I was simply pointing out the fact that if there are arguments, such as Ross's!, that take issue with the status quo arguments about evolution, those people are NOT in fact liars!
Wrong, balderdash. Granted, when someone makes false statements it could just be the case that they don't know what they're talking about, or that in their ignorance they're just repeating false statements they heard from someone else. It can be very difficult to definitely tell whether they are lying. However, I have encountered cases in which the creationist was very definitely lying; I'm sure that others here have encountered other cases of deliberate lying by creationists.
In the "Bullfrog Protein Affair", Dr. Duane Gish of the ICR made the blatantly false claim of the discovery of a bullfrog protein that showed that bullfrogs are more closely related to humans than humans are to apes. When asked to back that claim up, he stated unequivocally that he had documentation for that claim and he publically promised to provide it. He lied; he never provided any such documentation. Later he finally admitted that his only "documentation" for that claim was a joke that he had overheard. Really. He lied about the existence of that protein, he lied about the existence of the documentation, and he lied when he promised to provide that non-existent documentation.
Similarly, Walter Brown made the claim that in comparing the protein, cytochrome c, between different species, we find that the rattlesnake is more closely related to humans than to any other species. The thing is that he used one study which included only one species of snake. Because mammals and other branches of reptiles split off about the same time, snakes are equally distantly related to all other non-snake reptiles and to all mammals; it was just coincident that the snake protein was one amino acid less different than the human protein. The other thing is that Brown had to word that claim very carefully and deliberately in order to keep it technically true. You see, it doesn't work the other way. In that same study, humans were more closely related to the capucin monkey, differing by only one amino acid instead of by about 14. So if Walter Brown were to stray even one iota from the script, then he'd be making a blatantly false statement; he had to take great care to deliver the claim in exactly the right way. That shows deliberate intent. Furthermore, the person reporting this very shortly afterwards found Walter Brown delivering that rattlesnake-protein claim to a group, so that person started to explain it to them, whereupon Brown immediately diverted their attention by changing the subject.
He knew fully well he was lying! He still publishes that claim in his on-line book, but only as an extremely abbreviated footnote.
Both in his book,
Scientific Creationism 2nd edition, and in debate, the late Dr. Henry Morris of the ICR made the false claim of a NASA document published in
"1976", "well into the space age", which used direct measurements (implying that they were from the lunar surface, which he might have believed to be the case) to show that the layer of meteoric dust on the moon should be much thicker by a couple hundred feet if it were really 4 billion years old. I'm sure that Morris had never read that document; instead his source was from Harold Slusher who also was the source of that calculation, not the NASA document -- which Morris should have known.
The problem for them is that I found that NASA document in my university's library. "1976"? No frakin' way! It was a collection of papers delivered in
August 1965 and printed in
1967. When I wrote to the ICR about that claim, it was Dr. Duane Gish who responded and who sent me a copy of Slusher's letter in which he presented his calculation. Slusher also claimed "1976". But in comparing Slusher's quoting of that NASA document with
what that NASA document actually said, I found that Slusher had grossly misrepresented it. The direct measurements were made in
earth orbit by microphones, a technique that was later found to be flawed. But even if we just stuck with that NASA document, we found that Slusher still misrepresented it by including in that calculation
which was completely of his own design a factor of 10,000
which the document itself said was not applicable, along with an additional factor of 100 which violates the laws of mathematics (he took an average value which had brief excursions of +/- 100 and decided to multiply it by that excursion).
I responded to Dr. Gish with my findings, including the title page with the 1965 conference date and the copyright page with the 1967 printing date and I explicitly pointed those dates out to him in my letter. He responded by adamently insisting that the NASA document was indeed a 1976 document and also by trying to divert my attention away. He did so with the physical evidence right in front of him. He was lying through his teeth. I responded with copies of those exact same pages and explicitly pointed them out to him and asked for any contrary evidence that he might have. No response. He knew that he had been caught in a lie.
In the meantime, two astronomers had been doing the same things that I was, only their correspondent was Dr. Henry Morris. He gave them the same run-around and similarly cut them off as soon as he realized that they had caught him in a lie.
I had a subscription to the ICR's newsletter which announced a local speaking engagement by Dr. Gish, which I attended. At the end, I approached him and asked him about that meteoric dust claim and he professed complete ignorance of it -- it rang false, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt here. He took down my question and my address and promised an answer. He lied. Not only that, but my subscription to their newsletter was abruptly cancelled.
"Dr" Kent Hovind made a couple claims about the rate at which the sun is "burning its fuel." That rate is about 5 million tons per second. Actually, it's more like 4.7 million tons, plus there's some confusion as to which kind of "ton" they're talking about, but that turns out to be a minor quibble. The rate is about right -- a bit high, but close enough. The problem is that he claims that the original mass of the sun 4 billion or 20 billion years ago (forget that 20 billion-year figure, since the universe's age is estimated to be about 12 or 14 billion years; Hovind was just displaying his abject ignorance there) would have been so great that it would have "sucked the earth in".
I did the math. Do you remember that game-set commercial many years ago when Atari (I think) offered a wider data bus than the older sets did? "Do the math!" Well, I did the math. In 5 billion years, the sun would have lost something to the order of 10[sup]24[/sup] tons of mass through thermo-nuclear reactions in the sun's core. But the sun's mass is to the order of 10
33. Which means that the mass lost amounted to a few hundredth's of one percent of the sun's total mass. Which means that in the distant past the earth would have been "sucked in" by about 600,00 miles. Would that have incinerated the earth? Well considering that the earth's orbit varies by 3
million miles during the year, that 600,000 miles seems very insignificant. BTW, do you know what time of the year we're closest to the sun? Around 04
January. In the Northern Hemisphere, have you noticed how unbearably scorching it is that time of year?
I emailed Hovind about that (this was a few years before he went to federal prison for tax fraud) asking for his calculations that determined that the earth would have been "sucked in". He refused to divulge that information. He even tried, twice, to pick a fight with me over my email name (same as my name here). In other words, I had caught him in a lie and he was trying to squirm his way out.
I was also engaged in an email correspondence with a local creationist activist, Bill Morgan. The guy is a pathological liar. I have always kept a log/capture-file of my emails which became absolutely essential in that correspondence as I had to repeatedly respond to his lies of what we had written by showing him that transcript.
In the past, the county's creationist club would have monthly meetings and Bill would publish a monthly newsletter reporting on those meetings. One month he reported on the ozone layer:
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.fishdontwalk.com/aviewer.asp?i=7. In that "report" (please, do go ahead and read it) he made false claims about research about the ozone layer and told of how he had gone and sought the answers from "the experts": salesmen at air-conditioning trade shows. Seriously,
follow the frakin' link!; that's exactly what he claims!
Here's the truth. He listed several questions that the "experts" could not answer, so I Google'd and in less that
15 minutes I found all the answers to
all his questions from the
real experts, the
atmospheric scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Bill claimed that the experts could not answer his questions. The
real experts answered
every single one of his questions in their
FAQ ("Frequently Asked Questions").
I gave that to him. He only insulted me (to be honest, he might have been responding to my immediate response instead of to my research 15 minutes later). I presented the truth to him again. He ran away. A few months later, he put up a website, which included his
original article, containing absolutely no corrections. Now, that is
a deliberate lie; he knew full well what the truth was, but he deliberately decided to post a lie. I told him that he had deliberately lied. He denied it, so I pointed him to the exact lie he had posted. He ran away. And the lie remained, presented to the public. Once or twice more, I informed him that he was deliberately lying, he would deny it, I would point him directly to that deliberate lie, and he would run away.
In the meantime, his page has gone through three or more iterations. Each and every time, he has
deliberately chosen to post that exact same lie. That is, absolutely and undeniably, deliberate creationist lying. De
liberate!
Those are just a few of the cases of deliberate creationist lying that I've encountered. I'm sure that others here can offer more such cases.
I came across a friend of Bill Morgan's. I presented to him some of the lies that Bill had told. He had no response. He had to admit that Bill was lying. Bill was violating God's Law!!!!! Would he talk to Bill,
his friend, about Bill's violation of
God's Law and the dire threat to Bill's
immortal soul. Absolutely -fracking-not! These
Christians are always so concerned and completely
in your face with
non-Christians with overwhelming concern for theit
non-Christian souls, but when
one of their own ... especially
a personal friend!!! ... is slipping into Hell, then
to Hell with him!!! I'm sorry, but ...
is that Christian??? I'm sorry, but that makes absolutely no sense to me.
If nobody can explain that last part to me, I have somebody I might be able to ask in another few weeks.
Edited by dwise1, : Tried to clean up tags due to loss of support for HTML
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