It should be borne in mind that most creationists are what one might call passive creationists. They accept what they're told, they take no particular interest in the subject. Well, there are a lot of passive false beliefs. People think that Marie Antoinette said "Let them eat cake". They've heard it, they've not investigated it, for some inexplicable reason they're not particularly interested in the French Revolution.
And the same could be said of a lot of people believing things that are actually true. What proportion of people who think that the world isn't flat could give you cogent reasons why it's round? It's a received idea.
Which is not a bad thing, generally speaking. If we had to verify for ourselves all the things we think we know then we'd hardly have time for anything else.
Then there are the activist creationists. But many of them are peculiarly passive. They have a religious obligation to recite certain words to certain people. "The Second Law of Thermodynamics blah-de-blah-de-blah ...". But they are still not actually interested in the subject matter. They feel duty-bound to say certain things about thermodynamics: the fact that there is a science known as thermodynamics and that books on it are freely available at their local library doesn't even pique their interest; that's not the sort of thing they're interested in. They can recite their nonsense about it without once being tempted to learn anything about it --- their ignorance is not
willful, but
apathetic.
What does that leave us with. Well, there are the *** For Jesus mentioned in another post. I've met one of them myself, as I shall describe in a later post. But while the are willful, they are not ignorant.
Then there are the people who to try to nail creationist arguments down, and give up on creationism because they find that they fail. They study (to take the same example again) thermodynamics, so that they can say: "Look, evolution's impossible,
and here's the math". Then they find out that they're wrong, and so they cease to be ignorant.
And then there's a residue of people who are willfully ignorant. But perhaps even the would be merely apathetically ignorant unless challenged on the subject.
To take a case from my own experience, I stumbled across a website where some guy was being wrong about geology. Par for the course, you will say. But the
way in which he was being wrong about geology led me to enter into correspondence with him. According to him, geologists think that rocks are formed by underwater sedimentation followed by uplift or recession at which point rocks are formed
by the sediment drying out.
When I suggested to him that he should find out how geologists actually think rocks are formed, by reading a geology textbook, he refused to do so on the grounds that he disagreed with the philosophy expressed in geology textbooks.
The fact that there is no philosophy in geology textbooks is something that he also won't find out by
not reading geology textbooks. But even if there was, he might still have wished to know his enemy. He is left in the peculiar position of arguing against an idea that no-one holds; he is incapable of debunking actual geology because he has no idea what it is.
Well, I feel that I have rambled on long enough. The point I wanted to make is that
willful ignorance is actually rather rare. I think that ignorance among creationists is usually the result of apathy, uninterest, passivity, and laziness. After all, how hard do you have to try
not to know something? That's easy. Any fool can do that.
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