Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant, or so says Richard Dawkins

I like the latest gauntlet Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, has thrown down to creationists. Let the duel begin.

"Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: 'Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.' Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.

"Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or 'intelligent design theory' (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name....

"....I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: 'It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history.' Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader’s appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore 'gaps' in the fossil record.

"Many evolutionary transitions are elegantly documented by more or less continuous series of changing intermediate fossils. Some are not, and these are the famous 'gaps'. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a 'gap', the creationist will declare that there are now two gaps! Note yet again the use of a default. If there are no fossils to document a postulated evolutionary transition, the assumption is that there was no evolutionary transition: God must have intervened.

"The creationists’ fondness for 'gaps' in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas."

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Note, how Dawkins looks a lot like the insidious Palpatine in pic above, thus the Darth Vader quote and lightning streaks.