PZ Myers recently blogged about a dialog, if you can call it that, with a creationist in Belfast on his trip to Ireland. PZ's main point is that science isn't about excluding creationism, but that creationists aren't bringing anything to science. The Creationists are self excluding.
That brought to my mind an analogy. Surprisingly (ha ha) it involves food.
Think of science as a pot luck dinner. I'll call the participants of the dinner Pot Luckists. All the Pot Luckists bring their own dish to share with the rest of the attendants. Each dish is a specialty of that Pot Luckist and they've spent quite a bit of time and effort making sure it's tasty and nutritious. The only requirement to attend the dinner is that you bring your own dish to the buffet to share with everyone else.
Now, the creationists show up. They have a really pretty box which they say has their dish in it. On the outside of the box is a list of the benefits of their dish, the nutrition values, the health benefits, and so on. They explain for hours how great their dish is and how everyone ought to eat of it. When it comes time to eat, however, they refuse to actually open the box so the rest can see what they brought. In fact, while they eat from all the other dishes (dishes from computer science, weather sciences, medical sciences, energy science, agricultural science, etc.) they don't offer anything of their own. They claim, in fact, that bits and pieces of these other dishes were actually prepared by them and given to the other participants so they could prepare their dishes.
Every time the ingredients for the other dishes are checked they turn out to be fully separate offerings and not from the creationist preparations, or perhaps are incidental at best. Meanwhile, the box the creationists brought still sits unopened. When the other participants ask to see the contents, the creationists exclaim loudly that they will not be excluded, that no one can keep them from opening their box and sharing it with the world. The other participants look on perplexed since that is exactly what they ask, that the creationists open their box and share the contents. Each offer to help open the box is rebuffed with yet more exclamations that they will not be prevented from presenting their dish and that the other participants are all in collusion to prevent them from opening their box.
Pretty soon, the other participants begin to suspect that the box, after all, is empty. The creationists continue shouting that the Pot Luckists are all out to prevent the creationists from sharing their dish at the table. They begin to announce that they will introduce legislation to have every school lunch program include, at full cost to the school system, the empty boxes on every school child's plate so that the school children can see that the Pot Luckers aren't the only ones that have food. Except the boxes can't be opened.
Now, go back and change Pot Luckists with scientists. Change the School Lunch program with the science curriculum and dishes for actual science results.
Science offers real mental nutrition. Creationists just have their empty box, er, I mean book.
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