Science blogger Lofar Pilso reports that Discovery in Genesis and the Answers Institute are planning a major conference on creationism and intelligent design to be held at an undisclosed location in New Mexico some time next fall.

The conference, entitled “Hard Questions: God’s Glory,” will be a departure from creationist conferences of the past. “Evolutionists aren’t afraid to hold conferences where they tackle the tough issues in Darwinism,” said William Ham, of Discovery in Genesis. “This conference will prove that creationists are equally brave, and willing to confront the problems faced by modern creationist theory.”

The chief issue to be discussed is the question of why the Creator, despite being omniscient and divinely wise, has failed to come up with a biological design as powerful and innovative as the one proposed by Darwin. “It’s embarrassing,” said Ham. “According to current estimates, the number of species originally created 10,000 years ago is somewhere around 8.7 billion. Only 8.7 million of them still survive today, which is an extinction rate of 870,000 species a year. At this rate, every species on earth will be dead in another ten years!”

“The long-term survival rate for God’s design is appallingly bad,” agrees DiG apologist Casey Lisle. “It’s easy to blame the extinctions on climate change following the Flood, but that still shows an inexcusable lack of foresight on God’s part. Plus who says climate change is a bad thing, anyway? It’s just nature’s way of adding a bit of variety to everyday life.”

Compounding the high rate of extinction is the failure of God’s design to allow for sufficient adaptation in order to generate replacement species. Dr. Ken Dembski of Answers Institute explains. “In my book Ain’t No Free Lunch, I have calculated the odds of God’s design evolving even a crude bacterial flagellum using the laws and processes He created. Amazingly, it’s worse than about 1 in 800²⁵⁰, which is to say there’s no chance at all, really. God’s design cannot create new features because it simply doesn’t have the power. It’s no wonder He had to create everything by hand.”

“It’s really said,” says AI’s Jason Luskin. “The whole difficulty comes from God’s irrational insistence that evolution produce either everything at once or else nothing at all. If He had simply allowed the changes to accumulate over long periods of time, and if He hadn’t screwed up the design with arbitrary bottlenecks, He could have had a system capable of infinite sophistication and innovation. Like Darwin’s.”

“That’s the big problem,” agrees Ham. “We have to come up with some new explanation that accounts for God’s inexplicable failures without making Him sound like a complete klutz. But that’s what this conference is for. We’re the real scientists here, and we’re not afraid to tackle the tough issues in our field, using state-of-the-art advances in speculation, obfuscation, and prestidigitation. I just hope we can find some plausible sounding answers, or we can kiss all those faith-based donations good-bye!”