I just received a nice email from Mr. Mackay, in which he admits that he’s got it all wrong. He now accepts evolution, and is willing to interpret Genesis as being somewhat metaphorical.

Just kidding! But he should, shouldn’t he?

We’ve seen that John’s religious dogmatism is so strong that no amount of distorting or ignoring evidence is beyond him. As long as it’s fashioned to fit with Genesis, he hears a melodious ring of truth. If it can’t fit, he doesn’t hear it at all.

The evidence suggests that this is exactly how creationists manage to misread the data so dramatically. John owed us a similar explanation for how, as he believes, the biologists could be so wrong – but he manifestly failed to do so.

Instead, we got quotemines and a failure to answer the vast majority of my challenges. When he did answer them, he fell into absurdities: for example, his comments on so-called flood geology commit him to denying myriad facts in geology, chemistry, biology, astronomy, archaeology, and even basic laws of physics.

The main theme I pursued was that there are multiple lines of utterly conclusive evidence for common descent, all based on the same common sense reasoning. John’s comments on this theme descend into contradiction. For example, he’s happy to accept the conclusive evidence for common descent in some cases (e.g. kangaroos and bacteria), but arbitrarily rejects that very same evidence in others (e.g. primates and mammals). He argues that species-level gaps in the fossil record show common descent to be impossible in those cases, while blithely admitting that exactly similar or bigger gaps exist among current organisms that are related. He denies that we’ve ever observed evolution, but needs it to happen so fast that we could film it.

John: When your hypothesis leads to contradiction, that means the hypothesis is false. (John’s not worried, though, because if the Bible says black is white, or that there are circumstances in which it’s OK to beat people to death, it must be true.)

Addendum
Since I’ve been denied the right to post even the smallest comment in response to John’s debate summary (in which it’s rumoured he’ll be linking to lots of rubbish without fear of me exposing him), here are some links that might help you figure out where any new mistakes are:

• Talk Origins (see especially here [updated here] and here. If John falsely implies that a common creator can explain the pattern of organism similarities, see here.
• Talk Reason
• NCSE
• evangelical Christian biologist Dennis Venema
• The Panda’s Thumb group blog
• A simple introduction to evolution

Thanks to John Mackay, the Creation Club… and to you for reading!