They Lie Because They Have To

Someone said this of creationists, that they have to lie because their ideas do not conform to reality. I am taking "lying" in the broadest sense, which is knowingly misleading others. For people who profess to follow a Christian morality, this is utterly incomprehensible and inexcusable. 

Quote-mining, 

or how to lie about your opponents by quoting them. This is the use of very carefully cherry picked text from a writer and omitting the context, giving a false impression of what the writer thinks.

    Darwin and the eye

"To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree." (Darwin 1872)

This is the most infamous mined quote. Is Darwin saying that the idea of the evolution of the eye by natural selection is "absurd in the highest possible degree? 

   

No he is not. Darwin often introduced an argument by expressing a challenging puzzle before explaining the solution to it. Here, the creationist liars omit his solution. The miners quote of Darwin is followed by,

"Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real." (Darwin 1872, 143-144)

In other words, like many other things in science, what may seem intuitively clear can turn out to be incorrect.

Even the creationist blog 'Answers in Genesis (grudgingly) advises creationist propagandists not to use the "absurd" quote, but that doesn't stop people still using it, and even vehemently arguing that it is justifiable behaviour.

    The quote-mine project

Quote-mining is so prevalent among creationists that a suite of pages has been created, documenting many of them.

 It is called 'The Quote Mine Project'. Click on the link for its contents page.

     "Naturalistic Evolution are [sic] FALSE"

And this is another example, one that I have taken on, where the creator of a 'meme' tries to lie about what a couple of actual scientists are saying.

Straw-manning

Junk DNA

ERVs

Darwinism

Fake credentials

Claiming victory after defeat

Cherry-picking

Blatantly false claims

Appropriating religions

False equivalences (science = atheism = Satanism)

Lies about people

Dawkins

Darwin

Hitler

Lies from the 'Dover' trial

Cdesign proponentsists

No Free Lunch

Dinosaur bones