case).

This article offers nothing new and makes all the same mistakes/distortions as everything that I've read before it. In fact, this is one of the more poorly written ones I've recently read, as it was written for a Christian audience that already accepts at least some of the basic premises of the Bible. It confuses "Darwinism" (oooh, that evil man that all those evil godless heathens worship!) with modern evolutionary theory, confuses evolutionary theory with studies into the origins of life, confuses theory and hypothesis, makes a number of observations that have absolutely nothing to do with the point but merely serve as an appeal to emotion, and finally, puts out a number of distortions or outright lies (whether intentional or not) to cement the position. I'm not going to bother refuting anything in the article. As I said, the arguments are so old that anyone who's been studying any of this for more than a few weeks can answer every single one of them without so much as going to a reference.

Every time I get one of these articles (I think the last one I got before this was "proof" of the global flood), it occurs to me that religion is nothing more than an answer in search of a question. In every single one of these articles, the author starts with a stated premise from the Bible, then tries to rationalize a way to continue believing that delusion in spite of the facts. They search for the set of "facts" that they can connect in a careful construct to prop up their reality, and ignore all of those pesky facts that just want to test their faith. Appeals to emotion win the day, and if you can throw a hair-brained hypothesis or two in, all the better. Once you form the argument in such a way as to boost the ego of the reader, rationality can take the back seat and you can keep them from asking too many real questions that might demand real answers.

In this article, the reader question is phrased in such a way as to make it obvious that he wants to be a creationist, if only it weren't for those pesky facts. He already knows what answer he wants to come to, but can't seem to figure out how to make what he knows of the world work with that answer. The writer then proceeds to carefully construct a new reality for the reader that will allow him to push those facts to the side and ignore them, thereby, giving him the question he was seeking for his answer.