I now really revel in having the foresight to use HP for networking gear, and Dell for servers. This division of labor has kept me happy for 15+ years.

Creationism is an answer to a question that fundamentally doesn't make any sense. There's plenty of such questions, like, for example, "what's the meaning of life". It's really easy to ask a nonsensical question, and people do it all the time, deluding themselves that the answer might matter. Answers to nonsensical questions, other than those explaining the nonsense itself, are pointless.

If you truly believe that god is omnipresent and omniscient, then it doesn't make any sense to ask if god created the universe. It's like asking if cars are made out of cars - it's absurd. No matter what the answer is, the omnipresence and omniscience remains unchanged. Omnipresence and omniscience makes the "who did it" question entirely moot. Whatever the "true" answer to the question about "why are we here" and "who made us" is, it is an entirely irrelevant matter. It has absolutely no importance whatsoever. You can't make any decisions by it, there is zero tangibility to it, it's just a silly distraction.

Science isn't there to replace value systems, but you don't need to believe in any higher being just to be a good person and not a prick.

Creationism: belief in a creator that created our universe etc. The creationism popular in the U.S. is just, um, a sociologically expected conclusion of an underlying problem.

Creationism at the basic level is simply the belief that there is a creator. The protestant excesses are just icing on the cake, but not necessary.

That's why creationists who know what they are doing will make up most of the facts as they go along. Been there, heard it done first hand. Good luck having any argument with that.

I insist on partaking in the controversy of FSM. I think I'll have some noodle appendages for dinner.

A well trained creationist speaker is an expert at making stuff up and moving goalposts as they go along. That's the impression I get from listening to the supposedly best ones. They rig the game to win from the get go. There's no such thing as researching someone's yet-not-made-up-on-the-spot fiction. You'd need to be able to predict the future, quite literally.

There is no such thing as "creationist positions and arguments". The best public creationist speakers make up "facts" as they go, and their position is what people want to hear, it's so incoherent. That's why they beat anyone else in debates, almost each and every time. There's literally no way to debate them, even if you had your entire life to prepare for a discussion. A debate must be on an even field, and when you debate someone to whom facts and truth doesn't matter at all, you're in for a game that's rigged for you to lose.

I don't know if Nye realizes it himself, but this might be his very undoing. Because, you see, researching facts and logical argumentation requires hard work. Creationists, on the other hand, can and do make up fiction on the spot. There's absolutely no way to debate, in realtime, someone with an infinite supply of made-up "facts". Most "serious debates" I've seen between scientists and creationists basically shows that the former have little handle on what's really going on, and are taken along for a game that's dealt by the creationists. Again: it's very easy to come up with fiction on the spot, good luck disproving or discussing and endless supply of fiction.

A scientific theory must simply offer you predictive power. If anyone says that creationism is a scientific theory, then it's a simple matter to check it. Let them make predictions, and let us all test them. It's as simple as it gets. The debate doesn't make any sense when the creationists insist that they can debate while pretending that scientific theory means something else. Music theory is closer to being a scientific theory than creationism ever was, or will be. Once you understand music theory you can figure out how to make music, at the very least.

You must be completely unaware of how creationist "arguments" work. You're debating a bunch of stuff that is either irrelevant to the discussion, or just plainly made up. Since they have unlimited supply of made-up "facts", there's no way to have any real-time debate. There's literally no way to prepare to debate them and have any chance to offer even a semblance of finishing with an upper hand. It's a well-understood tactic, and they take full advantage of it. You'd need to have dozens of researchers on realtime chat, working furiously at fact-checking and debunking everything the other side says, in order to prevail in a "debate" with a creationist.

It is, quite literally, like wrestling pigs in the mud, except that the pigs are the only ones who enjoy it, but everyone gets dirty. It's an absolutely splendid analogy, on many levels.

LOLWUT? Catholics are creationists by definition. Sure, not all creationists are catholics.

He is a credentialed troll, I give you that. Why is he a troll? Because he knows full well where he is wrong, and he does it only for his own satisfaction.

You have no idea how creationist debates go. They literally offer no ideas at all, nothing sane that could be debated. Almost every sentence they utter is either nonsensical, or contains a bunch of made-up stuff that you have simply no way of preparing to counter. They literally make up facts on the spot, and there's simply no argument to that. Nobody enjoys a "discussion" where one party is constantly delaying things by looking them up in various sources.