Jon:
So, what really keeps those Creos ticking? How can you present point after point after point and have it rejected, and still keep trying?
A number of good points have been made. I'd add that one thing keeping creationists going is the sheer inability to imagine changing their views. They just can't imagine keeping their faith and accepting evolutionary theory at the same time.
It's possible to do this, of course. Millions of people do it every day. But they can't imagine it because they've been told time and again that it is
not possible. They've been told that they would betray everything they value if they even attempt it. Their teachers have raised the stakes of accommodating science beyond all sense of proportion.
This conditioning is the result of polarisation. It's the kind of polarisation that sets in whenever you have a long-running Hatfield-McCoy feud. (Scientists don't see the situation like this, but creationists do.) Too many grudges exist from previous battles to allow compromise to be allowed. Too many wounds administered in previous rounds still throb.
Even so, the creationist position is eroding dramatically. With each generation the old wounds fade. For the young, plate tectonics is common knowledge and Scopes is history. The shock of the new has passed. The young are free to reconsider, to entertain new ideas and find more fertile ground. Time is on their side.
The erosion of outmoded beliefs will continue. There will never a single day when we see the Berlin Wall fall. But the YEC position has retreated from an enormous amount of ground in only one generation. It is becoming increasingly obvious to all that it has the weight of all the sciences against it, every one. Its narrow focus on 'Darwinism' in the face of this flood is not only inadequate, it's downright quaint.
In coming decades creationism will wane in importance and finally vanish as a factor in any serious public debate about science education. There will never be a day when people wake up and say 'Hey, it's gone!' They will just talk of other things.
The descendants of today's YECs will be, in the main, religious people. They will just look back with amusement and a touch of embarassment at the quaint views espoused by their grandparents. Religious people today already take this attitude with once-prevalent pronouncements that defended slavery, opposed vaccines, and promoted Prohibition. The same thing will happen with YEC literalism. The descendants of today's fundamentalists will see evolution denial as one of those old-timey, misguided, back-in-the-day features of their religious history that no one owns anymore.
Edited by Archer Opterix, : clarity.
Archer
All species are transitional.
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