Doubting Thomas

A post about the ethics of publishing yourself, as practiced by pseudo-geologist Andrew "It's MY 'Journal' I'll Assume I'm Not a Crank and Publish Myself" Snelling of Answers in Genesis and the Answers "Research" "Journal," generated a little bit of heat back in the day. Digging through the geological strata of my website, I encountered the following highly compressed, dense coprolite. It comes from Thomas.

First of all the peer reveiw process is designed for other scientists to agree or disagree with your interpretation of the evidence. When the creationist author's interpretations are agreed on by his/her peers, it does not matter secular scientists anyways, because they have a different interpretation of the evidence. Therefore the peer review process is pointless for creation scientists.

Thank you for admitting that Answers in Genesis journal is not peer-reviewed. I know that you have no understanding of the importance of peer-review, the way that it keeps authors honest and reexamining their evidence, and how it assures that bad hypotheses are discarded.

But really, the peer review process starts when the paper is published and rebuked on websites and in other journals.

Bullshit. Any dickhole can publish on a website. Even Andrew Snelling.

Do you have any idea what gets criticized as a paper goes through peer-review? Methodology is the important one. It means that an anonymous reviewer can point out fundamental flaws and ask the scientist to go back and redo the experiment controlling for another variable. And this can happen multiple times before an article is accepted. The peer-review process is built into the very paper itself. And yes that can and does continue after publication (as scientists build upon it when they design their own tests), but your shallow misapprehension of the basics of peer review lead me to suspect that you are a gator-wrestler in Florida instead of a practicing scientist.

The problem with radio isotopes exits, believe it or not. Your slave like following of naturalist ideology blinds you from logically analyzing creationist papers in the first place. All your rebuking is worthless.

Actually, the "problem" with radioisotopes, as far as I can tell, exists only in the mind of bonkers failures like Snelling. The original claim of the problem was put forward in the mid twentieth-century by a creationist named Robert Gentry. Real scientists did waste a considerable amount of time trying to figure out the issues that Gentry raised, but J. Richard Wakefield published a devastating critique of Gentry's work in a peer-reviewed journal and found that the results could not be duplicated because the original survey upon which Gentry based his analysis would have been carried out more professionally by a difficult fifth grader.

It is important that Snelling omits this critique in his novelty paper. It is a sure sign of pseudoscience that someone ignores counter-evidence. Real scientists do not afford themselves that luxury, and neither do their peers.

As for "the millions of scientists" who believe in secular ideology. "all of them" are wrong. yes, all of them. They see wrong interpetations of the evidence, because they think right from the start that they are right, and don't even consider when coming with their pathetic hypothesis', especially in geology, that the evidence they are examining has other origins than their presuppositions.

I hope that the lawsuit against whoever hit you repeatedly in the head with that hammer went well. You forget that the proof of the scientific method is in the high level of predictability that it offers. With respect to radiohalos, real scientists who took Gentry seriously were unable to find a way in which his conclusions could be supported. This is not because they doubted him but because they initially believed him. Once they started doubting him, they were able to see where he went wrong. That's how Gentry squandered credibility and why the radiohalo debate is ill begotten from the get-go.

There more than dozens of creation scientists ready to study the evidence accurately and scientifically. There are thousands of creation scientists.

Where are their labs? How do they test creation? Conjuring rabbits out of thin air? Please. Seriously, tell me. I want to know where these creation labs are.



HJ