The Creation Science/Intelligent Design movements are, at their best, an imitation of science that fails to incorporate its defining characteristics in a way that could transform it into an actual science. The scientific method helps one overcome his/her subjectivity in interpreting data and generating hypotheses. The religiously-based pseudo-sciences begin and end with their prejudices. A scientist is forced to continually reevaluate his/her assumptions based on new data. Their religious counterparts start with a seed of the already implausible, and proceed to spin elaborate rationalizations around what is plainly the failure of their hypothesis.

Take the Garden of Eden. The most cartoonish of biblical literalists paint a disquieting scene of razor-toothed velociraptors frolicking amiably with the world's only two human inhabitants. Animals with pointy teeth can usually be relied on to be carnivores; I'm sure biology can elaborate on this, but it's also common sense. Creationists argue that, "Before original sin, every animal was an herbivore." Even the ones with giant pointed teeth. Animals with flat teeth are able to grind plant matter down to a fine pulp in order to get the most nutrition. Ruminants even have multiple stages of digestion for this purpose. How is an animal with pointed teeth meant to live off of plants when it's only got the ability to rip it into large chunks and swallow? Let's say that the velociraptor was "designed" with pointed teeth, and began its reign as a vegetarian, happily subsisting on massive indigestible chunks of vegetation. Sure, I can live with that. But the proposal is that everything we know today about animals and their diets was suspended until "original sin."

Today we are explicitly aware of the genetic pitfalls of inbreeding. But, if we take the Genesis accounts literally, we're told we're all the product of inbreeding: which should not only seem jarringly unpleasant, especially in the context of a "moral" book, but is plainly impossible. "Original sin" swings to the rescue of this naked absurdity as well. Before it, the Creationist explains, there was no "corruption" in the genetic code, so inbreeding wasn't a biological problem. It wasn't, apprently, a moral problem then either. Yeesh. Are you sure Adam and Eve weren't bonobos?

I'll close on the subject of speciation. When Noah gathered two of every "kind" of animal, apparently traversing the world -- did Noah live on Pangea and have a supersonic dune buggy and helicopter? -- to put them on his big boat with the one window, Creationists say there were tens of thousands of "kinds" of animals. The, incidentally baseless, answer we get to how there are now millions of species of animals, having split off from their tens of thousands of "kinds," is nothing short of a miraculous feat of evolution. A radical, improbable firestorm of mutations generating millions of species in only thousands of years. This is somehow easier to accept than gradual evolution and speciation over millions of years?