I started engaging in on-line discussions back in the second half of the 1980's on CompuServe. One thing I quickly learned was that the fastest and easiest way to get a creationist angry is to try to take his claims seriously and try to discuss it with him. And the more I would try, the angrier and more irrational he would become. As best as I could figure it out, he believed that his faith depended on that claim being true, but he had no idea what he was talking about; he did not understand his own claim. He had heard that claim and found it convincing, because he was already convinced (one of the pre-requisites for accepting creationist claims, I discovered later), so he presented it with full confidence, but then when questioned about it he found himself unable to even discuss it, let alone defend it.
For example, I was emailed this claim:
quote:
As any good scientist will tell you, the sun burns half of its mass every year. If you multiply the sun's mass by millions (even though science says it is in the billions) the sun will be so incredibly huge it will stretch out past Pluto. And if you say that the planets would stay close to the sun as it shrank, then why don't the planets still move closer?
He was a high-school student who was given that claim by a Christian camp counselor. I analyzed that claim in excruciating detail, showing him that it was blatantly and obviously false and explaining what scientists really say. He learned from that and accepted that he had been misled. Actually, it was in searching for other instances of this claim (which I did not find) that I stumbled upon Kent Hovind's bogus solar-mass-loss claim.
The point is that creationists freely circulate and adopt all kinds of false claims without understanding any of the science behind them. They can get away with it so long as it's only other creationists and scientific-illiterate non-creationists that they relate those false claims to, but they immediately get a rude awakening when they encounter someone who knows something about the subject. I've also encountered creationists who are more than eager to talk to and bully the unwary, but will immediately try to disengage the moment they realize that they're talking to someone knowledgeable. Obviously, those creationists that their claims will be refuted, but I believe that most creationists we encounter on forums are acting out of ignorance and over-confidence.
I basically there being two kinds of creationists: those who know something about science and produce many of the claims and those who don't know the science and just repeat the claims that they hear. The first kind know better than to discuss their claims on forums, whereas the second kind don't know any better.
Of course, that's too simplistic. There's a broad grey-area overlap between those two kinds. There are also those creationists who are ignorant about "creation science" and do not realize where the claims they've heard and bought into came from. But still it seems to settle down to those creationists who know better than to post on forums and those who don't.