Answers in Genesis: Give me a link, you bozos!

These bozos don't know the first thing about reciprocity. When I give AiG's insane rantings their due panning, I always include a link, but do they show me the same courtesy? Noooooooo!

It's called

Caught in the Act!

We’ve nabbed the first evolutionist trying to scam the Answers Research Journal

I've known about this attempt for some time, actually. They've been sitting on this story for...about a month and a half. Not really urgent stuff, apparently. I have all the letters emails that went back and forth. It is positively bewildering how conspiracy-minded these folks are. OK, to be fair, the AiG contest is an actual conspiracy, but Andrew Snelling had some pretty interesting comments about my site and my motives.

Dr. Snelling told us, “I found it interesting that the blog contest offering a prize for a fake paper published in the ARJ listed many scientific disciplines in which the prize would be awarded, but left out ‘geology.’ This was either a mistake or a ruse admitting that a fake geology paper wouldn’t make it past the ARJ editor, which would therefore be either prophetic or faint praise!”

Nope. I can assure you it was not faint praise. Quite frankly, geology is so...utterly dull that it is permanently below my radar. It's duller than a box of rocks, you could say. And, yes, I'm a prophet. Boo! I had no idea that you considered yourself a geologist.

Indeed, for months I have had a little clarification tacked onto the contest saying that absolutely anyone is eligible for the prize. Indeed, if the people who have already published in the ARJ would only admit that they are bibbling on my site, I would totally give them the prize.

I was absolutely amazed that the perpetrator could have thought he would be successful with such an obviously bogus paper with such ridiculously poor methodology and clearly erroneous geologic and mineralogic details. What is sad is that this failed attempt demonstrates that evolutionists are prepared to sacrifice their scientific integrity to try to discredit creationists. However, we shouldn't be surprised, as there is no basis for moral behavior and integrity in the evolutionists’ worldview, which has spawned many recent examples of outright fraud in the scientific literature, even perpetrated by high-profile academics!

Well, you kind of have to sacrifice your scientific credentials to publish in the CRJ, don't you? Of course, by this logic, Alan Sokal immorally exposed Social Text's masturbatory nonsense. He performed a positively productive critique of a certain movement's lack of editorial standards. Hell, he just did an experiment; his hypothesis turned out to be correct.

No basis for moral behavior? Please. I could write a book about how wrong you are. It is so...farcically arrogant...to think that you have a monopoly on morality. Let's look at wee little tots who simply can't be responsible, mature moral agents. Yet they display altruism at an age as young as 18 months (that was published in Science, a respectable journal). And, I'll be damned (heh) if chimps don't exhibit some degree of altruism too, suggesting biological, evolutionary roots of such social, cooperative behavior. Fuck no! God did it! Beats thinking!

More importantly, though, what does it say about evolutionists, who frequently accuse creationists of spreading lies, yet strive to upset a creationist journal through falsehood? Apparently at least some evolutionists have no qualms doing exactly what they accuse creationists of doing—but where are the academic ethics they clamor over?

I just think that if you had a lick of academic integrity, you would also be publishing papers that challenged your bizarre and untenable hypothesis. Of course you and your small cadre of ardent judgmental nuts could never be wrong, Andy. Those hundreds of thousands of respectable scientists and the millions of observations that discredit your bankrupt weirdness can be completely discarded. You are working largely deductively. Darwin has been upheld by working from evidence, inductive reasoning based on empirical evidence. This is why the texture of evolutionary theory has changed over the 150 years it has been around while you are, mentally at least, still Bronze Age Semitic nomads. (But, hell, even they didn't really think that snakes could actually talk.)

You have to consider this, Andrew, since you are apparently an devoted reader of my little blog (admit it...you're pegleghippie): any scientist who came up with evidence that 1) overturned evolution by means of natural selection, 2) could indicate a designer directly somehow, or 3) could prove that there was a worldwide flood with baby dinosaurs surviving on a big boat to the satisfaction of his or her peers--anyone of these things would be grounds for instant multiple Nobel Prizes. It's just that the empirical study of the world does not seem to lead there. Science discards that which doesn't work, and that includes sacred texts.

There is this peculiar manner in which you see science, which probably prevented you from getting lots of fellowships. You see the bible as a text that has to be totally right or worthy of nothing more than the garbage bin: you make it an all or nothing game. Science does not work that way. It preserves that which works and that which doesn't work is "left behind" as it were. (There is an evolutionary metaphor in there somewhere--can you find it, loyal readers?)

Instead of trying to play “gotcha” games through dishonesty, why don’t evolutionists take on the task of honestly understanding our research and worldview and then, if they have objections, explicating them politely without the vitriol and name-calling (and foul language) found frequently on anti-creationist websites (such as on sites that sponsored/popularized the spam-ARJ contest).

NO LINK!?! C'MON!!!! You suck as people.

You're wrong...I love you guys. You make me feel so insanely smart. Really. We do understand what you are on to. Give us that. And how is that not name-calling? You just characterized us en masse as incurious and possibly a little stupid, you dunderhead. To be fair, there was a footnote that retracted what he just said. This, of course, makes me wonder why he said it in the first place.

There's more, but I have grading to do. There are more on the way, Andrew, of that I solemnly assure you. You managed to pick out the work of someone who was not writing in their field (a materials scientist doing geology). Let's see how you do when you get a couple from those people who are writing from their own field. (Maniacal laughter!!! Muahahahahahaha!!!)

I did want to comment on one of the footnotes to this article:

"Dr. Snelling shared that ARJ was also lampooned in a May/June 2008 issue of Skeptical Inquirer (pp. 19, 44). In it, Massimo Pigliucci ridiculed Dr. Snelling’s qualifications, yet in his review of ARJ papers he deliberately ignored the third ARJ paper, which was highly technical. Presumably Pigliucci’s silence was a tacit admission of the quality of the paper."

It's telling how their positive evidence always comes in the form of "silence"; their entire belief system depends on it.

There is one more point that I want to make before I plug the contest again. Consider the following points that Snelling makes:

• “[Y]ou state you are a materials scientist, but your knowledge of the geological subject you are supposedly writing about is highly deficient. . . . For example, feldspar is not silica, but a complex aluminosilicate. Granites are not just composed of feldspars, but 20-30% quartz. No granite I'm aware of from the literature contains >85 wt % SiO2, least of all alkali granite.”
• “Your paper . . . is deficient as a serious scientific paper. Any reputable journal would require a geologic map showing exactly where you obtained your samples. The western region of Norway is composed largely of high grade metamorphic rocks.”

(He seems to forget his is not a reputable journal....heheh. Too easy.) The problem is that Snelling writes in a language that lay people, and his followers don't get any "layer" than the trailer-bound, government-cheese-eating shut-ins who swallow this tripe by the bucketful. Succinctly stated, these assertions may be true, but creation science depends on the audience's ignorance of science to seem convincing. This, of course, is perfectly consonant with the anti-intellectual tendencies of American Christianity.

The Answers in Genesis Contest is still on, by the way, and, as Andrew has happily informed us, still open! Go to the link above and learn all about it!

HJ