When it comes to the age of things, the ignorance, and/or intellectual dishonesty/lack of rigor, and/or denial, of the young earth creationists is readily discernable, and their young-earth POV is obviously and laughably erroneous to anyone with merely a superficial understanding of geology and cosmology. So it’s hard for me to get too upset over a Kansas school board chairman/veterinarian who also happens to believe that God created the universe 6,500 years ago. (He apparently “compartmentalizes,” as they say.)

Additionally, what many of these folk are actually fighting is the blatant atheism that many neo-Darwinian proponents, e.g. Dawkins, insist biological evolution mandates. So, IMO, it’s pretty much a bullshit debate. Besides, I’d guess that the veterinarian/school board chairman referred to in the article probably has the highest regard for the importance of basic math and science, which is really where so many American kids are failing, and which is really the scientific/mathematical “illiteracy” that we need to be concerned about; not whether they’ve bought into the Dawkins neo-Darwinian view of a directionless evolution.

I’d say there’s lots of ignorance, and/or disingenuousness, and/or agendas on both sides of this issue. A blatant example on the pro Darwinian side is in the article itself when the author, regarding what he says is a “remarkable misunderstanding of the nature of the scientific method,” and that we use “evidence from the past in formulating hypotheses,” asserts that, “This is how we distinguish theories that work, like evolution or gravitation.”

But lumping “evolution” and “gravitation” into so-called “theories that work” is a disingenuous, misleading non sequitur—“evolution” and “gravity” are different things. The reality is simply that the available evidence indicates that life, like everything else in the universe, evolved over time—“evolution,” essentially, is simply a fact, and the actual question/issue is by what mechanisms life evolves. E.g., selection pressures imposed by the environment appear to be a factor. Gravity, OTOH, is a basic force of nature, and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity and Einstein’s general relativity are superb theories of gravity that provide equations that make (extraordinarily accurate) predictions, and that are obviously falsifiable.