Publicizing ideas

As an afterthought inspired by Michael Roberts' comments on Mortenson's
book, I note that Answers In Genesis has for some time made available
Mortenson's work on their webpage, pretty much chapter by chapter. Now it's
available in a slick book that I have cited in an essay I recently wrote on
the history of creationist hermeneutics. But I lack a publicist like AIG.
Nothing I've ever written has been read as much as my whale story on the ASA
webpage, but the few thousand hits that gets annually pales in comparison to
the traffic at AIG. Those folks believe they're winning the war of ideas,
but (as we all realize) hardly anyone who goes into science in a serious way
will ever believe their stuff--the exodus out of YEC for scientifically
trained people is much larger than the ingress, and it will always be so.
Audience is the key. What works for people who really know science is
worlds away from what works for lay people, particularly for committed
laypeople whose own conversion experience tells them (rightly) that
Christians live differently and evaluate things differently from
non-Christians: so why shouldn't we also do science differently? The
distinction they fail to get without hard thinking is that between a
Christian *view* of biology, geology, etc. and a *Christian biology,
geology, etc.* And hard thinking about science, genuinely hard thinking
about it, is not attractive to most laypersons (and it isn't hard to
understand why not).

YEC is presently winning the war of publicizing ideas, at least among
conservative Protestants. They will never win the war of the ideas, without
being able to persuade many Christians who know the genuine science. But
the politics of science, on pretty much any issue, is driven by the politics
and not by the science.

Ted
Received on Fri Jul 29 13:38:58 2005