You really must read Jason Rosenhouse's reports on the 2005 Creation Mega Conference, Part 1 and Part 2 (with more to come). What struck me is the elaborate set up for presentations, with multiple projectors and video feeds of the speaker…yet it was considered impractical to allow time or microphones for questions. The blatant hucksterism, in which the speakers spend 5-15 minutes exhorting the audience to buy, buy, buy their books and tapes on sale in the hallway was also amusing.

Not so amusing is the simple-minded anti-intellectualism of the speakers. These are people who have turned stupidity and ignorance into virtues.

But what really bugged me about the talk was not the extreme shallowness of Kerby's thinking. No, I'm used to that. What bugged me were his incessant imprecations that we be humble before the glories of nature.

Humility? How dare these people talk about humility! You know what scientists do when confronted with nature's complexity? First they spend five years or more in graduate school, living in near-poverty, having no life, studying all the time while being used as cheap labor by the university, just to get a PhD. Then they go out into a job market that presents the very real possibility of unemployment as the reward for all that hard work. If they're lucky they'll land a post-doc, and bounce around the country for a while struggling to find a permanent position. Even if they are lucky enough to land a permanent position they could very well find themselves in some two by nothing town in the middle of nowhere. They spend years trying to get a research program off the ground, scrapping for grant money, and fighting with ornery referees to get their research published.

And why do they do that? They do it because they know that's what it takes if you want to understand nature's complexity just a little bit better. That's what it takes to make the tiniest dent in the sum total of human ignorance.

That's humility.

Hey! That's kind of personal…what is Jason doing talking about me?

Oh, actually, I guess that is a kind of generic description of the typical scientific career, isn't it.

One point Jason didn't make that is relevant to this, though, is that Falwell was pleased that they had 2,000 attendees at the conference. The last time I attended the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, which was but one sub-discipline within biology and was attended almost exclusively by people at various points in that difficult career ladder described above, there were over 20,000 attendees (additional perspective: one Neuroscience meeting was hot on the heels of another meeting that was twice our size, and we had to struggle with all of those people trying to leave as we were coming in. It was some national convention of car dealerships). Curiously enough, though, small high-budget meetings of raving idiots like the Creation Mega Conference get much more attention than the larger, regular, and much more substantial meetings of scientific societies. I think that's part of the problem—scientists go off to these meetings thinking exclusively of meeting with their peers, and there isn't much effort made to appeal to the general public.

I believe the Mega Conference can be easily summed up by this quote from Carl Kerby:

Do not let evidence fuel your appreciation of God. Let your appreciation of God influence your view of the evidence.

Having seen that, I don't need to have attended this conference.