Let there be light:

In a recent phone interview with Richard Dawkins, EYE WEEKLY Senior Editor Edward Keenan interviewed him by phone recently.  These were my favorite questions and answers from that conversation:
It seems that a key problem in debating the “history deniers,” as you call them — those who still insist on creationism as the truth — don’t accept logic and evidence as reasonable forms of argument…
I think that’s probably right. I don’t actually often come across them face-to-face. I tend to move in university circles. But I think you’ve put it very well: they can’t deal with logic.

In the book, you say evolution is a theory in the way that heliocentrism is a theory — a point you make clear throughout the book. What I kept wondering about as I read on is that this is such an open-and-shut case when the evidence is arrayed like this, that I don’t know how you proceed from here in dealing with people who still won’t accept the evidence.
Well, this is a fascinating thing. Because when you see some of the people who clearly know the evidence and have seen it — the most striking one is a man called Kurt Wise, who is an American geologist who studied geology at Chicago, got a PhD at Harvard — absolutely top-class qualifications — and realized that his science conflicted with his fundamentalist religion and took a decision that where there was a conflict — which was almost everywhere — he was going to go with scripture. And he said, he actually said, he quoted Martin Luther: “Here I must stand,” and he said, “If all the evidence in the world points to an old earth” — he’s particularly a young-earth creationist — “I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a young earth creationist because that’s what holy scripture says.” So here’s a man who — unlike many of them who are pretty ignorant — is not ignorant, and he’s explicitly admitting that he throws out evidence when it conflicts with his beliefs. How do you deal with somebody like that?

Well, I don’t know. It does seem that people like that — particularly in the United States — are among the most vocal supporters of the death penalty. So they believe that “beyond a reasonable doubt” and the weighing of evidence is a valid means of determining the truth in those cases, and yet…
I see what you’re saying. You mean they’re capable of applying the standards of evidence in other cases. And presumably they lead normal lives where they might be in business or — in any sort of court of law, as you say — they would weigh up the evidence the same way you or I would weigh up the evidence. And yet, when it comes to this one matter, evidence goes straight out the window.

Full Interview!