Um, Hank, I don't write for the Washington Post. I did write a single book review for them five years ago. That's not out of any particular principle, just that I have a good relationship with the New York Times for science reporting.

However, there is a huge division between the news section of the Washington Post and the op-ed section. And given the way the op-ed section has behaved with George Will--not even bothering to publish a correction when Post's own news staff has pointed out his basic science errors--I wouldn't try to land a piece in the Post's op-ed pages.

It's certainly true that as a freelance writer, I have to resign myself to having my stories appear sometimes in publications that also publish some cheesy stuff on science. But there are also times when even a freelancer has to walk away. This is one such case.

I was just watching CNN and they had a story on about a boy that had some unknown illness that was causing him to "cry blood" (bleed through his tear ducts). They had the kid and his mom on live and then brought on a doctor (and I think the idea was to facilitate the idea that CNN was somehow helping this poor child). I wasn't really paying attention because, frankly, I don't consider this news worthy. Anyway, I was pretty shocked when I heard this medical doctor explaining the workings of the human eye by referring to "God's design"! Now, granted, he's a doctor, not a scientist, and he's entitled to practice medicine and retain whatever religious beliefs he may have. But when he's on national television and says something like that so casually while speaking from a position of medical (and in the eyes of the public, scientific) authority... it just makes me angry.

To be fair, a large number of good scientists regularly irk me when they use anthropomorphic language to describe evolution, biological (or other natural) processes, or use language that implies intent, purpose, or design, without thinking about it. Biologists who speak freely of how "perfectly designed" a creature is just fall into the same kind of logical trap. Natural does not think or intend, and even if it did or could, we'd have no way of knowing or proving. When I hear a scientist, or worse yet a science teacher, talk about "selection" in a way that implies some kind of conscious affirmation, or that evolution "tries" various designs. I think these are not very different habits from what creationists do, only creationists do it consciously toward the end of promoting and lending the aura of legitimacy to their religious point of view. Most scientists I think either do it innocently, because evolution is really a highly abstract statistical process and as human beings we need to understand the world in terms of our own experience, and/or because they themselves harbor informal but still quasi-religious sentimentalities and attitudes toward "nature" as some kind of sacred entity or thing as has been common for scientists from the beginnings of science. But they are both guilty of similar errors in thinking and misrepresentation of evolution and biology as we currently understand them.

On the whole of the issue, I think the creationism-vs-evolution debate is an important debate to have, philosophically and theologically and for the public to better understand what science is and is not. I agree with you whole-heartedly that putting a creationist on the same level as a scientist and calling it a "scientific" debate rather than a philosophical discussion is a bad idea... for the same reason you don't put a Holocaust Denier on the air with real historians and call it a history seminar. However, I do think that scientists need to open up to combatting the challenge from creationism head-on, but in a way that recognizes that science itself is tentative by nature. For example, when you say that the science on evolution "has been settled" that is misleading and incorrect. Science by definition is never settled. It's an open-ended search for better and better answers. No one in their right mind would say that the science on gravity is "settled". By communicating to the public that science is a set of absolute and value-neutral facts that constitute some kind of Platonic Truth about reality, is flawed because it means the public wont understand how science actually works. Creationsists simply point out that evolution is "just a theory" as if that were some kind of insult because "theory" in the popular vernacular means something very different from scientific theory. The public does not realize at large that even the most hard-proven natural "laws" have problems with them and aren't completely understood. Newton was very wrong about gravity, for example, and we're currently trying to find the fabled graviton (which might not even exist). Science is not about Truth or facts, or right or wrong, it's about a set of basic rules and principles for playing the game of trying to understand nature. I don't think most people get that and I think the popular misconceptions around science are the biggest weapon in the arsenal of the anti-evolutionists, because they can attack science through the public's misunderstandings of what science is, rather than have to compete with science scientifically.