The other day my good lady rented the movie “Creation”, which, despite its fundagelical sounding title, is an account of the life of Charles Darwin during the period in which he wrote “On the Origins of Species”.

The movie, however, is not the point of this discussion – the special features on the DVD are.
Following the movie, we tried to watch one of the special features, a “documentary” (read: “a load of old bollocks”) about the “debate” (read “Christian apologia”) over Darwin’s life and work. Featuring prominently in the interviews in the “documentary” were the views of (the now deceased) Emeritus Professor (of combustion science) Graham Dixon-Lewis of the University of Leeds. Who was a Young-Earth Creationist. When his title was first put on screen, it carried the addendum “speaking in a personal capacity”, but his title was then displayed without this rider whenever a section of his interview was played.

Again and again, he claimed scientific authority over the debate, again and again he called evolutionists unscientific and rubbished the evidence, their ideas, even the way that they think – all while his titles were cheerfully displayed beneath his image. Let’s remember that his masters, doctorate and professional accreditations were all in chemistry – he had no qualifications in either biology or physics – but that was not made clear by his title as displayed.

Ignoring the fact that a documentary produced for the BBC as a special feature on one of their DVDs seems to have been produced by Christian apologetics, let’s look at the bigger issue:

How much time should we give to debating those whose views are so extreme and so absurd? How much attention do we pay to such fringe lunatics?

If, for example, I was to make a documentary about Magellan circumnavigating the globe, featuring many great historians, geographers, explorers, travellers and sailors, would I also be obliged to prominently display the views of a member of the Flat-Earth Society alongside a list of his academic accolades in an unrelated field?

Richard Dawkins has famously refused to debate a number of fundagelicals whose views are on the lunatic fringe because he believes that to engage them on an equal platform lends credibility to their cause: That is, if a prominent atheist and biologist takes them seriously enough to debate them, there is a danger that outside observers will reach the conclusion that their views should have equal weight.

Is Dawkins right? Is ignoring idiocy the answer? Do we try to engage and convert them? Or are they simply to entrenched in dogma to think for themselves?

Edit: Nzo posted this video in comments below, and I thought it was rather good :-)
Edit 2: The video might not be safe for work (depending on where you work) due to stong language,