Tuesday, October 25, 2011

John Mackay, Creationist

The name "John Mackay" popped up in my RSS feed today. Mackay is a prominent Australian creationist and director of Creation Research, an online ministry funded by donations with the mission of discovering evidence to support biblical creation. 

Mackay has had the good fortune to debate such skeptics as Richard Dawkins and myself (the only time I get to feature in a sentence with Richard Dawkins). Dawkins has since enforced the policy of not debating creationists, but I'm still willing!

Here is Mr Mackay speaking on the subject of evolution and creation. I'm not sure of the location, but it is evidently not Australia.


While I find most of what Mackay teaches to be at best wrong and at worst deplorable (Heath Ledger of Brokeback Mountain - DEAD), I want to focus on only one issue he has with evolution today. In his presentation, Mackay repeats over and over that the bible is very clear that animals produce "after their kind".
"The bible says ten times in genesis chapter 1 that God made creatures to produce after their own kinds and the theory of evolution says they haven't... What I've just done is reduced them (the two theories) to their simplest essence".
No, what you've done Mr Mackay is to reduce your audience to your simple essence, because what you have just said about evolution is incorrect. Evolution does not suggest that creatures do not, or have not, always produced "after their kind". Dawkins elucidated it well in his thought experiment during a recent discussion with Henry Finder at the New Yorker Festival. Because species boundaries are arbitrary, and because evolution is gradual, every creature that ever lived produced offspring that would have been classified in the same species, had their been classifiers available.



I take a particular interest in Mackay, because not only does he try and get into schools in my city, local churches donate to his cause of misinformation and bigotry.

2 comments:

  1. See http://blogs.ubc.ca/markbergen/ for an online debate in which Mackay thoroughly embarrasses himself.

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  2. Thanks, I've caught bits and pieces of it. Might do an analysis.

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