I've been thinking about Pete's latest 'straw man' of "scientific consensus". What he seemed to be implying with that jibe is that mainstream scientists, working in the field of evolutionary biology and related fields, are sharing a common delusion or are engaging in some sort of giant (anti-religious?) conspiracy. I have challenged him on the conspiracy hypothesis before, on this thread, and he has ruled it out. So that leaves us with the common delusion. So we are asked to believe (with no evidence, of course) that many thousands of scientists worldwide, plus the great institutions of learning that they are affiliated to, plus numerous grant awarding bodies, plus the editors and staff of the distinguished journals that they publish their work in are ALL deluded; does that seem likely? Does it also seem likely that a bunch of religious fundamentalists - based mainly in the US (sorry Joe!) - are the only group who are not deluded?

And if evolutionary biologists and palaeontologists and geologists and geneticists and molecular biologists are deluded, where does it stop? Are physicists and chemists deluded too? If all scientists are deluded, we wouldn't be having this discussion, in this medium, would we? We wouldn't be having this discussion because personal computers and the Internet wouldn't exist, would they?

So who am I to take most seriously and find most credible: a bunch of religious fundamentalist bigots and a barely literate, scientifically ignorant oaf they appear to have brainwashed or thousands of ingenious, hard working, mainstream scientists? That's not a difficult choice, is it?