The Index of Creationist Claims

The Index of Creationist Claims is a great site that demonstrates how useful it is to link arguments directly to rebuttals in a large repository. The Index is well organized and exhaustive. It’s a shame that systems don’t exist where the Creationist side could participate more directly. The site will always be vulnerable to the criticism that the Creationist arguments it rebuts are either out of date or straw man arguments.

One could argue the Index disproves one of my major premises, that forums are terrible for debate, seeing as the source for most of the content in the Index comes from the Talk.Origins newsgroup. I have four points in response to this criticism:

1. Talk.Origins has been around since the 1986,. the Triassic by Internet time. Even with the classic signal to noise ratio of forums you can still manage to generate a body of useful content in that much time.
2. The users on Talk.Origins though it was a good idea to create the index. Thus demonstrating that they weren’t completely satisfied with the forum system.
3. Talk.Origins is hardly accessible to everyone. It’s 80,000+ posts are practically dark matter to search engines or browsing were it not for the Index.
4. The index is an anomaly and probably couldn’t scale to more mundane controversies. The passion of its participants makes it work.