YECism: sect or cult?

No, we don't.

I first heard about Dr. Kurt Wise back in the 1990's. First there were reports of other creationists going to him to have their "artifacts" dated and analyzed and he'd have to explain to them what they actually had -- I think one was the "gold chains embedded in coal"; I forget what that "gold" actually turned out to be. Then Robert Schadewald mentioned him as one of the "young Turks" at an International Conference on Creationism (ICC) who was trying to effect changes in creationism to make it more honest and based on actual evidence (we can all see how much that effort has failed).At one ICC, Dr. Wise gave a presentation that was basically Geology 101 in which he explained what the other creationists kept getting wrong and why they were wrong. In another presentation (or the same one), he reviewed the status of creation models in the various fields of science and concluded that except for the beginnings of a model in one or two places (eg, flood geology), there were none and you creationists need to get cracking and start developing those creation models.At the 1986 ICC when he was still a graduate student, Wise surveyed what is known about the speed of formation of the three major kinds of rock. While he found that many kinds of sedimentary rock can form rapidly, igneous rock is another matter. While a small chunk of granite can conceivably form in a short time, many massive bodies are known, such as huge granite batholiths, some of them 10 kilometers in diameter, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Under the most favorable conditions, such formations would take about 100,000 years to cool, instead of the 6000 to 8000 years required by Flood Geology. Metamorphic rock is worse since it must first be formed as sedimentary rock, be heated, and then cool off. During the question period, geophysicist John Baumgardner pointed out that Wise's figures had been very conservative and that much more time would be needed for rocks to form. He also offered shear forces as a source of heat and pressure for metamorphic rock, but Wise countered that many metamorphic rocks show no signs of shear.At another (or the same) ICC, he told the audience that evolution is a powerful theory and that anyone who claims otherwise simply doesn't understand evolution. He said point blank that if it weren't for his religious beliefs -- if he had only the scientific evidence -- he would accept evolution himself.Which brings us to his beliefs. He was raised a fundamentalist and a YEC, or became one while still young. There's a famous story in which he took a pair of scissors to a Bible and cut out everything that he believed he'd have to reject if YEC were not true and he ended up cutting so much out that the Bible fell apart (or threatened to) when he tried to pick it up.His ability to do honest science and still be a YEC indicates to us that he's that rare bird, an honest creationist. However, it has also drawn criticism from Dawkins and others as Wise being dishonest to himself and practicing self-deception. I tend to lean towards "honest creationist". However, the last I had heard of him was in 2002 when he joined the ICR, so I don't know how well his honesty has survived in that den of iniquity.Dr. Wise was interviewed in "Creation Ex Nihilo", 18(1) December 1995-February 1996. His bio page there starts at http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/313.asp and the interview starts at
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1318.asp -- those links are nearly two decades old and they still work (I just tried them).BTW, I am fairly certain that Dr. Kurt Wise is not related to me (David Wise -- dwise1 was the label on the first of two floppies I was using at work when a co-worker read it and started laughing). Nor is Dr. Donald Wise, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts at Amherst whose page on the creationist time scale I link to (http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/wise.htm).

See my reply, Message 77, to Phat. BTW, I concur with you about Dr. Kurt Wise. No, that was not what he said and did. Rather, it is far worse than you describe.Basically, he made up a bullshit lie on national TV. Here is that part of the transcript from "Creation vs Evolution: Battle in the
Classroom", KPBS-TV, which aired 7 July 1982. First Dr. Russell Doolittle:

quote:

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Doolittle: "Ever since the time of Darwin the chimpanzee has been regarded as man's nearest living relative. Naturally it was then of interest to biochemists to see what chimpanzee proteins would look like. Now the first protein to be looked at in a chimpanzee, and compared with a human, was the hemoglobin molecule -- hemoglobin one of the blood proteins -- and in fact, there were no differences found in the chimpanzee molecule when 141 amino acids were looked at in the hemoglobin alpha chain. In contrast, if you looked at a rhesus monkey, there were four differences; or if you looked at a rabbit, you found the differences got up into the 20s. If you got up to a chicken you'd find 59 differences; and if you looked at a fish you'd find there were more than a hundred differences. Now this is exactly what you expect from the point of view of evolution."

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Narrator: "Three more proteins were analyzed."

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Doolittle: "Once again, no differences compared -- chimpanzee compared with human. It was astonishing. In fact a rumor began to sweep around biochemists, that maybe all the differences between chimpanzee and human were really going to turn out to be cultural. Well, in fact, one more protein was quickly looked at -- this was a large one -- 259 amino acids -- and a difference was found. Whew!"

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Gish's response:

quote:

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"If we look at certain proteins, yes man then, it can be assumed that man is more closely related to a chimpanzee than other things. But, on the other hand, if you look at certain proteins, you will find that man is more closely related to a bullfrog than he is to a chimpanzee. If you focus your attention on other proteins, you'll find that man is more closely related to a chicken than he is to a chimpanzee."

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This was immediately followed by Dr. Doolittle's response, "Oh bullfrog! I've heard that gibberish before, I have to tell you." Then Doolittle indicated a book full of amino acid sequences from thousands of proteins taken from many hundreds of species and offered Gish all his worldly belongings, a '63 VW and half a house, if Gish could find just one protein in chickens or bullfrogs that is more closely related to human proteins than chimpanzee proteins.BTW, that was the first recorded use of "Bullfrog!" that I am aware of. For a few years after the Bullfrog Affair hit the pages of NCSE's Creation/Evolution Newsletter, the cry of "Bullfrog!" was a standard response to hear yet another creationist bullshit lie.So, when NCSE editor Robert Schadewald heard the story, he decided to follow up on it with Gish, especially considering that nobody had ever heard of such a bullfrog protein. Gish insisted that the protein did exist, that he had in his possession documentation of that protein, and he promised to send Schadewald a copy of that documentation. It never happened. Gish's claim turned out to have been a joke he had overheard about such a protein having been discovered but that discovery could never be confirmed because it was from an enchanted prince who had been turned into a bullfrog and you can't find those anymore.I did a write up on that and other aspects of creationist protein comparison claims (all of them false) which I posted on CompuServe back in the day (Feb 1990) and then later on my web site, which I created originally to repost my CompuServe essays. You can find this one, "THE BULLFROG AFFAIR or The Enchanted Prince Croaks", at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/bullfrog.html.That essay includes the story of Walter Brown's rattlesnake protein claim, which does involve cytochrome c. The claim is that the rattlesnake's closest biochemical relative is humans based on cytochrome c. It turns out that the database used only included one snake and no lizards, so the snake was equally distantly related to all the other species in the database with humans differing by only 14 amino acids instead of the 15 or more that the others differed from the rattlesnake.Please note how carefully Brown had to word that claim. If he had said instead that humans' closest biochemical relative is the rattlesnake based on cytochrome c, then that would have been completely false. The study included rhesus monkeys who differ from humans by only one amino acid. It did not include chimpanzees whose cytochrome c is identical to humans, zero difference.Because of the great care required to state this claim correctly, I count it as a proven example of a creationist engaging in a deliberate lie. The icing on that cake came when the reporter of this incident, Robert Kenney, came across Brown talking to a group of people after a debate and he was telling them his rattlesnake protein claim. When Kenney started to explain it to those people, Brown very quickly changed the subject.Another case of Gish lying was in my correspondence with him about Henry Morris' "1976 NASA document" claim involving moon dust. That claim depended entirely on that "1976" date since he used it in a debate I attended to counter the complaint that they use old outdated and superceded sources. I wrote to Morris for more information and Gish replied with Slusher's letter about the claim, including the name of the NASA document. When I pulled that document off the library shelf, I saw immediately that it was dated 1965 and the copyright page showed that it was printed in 1967. I wrote back to Gish with this information and included a xerox copy of the document's cover and copyright page. With the proof of the truth right there in front of him, Gish replied swearing up, down, and both ways sideways that the document was indeed and truly dated 1976. I replied by with more copies included again. Caught in a blatant lie, he did not reply.I report on that on my "MOON DUST" page at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/moondust.html. It includes scans of pertinent documents.But wait! That's not all! I was subscribing to the ICR's newsletter, Acts & Facts -- it was free and it provided me with research material. About a year or two later, I saw that Gish was going to give a presentation at a local community college, so I attended. Afterwards, I asked him about that moon dust claim and he pretended to have absolutely no knowledge of it and acted like he had never heard of that claim. He asked me for my name and address so that he could look into it and send me the information. Well, that never happened, but something else did: my subscription to Acts & Facts was immediately cancelled without any notification of any kind -- it just stopped arriving. Even Dr. Eugenie Scott, who has seen the worst behavior from creationists including Gish, was shocked and gob-smacked when I told her what Gish had done.

And there's Dr. Steve Austin, PhD Geology. Unlike with many creationists, that's a real degree from a real university. A creationist organization (either the ICR or the Creation Research Society) paid his way through college so that they could have an actual degreed PhD Geology on their staff.While he was working on his degree, he wrote a number of geology articles for the Creation Research Society Quarterly. In order to avoid any of his professors discovering that he was a YEC, he wrote under the penname, Stuart Nevins. I read some of those articles. Even though he was a post-graduate student, his articles contained misinformation that even a second-year undergraduate would know was false. For example, he described a sedimentary formation that was this many hundreds of feet thick and geologists say it formed over this many millions of years, then he said that those uniformitarian geologists claim that it formed continuously at a rate of a few hundredths of an inch per year. No, that is completely and utterly false, it misrepresents what geologist think, and it misrepresents uniformitarian thought. As a graduate student he couldn't possibly be that ignorant, nor could he be stupid because a stupid person could not survive a post-graduate studies long enough to earn a PhD. The only explanation is that he deliberately lied about geology in those articles.Since there are conditions that could throw certain types of radiometric dating off, geologists are taught how to look for those conditions when collecting samples to be dated. I don't know where the link to this is, but there was a case (at the rim of the Grand Canyon, I seem to recall) where Dr. Austin collected samples to be radiodated and he deliberately chose samples that would give a wrong date, then he used that "data" to write an article exposing radiometric dating giving false ages yet again. I think that's described on talk.origins, A Visit to the Institute for Creation Research.

I just located an email I wrote in 2000 describing a lot about Dr. Kurt Wise. It was in response to a creationist, D.Gregg, trying to use him as an example of a trained scientist then turning YEC. I'm passing it on to you as a way to give you a lot of information about Wise, his beliefs and attitudes, and what effect he's trying to have on creationism.The text from the email follows, starting with my quoting and correcting the creationist. Sorry for the length.

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That paper has its facts wrong. Wise's degrees are listed on his faculty listing on Bryan College's site (http://www.bryan.edu/Faculty/data/WiseK.htm), where he is Associate Professor of Science and Director of Origins Research:B.A. Geology, University of Chicago
M.A. Geology, Harvard University
Ph.D. Invertebrate Paleontology, Harvard UniversityTherefore, he does not have a PhD in geology.>>He studied under evolutionist Stephen J. Gould.Wise now debunks his former professors viewpoint and is a yec.<<Yes, he did study under SJ Gould, but as a creationist. You are completely wrong in characterizing him as having converted from being an "evilutionist" to being a YEC. He has been a YEC since early childhood.Dr. Donald U. Wise (no relation to Kurt nor to me), Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Research Associate at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, wrote in American Scientist, March/April, 1998, vol. 86, n. 2, p. 160-173, what an expansion posted at http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/wise.htm:{after telling of a number of YECists who lost those beliefs during their graduate study of geology} "A very few young evangelicals did manage to survive graduate education in geology with their Biblical fundamentalist faith intact. Three of the most prominent are Stephen Austin, John Morris, and Kurt Wise (no relation).""Kurt Wise was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist family in rural Illinois and accepted flood geology as a teenager while attending a conference for Christian youth run by Bob Jones University."From an interview with Dr. Kurt Wise in "Creation Ex Nihilo", 18(1) December 1995-February 1996 {bio page starts at http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/313.asp, article starts at
http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1318.asp}:"For Dr Wise, the authority of the Bible is non-negotiable. He received Christ when he was nine years old, and maintained the absolute truth of Scripture throughout his school years."In the same Ex Nihilo interview, concerning Gould:"Dr Wise surprised many creationists by earning his Ph.D under the tutelage of noted evolutionary palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, a very harsh critic of creationists."Dr Wise says of Professor Gould, 'He's a libertarian at heart', and thinks that at least some of Gould's criticisms have been justified because of the statements of some ill-informed creationist writers. Professor Gould is said to be very interested in people who show they they can do good science, even if they have differing beliefs."So actually, Wise does still agree with some of Gould's viewpoints, particularly those concerning the importance of doing good science. On the question of whether evolution actually happened, he never did agree with Gould, so nothing has changed there.Wise's belief in creationism and his rejection of evolution are based purely on his belief in Scripture, a fact which he does not try to hide (from the Ex Nihilo article):"At one stage he even took a pair of scissors to a Bible, and started cutting out the sections which would have to be discarded if evolution was true, with its long ages for the earth. He found that there wouldn't be enough of the Bible left for it to hold together."'To accept the entire evolutionary model would mean one would have to reject Scripture. And because I came to know Christ through Scripture I couldn't reject it.' At that point he decided his only option was to reject evolutionary theory."About his fellow creationists (again from the Ex Nihilo interview):"Apart from evolution, Dr Wise says that one of the things that has really bothered him is finding creationists who fall into the trap of dismissing justified criticism. He said he has presented data to point out areas that some of them needed to change, and it was either fobbed off or was still being repeated next time he saw them."'You know, there's no data that I ever ran into that bothered me as far as my creationist position went. But this issue did.'"He believes that this may be why he has a reputation for being critical of creationists, or even why some have accused him of being a 'closet evolutionist'."But he says he simply has an extremely high regard for the truth."'I cannot stand people who propagate non-truth', he says. 'In school, my hand never went up unless the teacher said something I knew was wrong. I didn't care who the teacher was, if they said something I knew was wrong, my hand went up. There's just this automatic reflex action. It's really an issue of integrity.'"He is concerned that there are 'creationists' around who, because of their understanding of particular scientific issues, deviate from the scriptural foundation promoted so strongly by Dr Henry Morris, for example. {DWISE1: Of course, I believe that Dr. Wise has chosen the wrong group to fall in with, though Dr. Donald Wise thinks otherwise}'The thing I hope above all else is that no matter what scientific models we play with and toss off the hill, so to speak, that the hill is always built on Scripture. That is one thing I am very concerned about'The Ex Nihilo interview also notes:"Among positive trends in creationism, Dr Wise sees the four-yearly International Conference on Creationism in Pittsburgh as extremely encouraging. He also regards the continual improvement of the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal as exciting. He is pleased to see the trend towards a presuppositional approach to the presentation of creationism (as opposed to the 'evidential' approach)."'Another trend that excites me is that there is an increasing number of people who are seeing the value of building a creation model rather than merely attacking evolutionary theory.'
{DWISE1: Gee, D.Gregg, it appears that your new "model creationist" has the same opinion as I do about what most of the other creationists have been doing.}"Dr Wise says he is encouraged at seeing an increase in the number of creationist graduate students who are receiving advanced degrees, and who will be able to help build the creationist model. He says the time of the 'lone wolf' creationist is past, where one lone creationist is out trying to attack evolution on his own In this vein, he is always looking for ways to bring researchers from different fields together, and to get groups working on improving the creation model. At present, one of his undertakings is an in-depth Flood model project with Drs Andrew Snelling, Steve Austin, John Baumgardner, Russell Humphreys, and Larry Vardiman."It has been through Kurt Wise's involvement in the International Conferences on Creationism (ICCs) that I have known about him. It was at an earlier ICC that he demonstrated that he was not afraid of scientific evidence contrary to a young-earth by presenting a paper showing that the amount of time required for granite plutons to cool far exceeds the 10,000-year time-frame required by YEC. In the closing presentation at the 1998 International Conference on Creationism, he reviewed the state of the creation model in various fields (as reported by Robert Schadewald, another long-time regular ICC attendee, in "The 1998 International Conference on Creationism", NCSE Reports, Vol 18 No 3, May/June 1998, pp 24-25):"Astonomy? No creation model exists. Biology? Same. Paleontology (his own field)? Same. He thinks a couple of other fields, such as the development of a Flood model, are making slow progress."Despite this seemingly gloomy summary, Wise sent people away fired up. His message was that creationists have an enormous amount of work to do, and it is time for them to get cracking."In the same article, Schadewald described having heard Wise's presentation at the 1986 ICC entitled "How Geologists Date Things" and being impressed that it was "absolutely straight Geology 101, except for a few debunking asides ('You know how creationists often claim that geologists use circular reasoning, that the rocks date the fossils and fossils date the rocks? Well, that's wrong.' And he explained why.) That was 12 years ago. Since then, Kurt has labored tirelessly, in public and private, by example and persuasion, to convince his creationist colleagues to face the facts and find new ways to interpret them." In an earlier presentation:"[Wise] told the audience that evolution is a powerful theory, and that anyone who claims otherwise simply doesn't understand evolution. He said point blank that if it weren't for his religous beliefs -- if he had only the scientific evidence -- he would accept evolution himself."Schadewald characterizes Wise and other serious creationists (eg, Paul Nelson and John Mark Reynolds) as the "Young Turks" working against the ICR "Old Guard" in order to set a higher standard. Schadewald has watched their progress since 1983, over the course of four ICCs and six other major creationist conferences. The 1986 ICC included a "basic creationism" track, which some creationists referred to as the "wacky track." After the 1990 ICC, which was marginally better, the ICC organizers (the Pittsburgh Creation Scinece Fellowship (CSF)) established a refereeing system to eliminate outright shoddiness, while the Young Turks convinced the CSF that "evolution-bashing never has advanced and never will advance a real 'creation model.'" As a result, "[a]nyone whose only exposure to creationism is a Gish Gallop would not have recognized a single presentation at ICC98."Schadewald concludes:
"On one point [Schadewald and Frank Lovell vis--vis the creationist attendees] found complete agreement: precious little of the ICC-style creationism has filtered down to the grassroots level. Duane Gish, Gary Parker, Kent Hovind, Walter Brown, Donald Chittick, and others still spout the same old stuff in seminars and debates, and it is endlessly regurgitated at Sunday schools, Bible clubs, and on the Internet. The new-generation creationists are painfully aware that most of the popular creationist literature is dreck. Although they cannot (and should not) prevent anyone from publishing anything, a move is afoot to establish some sort of clearinghouse that will award a seal of Clean Creation Science (or whatever) to books that meet the new standards. Moreover, they intend to commission someone to write an up-to-date replacement for Henry Morris' "The Genesis Flood", which they hope then will go mercifully out of print, along with the equally valuable works it spawned. Even with a serous effort by dedicated people, it will take decades to purge the nonsense, and it may not be purgable at all."At one point in Dr. Donald U. Wise's presentation mentioned above (http://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/wise.htm), he discussed the matter of creationist geologists in the "The New Crop of Creationist Geologists" section (please note that I just found this page within the past week):"One of the greatest anomalies in the history of scientific creationism and flood geology has been the near non-presence of well educated geologists (Numbers, 1993). Even most of the promising young evangelicals who undertook advanced work in geology emerged with badly shaken faith in strict Creationism."He briefly discusses 6 such cases: J. Lawrence Kulp, F Donald Eckelmann, Davis Young, Nicholas Rupke, Harold James, Jr., and Edward Lugenbeal. Wise quotes Lugenbeal upon his resignation from the Adventist Geological Research Institute as citing "the emotionally and ethically debilitating attempt to bolster our peoples' faith by telling them a series of partial truths about science". Then Wise mentions that: "A very few young evangelicals did manage to survive graduate education in geology with their Biblical fundamentalist faith intact. Three of the most prominent are Stephen Austin, John Morris, and Kurt Wise (no relation)." and then discusses their cases more fully.Interestingly, while Stephen Austin was earning his PhD in coal geology (tuition and living expenses paid by Henry Morris and the Creation Research Society), he wrote a number of creationist articles under the pseudonym of Stuar Nevins, whom he claimed to be a PhD Geology, as I recall. I remember reading some of "Nevins'" articles. I especially remember how he had misrepresented practicing geologists as believing in a form of very strict uniformitarianism in which a sedimentary formation would form at a strictly uniform gradual rate of a fraction of a millimeter per year for several thousands of years. Utterly ridiculous.Dr. Donald Wise's next section, "Creationist Geologic Thought at Present", starts out:"Until recently "Creation Science," as presented by the likes of Henry Morris and Duane Gish, was such a hodge-podge of geologic ideas, floating loosely in time and space, that it was nearly impossible to obtain an overall picture of how their Bible-based model might fit into the fabric of generally accepted geologic and paleontologic observations. This has changed or at least been modernized with the rising influence in ICR circles of the likes of Austin, Morris, and Wise. All three are familiar with some of the geologic literature but are highly selective about which portions they decide to use. They also tend to lean more heavily on ICR in-house publications than on refereed papers in the general literature."Although Donald Wise's presentation is decidedly critical of creation science and its claims, it does appear that he sees the efforts of Austin, Morris, and Wise as having positive effects on the ICR. Interestingly, the next thing he covers is their group efforts to work out creationist plate tectonics, "Catastrophic Plate Tectonics: A Global Flood Model of Earth History", in which the plates would have moved at rates of meters per second. So basically, instead of trying to deny the geological evidence as those before them had done, they are trying to make the evidence fit into their much shorter time-frame.

Scaramucci was on Bill Maher tonight and he did exactly what Republican guests always do: they spout a non-stoppable torrent of words that is intended to prevent any kind of discussion to take place.And here you are doing the exact-same thing as you always do. Coincidence? No farking way. It's the same as the standard fundamentalist proselytizing trick (which I first encountered in the Jesus Freak Movement circa 1970 and have seen used over and over again, especially by creationists) of demanding that your opponent give excruciatingly detailed answers to questions that we simply do not have the answers to yet (eg, detailed description of the origin of life, the complete details of bacteria evolving into blue whales). A local creationist uses those "unanswerable questions" as his primary MO, yet at one point in a three-way email discussion he admitted that their purpose was to "make you look stupid." Well, I would answer every one of his "unanswerable questions", questions which he emphatically insisted he really really really really wanted to know the answer to. His response? He would immediately lose all interest in that question and throw yet another "unanswerable question" at me. Or else simply run away. But he never ever would attempt to discuss my answer. That that pattern repeated itself over and over again exposes his efforts to be completely dishonest.Now, this should be intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer (engineer-speak; sorry). If the truth is on your side, then just simply presenting the truth should be the best strategy. However, if the truth is not on your side, then you have no option but to resort to dishonest tricks.OK, so just why is it that creationists must constantly resort to dishonest tricks? Everything that creationists do just screams out that the truth is not on their side. Why is that?Again, I'll share a bit of personal history. Circa 1970 (Jesus Freakery!), I encountered a few YEC claims which appeared bogus at the time:

• That living fresh-water clams had been carbon-dated to the thousands of years old; at the time I could only be skeptical but once I got an actual reference to the actual source I found that the creationists had lied about what the source had reported (look up "reservoir effect").
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• That a NASA computer had found "Joshua's Lost Day". That one was blatantly bogus since it attributed to computers such magical powers that even in 1970 people with no contact with computers would know to be impossible (curiously, my sister-in-law told me that that claim had been repeated in a Sunday newspaper insert magazine in the late 1980s). BTW, most sites that address this claim are Christian sites exposing it as being false.

Over the next decade, I had lost contact with the Jesus Freak community. In 1981 Duane Gish of the ICR had a presentation at the university where I was stationed, but the duty schedule prevented me from attending. But that got me thinking. If they were still in operation making those claims of having evidence for a young earth, then maybe there was actually something to their claims.So I started researching their claims. What I found was that their claims were all false. Furthermore, in on-line discussions with creationists, I increasingly found them to resort to outright lies.In the intervening four-plus decades that I've been involved with "creation science", I have yet to see any creationist present any actual evidence that supports his claims. Gee, why would that be the case? Could it be that you are all just lying out of your asses? Well, that is most certainly where the evidence is pointing.So when you see us disparaging YEC, we have very good reason to do so. If you have any actual evidence to the contrary, then you must present it ... devoid of your usual dishonest tricks. On a personal level, that is just too funny! You see, my very first conversation with a creationist was at work and it was based on Dr. Duane Gish of the ICR lying about Bomby. I asked Charles whether "lying for the Lord" was part of Christian doctrine (my own Christian training said "no", but who knows what weird shit those fundies might believe?). Well, at San Diego State University, Thwaites and Awbrey taught an actual two-model class in which they gave half the lectures and the staff of then-nearby Institute for Creation Research (ICR) gave the other half. Duane Gish was a principal proponent of the Bomby claim in which the two chemicals would spontaneously explode when mixed together, so Thwaites and Awbrey performed an experiment in the classroom in which they mixed those two chemicals together. No explosion. Gish muttered some kind of excuse that Schildknecht's article, which was in German, had been mis-translated, etc, etc. In spite of that, the claim continued to be published by creationists. You might want to read the NCSE article on that claim, The Bombardier Beetle Myth Exploded.Later, Charles and I attended a creationist debate pitting Gish & H. Morris versus Thwaites and Awbrey. Before the debate, we browsed the vendor tables and almost all of them were covered with "Bomby" books, something that Charles did not want to see. As we left, Charles was visibly in shock. He kept muttering "We have mountains of evidence. Why didn't they produce it? We have mountains of evidence. Why didn't they produce it?" Read about that, as well as my own position, at Why I Oppose Creation Science (or, How I got to Here from There).Mike, if you have any actual evidence, why don't you present it? Why do you instead post bullshit lies? No, if you were honest and self-aware, you would know that that is a lie. You do not believe in the Bible. Instead, you believe in what your own particular peculiar beliefs say about the Bible. You do not believe in the Bible, but rather you believe in your own particular and peculiar theology. Even Faith has stated that you need to be properly guided into understanding the Bible, which means that someone schooled in your own particular and peculiar theology needs to be present to instruct you in how to interpret what the Bible says. What do you think would happen if one were to read the Bible without such guidance? That was my case. Reading the Bible is what turned me into an atheist more than half a century ago. And everything I've seen since then, especially the Jesus Freaks and the YECs, only confirm that I had made the right decision way back then.
 
 
 Mike, in what you write I see an attitude that you believe that a naturalistic explanation of something would disprove God. Could you please verify that? I mean, an actual creationist should have no problem with, say, the origin of life by natural processes.