I wrote it because, creationism is dangerous. It replaces evidence-based knowledge with superstition and creates the impression that cultural prejudice and ignorant incredulity are better measures of reality than observation, analysis and reason.
Now more than ever we need our politicians, law-makers and captains of industry to be able to make sense of complex data and use it to make wise decisions, not dismiss it as based on ‘flawed’ concepts and the result of conspiracies designed to turn people away from the ‘truth’ as revealed in ancient texts declared to be holy. As is clearly shown in the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Document and in the wilful misrepresentations of science its fellows dutifully feed to the largely scientifically-illiterate public, there is a hidden political agenda that depends on people believing falsehoods and thinking anti-science is some sort of moral crusade to restore Western civilisation to a notional ideal golden age in pre-renaissance Europe when the slave trade was booming and witch-burning was a regular spectacle in the local town square.
This was a time when people like Copernicus and Galileo would be persecuted and deprived of their livelihood and even their life, for revealing the empirical evidence that Earth orbits the sun – not because they had falsified the data but because the data falsified the Bible. The sacred superstitions, even though empirically proved wrong, had to be defended against the truth as revealed by the physical data.
Why Evolution Triumphs Over Intelligent Design. In a world where science and pseudoscience often collide, Twenty Reasons To Reject Creationism: Understanding Evolution delivers a clear, evidence-based dismantling of creationist arguments. This book systematically exposes the flawed logic and misrepresentations underlying Intelligent Design (ID), while celebrating the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution.Creationism, and its pseudo-science big brother, intelligent design, makes no testable predictions so is useless as the basis for further enquiry and progress in understanding how the world works, how species evolve, how pests and parasites can be controlled and how to target a new generation of antibiotics and medicinal drugs, or improve food production whilst protecting delicate environments and biodiversity. Perhaps most importantly for the long-term survival of our species and this one planet we call home; we need science to combat climate change and avoid climate catastrophe. This will not be done by endlessly reinterpreting ancient texts and concluding ‘God did it!’
Drawing from genetics, comparative anatomy, palaeontology, and molecular biology, this book demonstrates how life’s complexity is not the product of a designer but of countless natural processes shaped by evolutionary forces. From transitional fossils and genetic evidence to observed instances of speciation and the evolution of antibiotic resistance, every chapter reveals how evolution continues to explain the diversity of life with unmatched clarity.
The book also confronts the misuse of science by leading ID proponents like William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, and Michael Behe, exposing their statistical distortions and theological presuppositions. Additionally, it explores the historical and cultural misuse of ID and its impact on science education.
Written for curious minds, science enthusiasts, and defenders of reason, this book empowers readers with the knowledge to challenge pseudoscientific claims and appreciate the elegance of evolutionary theory.
Evolution is not just a theory—it is a fact supported by mountains of evidence. This book explains why
Religion provides excuses for frauds who need excuses. It has no other purpose in modern society. Religion Balkanises society at a time when, in a global economy, we need more tolerance for different ideas, not less. We need fewer walls between us, not bigger and better ones. There may have been a time when religions served the social purpose of maintaining group cohesion and identity with social ethics maintained not by active monitoring and policing but by the superstition that a judgemental deity had provided the rules and was watching to ensure compliance.
We now know that model of the origin of social ethics is fundamentally flawed because cultural, memetic, evolution better explains the evolution of group norms and gene-meme co-evolution better explains the evolution of modern humans in modern technological societies.
Primitive notions that our belief system is the only true moral code, and all others are the result of evil and conspiracies trying to destroy our one true faith, might have served us well on the African savannah, but now they create the very evil that religions purports to oppose and give rise to hatred for strangers that can only come from dogma and in-group/out-group cultlike thinking – encouraged by cult leaders with a vested interest. While professing compassion and tolerance, religions provoke intolerance and hate. You can be sure that any politician with messages of hate will have religion skulking somewhere in the background providing his/her excuse.
The recent growth of White supremacism in the USA in the guise of Christian nationalism is a direct result of evangelical Christianity lending support to neo-fascist political extremism, nurtured by creationist propaganda of anti-science cults like Answers in Gensis. The Discovery Institute’s Wedge Strategy has a declared aim of using pseudoscience and disinformation to attack and destroy the American public’s confidence in science, as the prelude to a root and branch takeover of all aspects of American political, cultural and scientific life in a Taliban-style fundamentalist Christian theocracy.
The supreme irony is that the White supremacism these neo-fascists espouse is probably the most perverse interpretation of social Darwinism – the only form of Darwinism the far right embraced with enthusiasm.
Such a theocracy will, just like in Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, stratify American society still further and deny basic human rights to women and minorities, because a few lines of text in a holy book appear to give credence to the idea that this is what God wants. And if the necessary text can’t be found, there is always the fall-back of claiming ‘God came to me in a dream and said…’ And what methodology does creationism provide for testing and falsifying those sorts of claims?
American secular democracy, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights once stood as the ‘shining beacon on the hill’ as the great achievement of the European Enlightenment with its ideas of the essential equality of Man (which includes all genders); that each of us is entitled to hold beliefs that may differ from those of his neighbour and that government should come from the collective will of free people expressed through the ballot box, and exercised on their behalf.
These ideas lay behind both the American and the French Revolutions, expressed in the French slogan, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’, and eventually to the post-World War I doctrine of national self-determination of free people. Ideas that broke up the old Imperial powers into free democratic states, that was only threatened by the rise of fascism with the support of the Catholic Church, that had to be put down in the name of freedom by the Western democracies, fighting to establish free democracies in the US model.
That fundamentalist American Christians now see this secular democracy as something to be attacked and overthrown in favour of the brutal medieval regimes that characterised Medieval Europe is something the must be opposed.
Extensive use was made of ChatGPT4o to assist with research and to provide the extensive references made to original research material.
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