If you’re like me, you have wondered why many Darwinists seem consistently unwilling or unable to grasp basic points pertaining to their opponents’ arguments. Is it maliciousness or are they just not that bright?

This is on my mind because a colleague of ours is currently trying to wrestle several corrections to an article about evolution-related legislation from an editor whose reporter egregiously distorted Discovery Institute policy on academic freedom and mangled my colleague’s words. We’ve been through this process with other media outlets many times before. Of course it matters because if uncorrected the article with its untruths will end up being cited as fact by Wikipedia’s editors and become part of an eternal, immovable online legacy.

It can be very difficult to get these people simply to say back, accurately, what you said. As a further random illustration, I saw that Joshua Rosenau of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education blogged yesterday attempting to insinuate that this website is in sympathy with the Spanish Inquisition. He really did.

Beyond the sheer silliness, I noticed that everything Josh thinks he knows about the Spanish Inquisition he got from reading one Wikipedia article on the subject — every single particular in his blog post, intended to demonstrate his smarts on the subject, is from there. And even that he seems to have been unable to read with the care you’d expect from a remotely thoughtful person. Leaving evolution totally to one side, he could not understand what the Spanish Inquisition set out to do or whom it targeted.

Richard Dawkins has famously attempted to christen a social movement of materialists, atheists and Darwinists called the “brights.” But an absence of the very quality of which these folks want to be able to boast is what often strikes me. For many, basic reading comprehension is a stumbling block.