lew@ihuxr.UUCP (11/21/83)
As an answer to my question, "To what should I attribute the contorted machinations of creationist doctrine?" (... in view of the fact that religious conviction doesn't preclude rational thought), uiuccsb!eich suggests that evolution being "... still an area where contested legitimate theories clash, is ripe for `debunking' from a `scientific' standpoint." I agree that this accounts for a lot of said machinations, though not the most contorted of them. The creationist attack on conventional Natural History is so thoroughgoing that its selfmade characterization as an alternative to Darwinism is itself a gigantic contortion. One need not even consider the mere existence of life on earth before one runs headlong into creationists' bizarre contentions. I refer to their accounts of geologic strata according to various "flood" theories, and to their rehashes of physical theory, of which Barry Setterfield's is an example. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew