This creationist talk was abysmal even by creationists’ standards. I shall leave aside critiques of presentation style and personality. The content presented was more irrelevant and poorly reasoned than I’d expected. You always expect some form of confusion between abiogenesis and the theory of evolution. Geisler, however, did something more ludicrous: he spent the first ten minutes explaining the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. This as a prelude to making the argument “if the universe has a beginning, then there must be a beginner”. Leaving aside the obvious flaws in that “argument”, it is irrelevant to the theory of evolution for the same reasons that abiogenesis is irrelevant to the theory of evolution.

There was the usual stuff about irreducible complexity, blah blah. He didn’t seem to have a good understanding of the concept of ‘complexity’, and freely interchanged it with the quite different concepts of ‘intelligence’ and ‘mind’. So that questions about how self-reproducing complexity could have originated from a chemical soup were massaged into catch-phrases like “mind can come only from mind; mind cannot come from matter”.

The part that sent me spluttering the most was when Geisler brought up the protein folding argument against abiogenesis. I hadn’t heard it before, and it must be one of the foremost examples of creationists not bothering to learn the science that they are criticising. We take ages to find out how a protein folds because we do so by calculating the solution to enormously complex equations. But a protein does not fold by doing its own calculations to determine how it should fold. It folds as a consequence of obeying the laws of physics. The time it takes to calculate the trajectory of an object has no relation to the time the object takes to complete its trajectory.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that most of the audience saw through the pathetic show that was Geisler’s “defence” of ID.