The cream of flood geology research

Saturday evening, Wise gave the closing presentation for the conference, and among other things, he reviewed the state of the creation model in various fields. Astronomy? 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. He appealed to everyone present to pitch in and do whatever they could. One prominent creationist told me later that he thought the Wise windup was the best presentation of the conference.It is hard to overstate the influence of Kurt Wise in shaping modern creationism as it is practiced at its higher levels. I first met Kurt at NCC85 in Cleveland ... . He immediately impressed me with his candor in dealing with the evidence, but it didn't really sink home until the following year, when I heard him give a presentation at ICC86 entitled "How Geologists Date Things." The talk 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....One result of the higher level of ICC presentations seems to be a higher-level audience. The deep-denial school of creation science the "absolutely no evidence for evolution," dust-on-the-moon, salt-in-the-sea, evolution-is-Nazism, geomagnetico-thermoapologetic ICR parrots were mostly silent, though not entirely absent....On one point [Schadewald and creationists at the ICC] 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.