They Walk Amongst Us

I recently found myself in the uncommon predicament of being a captive audience to a creationist, suckered into what I foolishly presumed could be a containable round of banter by his outwardly not only functional but even rational air. I am obviously far more sheltered than I had presumed, believing myself insulated from the bulk of that Dark Age-horde by the moat of the Atlantic. But Britain is of course is no safe haven after all: whilst religion is, amongst its original demographic, in terminal decline in a country that has few other claims to being the most developed on Earth, the fundamentalism of immigrant African Christianity and a booming Islamic population ensure a constancy in the total mental energy expended by the populace on obeisance to an imaginary overlord.
The energy is firstly spent on believing in books that have authority by virtue of being so old that no-one knows exactly who wrote them or even which bits to follow and which to ignore, which is nice in two principal ways: there's the satisfaction of being able to define yourself as a true believer because of the existence of people who believe otherwise, and also in that all the inconsistencies and variable interpretations of the said texts give plenty of opportunity for debate with similarly-minded individuals, which is a nice hobby with the fantastic bonus of a feeling of seriousness and devoutness.
Secondly, as with a child excitedly taking the potty containing its first independently delivered poo to its parents, the discoveries made must be shared with everyone regardless of whether they want to hear it or not, and this takes up a tremendous amount of energy too. Under no circumstances tell the child that you were already aware of the possibility of pooing all by yourself, nor that it is at the end of the day just a poo.
Anyway, back to creationists. The individual in question saw himself as a scientifically minded type and had gone to the effort of finding out the degree of probability of life as we know it springing up on a molecular level: clearly, minuscule. Unfortunately, his faith also required him to accept time and space as infinite. And therein lay the rub. As with monkeys and typewriters, given infinite time and space, a probability of, say, merely 1 in 10 to the power of 23 (the figure is endlessly debatable but you can call it 1 in 10 followed by a billion zeroes if you like; it doesn't matter a jot for the sake of the mathematical principle) of the first proteins and, thereby, life arising actually equates to it being 100% probable and therefore certain to occur at some point in some place. You don't even need to read up on Hoyle's fallacy to grasp this.
This is a horrible threat to a literal-minded creationist. Effectively, it means that deliberate design of life by a creator is not a foregone conclusion and the doubt is something that cannot be lived with.
Still, all hope is not lost: climate-change deniers can continue to find succour in the backing of mercenary and/or demented individuals calling themselves scientists. And likewise individuals exist to feed the devotees of intelligent design and their ilk their daily bread with fabrications on missing links, misunderstandings of what evolution means (no, it does not mean we evolved from monkeys or that there should be sabre-toothed cats the size of houses around by now instead of domestic moggies) or propaganda painting actual non-missionary scientists as people who claim to have all the answers (or alternatively must know sod all because they call many of their findings theories rather than facts!) and are probably in league with Satan anyway.
I admit I might not have got quite as hot under the collar if the man in question had not been a schoolteacher. In science.