Thursday, September 11, 2014

Happy Jason Lisle Day! Celebrating Creationists' Inability to Solve the "Starlight Problem" (and Willigness to Lie About It)

[Final Draft, maybe]

Happy Jason Lisle Day! Today is the second anniversary of the day when Jason Lisle, director of what passes for research at ICR (Institute for Creation Research), promised he would explain why his alleged solution to the creationist "Starlight Problem" wasn't really demolished by the math of Einstein's General Relativity-- in spite of much proof to the contrary that had been shoved right in his face. Lisle had whipped up a convoluted, technical explanation for why Young Earth creationists [YECs] are right about the universe being created only 6,000 years ago, even though we can see galaxies that are millions of light years away, and their starlight must have been traveling towards us for much longer than 6,000 years. Subsequently critics confronted Lisle with a handful of different mathematical and observational arguments that refuted his alleged solution to the Starlight Problem, which he calls "ASC" [Anisotropic Synchrony Convention]-- one point being that his ASC would in fact require a gravitational field that ought to be observable, but isn't observed. In his only response, two years ago today, Lisle promised to explain why we're all stupid and maths are all wrong and his shitty model actually rules.
Lisle: I’ve seen this criticism [observable gravity field] but I haven’t responded yet. It is very easy to refute. I plan on doing a series on this blog on the topic of ASC, in which I will refute this and other criticisms made by those who have not studied the topic. [Jason Lisle, comment September 11, 2012 at 6:18 pm]
Uh huh. Sure you will Jason. Two years later, we're still waiting. His comment has no content beyond the usual creationist combination of genetic fallacy plus ad hominem attack: ignore the math because it was "made by those who have not studied the topic"-- as if Lisle's toy model is so friggin' hard! (For other entertaining examples of creationists who respond to the demolition of their faked evidence and/or terrible math with the very mature, "Wah, it don't count because you're all ignorant of my genius, ignorant ignorant!!", without ever actually employing their superior intellects to show what's wrong with the maths, you can peruse IDer William Dembski's ad hominem "refutation" of Felsenstein and Shallit's demolitions of his pseudomath, and creationist Jeffrey Tomkins' infantile mental meltdown presented by him as a "refutation" of AceofSpades' exposure of Tompkins' incompetent huge overestimate of the genetic difference between humans and chimps.)

So on Sept. 11 of this year and every year, let's celebrate not just the genius of Dr. Jason Lisle of the ICR, but the genius of all the YECs over the years who've said they could explain how starlight can get here from galaxies millions of light years away in a mere 6,000 years-- all of whom subsequently crashed and burned, including Lisle, as we'll see below.

In this blog post, I'll review the math that shows why Lisle's model is dead, dead, dead, and why his cosmogony is absurd on several levels, because contradicts Lisle's assumptions. But first, for your entertainment, let's review some previous, disastrous, failed attempts by YECs to "solve" the starlight problem.

Background: Previous YEC Attempts to Solve the Starlight Problem

The "Starlight Problem" has vexed Young Earth creationists for as long as there have been Young Earth creationists. Simply put, the universe cannot be 6,000 years old if we can see galaxies millions of light years away, and if light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second-- not unless God is tricking us with phony light shows in the sky. Here are four dead proposals.

1. "Omphalos", aka "Appearance of Age": the Deceiver-God is tricking us with phony light shows in the sky that didn't really come from stars. You might think that this argument is an evolutionist spoof of a creationist argument, but in fact it was promoted for decades by none other the most famous creationist in American history, Henry Morris, the "Godfather" of modern YEC, author of the influential The Genesis Flood (1961), and founder of the ICR where Jason Lisle now works. Morris never backed down over several decades but aggressively defended the idea of deceptive light shows in the sky, along with his ICR lieutenant and "star debater", Duane Gish. These light shows must be extremely complex and highly contrived by Deceiver-God, due to the complexity of many observed astronomical events and structures. For example, from time to time a supernova comes into the news, and astronomers can detect both photons and neutrinos from the exploding star, and in years afterward they observed the expansion of the gas and dust clouds thrown off in a shell around it, e.g SN 1987A that exploded in 1987. All fake, all an illusion, according to the ICR when Morris and Gish were alive-- fake photons, fake neutrinos, fake dust, fake clouds... if the object is more than 6,000 light years away. If it's closer than that, it might be real. Some large astronomical structures are light-years across and in principle could cross the 6,000 light-year boundary, a topic the YECs discreetly avoid discussing, but in principle structures like large nebula could be half real and half make-believe, like Fox News.

Henry Morris used Deceiver-God to explain away both the starlight problem and also radiometric dating: In The Genesis Flood Morris said God just created rocks with a high ratio of daughter isotopes to parent isotopes, making them appear old by radiometric dating, because the Bible says "a thousand years is as a day to the Lord." Morris never explained why God made deeper rocks appear older than rocks near the surface, or why volcanic intrusions appear younger than the strata they intrude into. In a debate against Ken Miller in 1981, Morris defended his "fake photons" argument for starlight but in a comical/pitiful performance, he seems embarrassed by it. In the Q and A session afterward, an audience member asks him, "[C]ould we not equally accept that the universe was created a millisecond ago with prepackaged memories of your two-and-a-half-hour debate implanted in our minds?" [a philosophy called Last Thursdayism]. Morris' 1981 answer is still amazing.
[Henry Morris]: ...obviously when you suggest the creator could create things with the appearance of built-in memories... yes, in principle of course as the creator he could do that, and if there is a creator then you can’t say “No.” ...But when we suggest that there is creation, then the only way to say that there is no possibility of creation with an appearance of maturity, or completeness or appearance of age, or whatever, is to say that creation is impossible. And that’s to say that there is no creator, which is tantamount to atheism. [Henry Morris vs. Ken Miller debate, 1981]
So you have to like Morris' Deceiver-God and his fake photons, fake supernovae, fake nebulae, fake light shows in the sky, fake geological evidence etc., or else you're an atheist. This is the classical defense of Omphalos, still used by Jason Lisle today: flip the burden of proof onto the other guy by demanding, "Where is your evidence that my all-powerful God can't trick me?"

2. The Speed of Light is Slowing Down. This terrible idea was the go-to answer in the 1970's and 1980's.  Do I have to say that the method to "prove" this was a hoax, and that energy is converted into mass by the equation E = mc^2, so when creationists say that the speed of light c could have been, say, a hundred million times (10^8) faster in the past, that means that the energy released by nuclear fusion in stars would have been ten quadrillion times (10^16) greater back in the old days and the universe would blow up? Likewise all the radioactive uranium, thorium and radium in the whole Earth would release ten quadrillion times more heat, and in your own body the fraction of your potassium that is radioactive would friggin' kill you.

This dumb idea of light "tiring out" from its long journey was concocted by Norman and Setterfield about 1969 and the method behind it was thoroughly debunked by the time of the 1982 book Scientists Confront Creationism. Norman and Setterfield took a historical value of the speed of light and a then-current measurement, then they drew a curve through the the highest end of the error bar of the first, to the the lowest end of the error bar of the second, and surprise!! The curve goes down over time!! And of course they used an exponential curve, so if you go back in time a few centuries, the speed of light would be vastly, exponentially larger than now. Also, al stars would explode, the Earth would vaporize and your own potassium would kill you.

This dumb idea was pushed by Flood fossil fraudster Dr. Carl Baugh (fake Ph.D.) and by Dr. Kent Hovind (fake Ph.D.), aka Federal Prisoner #06452-017. Naturally, Ken Ham, Andrew Snelling and Carl Wieland, in a precursor to Answers in Genesis ministry, pushed the idea in the 1990 edition of The Answers Book (pages 189-192).

3. Stars are Not Big and Very Far Away, They're Small and Close Up. Again, this is a real creationist argument, not a parody of creationism.
[Carl Baugh]: One of the concepts of evolutionary consideration is that some of the stars appear to be much closer. The formula which calculates these distances is by no means proven. But even if God wanted them to be sixteen billion light years away, that's no problem for an omnipotent... God. ["Dr." Carl E. Baugh (fake Ph.D.), 'Panorama of Creation', (1992), p.11-13, 16, cited here]
Ooh, the jury is still out!! The stars might be fifty feet away and just very tiny, who knows, scientists can't prove a damn thing!

Henry Morris again, embarrassed to have to invoke this argument, but invoking it anyway, because what the hell?
[Henry Morris]: ... we can’t even be sure that these stars are billions of light years away. There’re very sophisticated esoteric sort of assumptions involved in calculating the distances. [Henry Morris vs. Ken Miller debate, 1981]  
Ooh, them scientists are doin' long division and my head hurts! So esoteric! No, scientists do have sophisticated methods to estimate the distances to stars, and the laws of physics don't permit the stars to be shiny nails pounded in the dome of heaven like the Bible says. Here creationist Danny Faulkner summarizes and disputes other creationists who claim stars are small and close up.

4. Space could be Riemannian, then light from the most distant galaxies could get to us in 15 years! Bullshit, and the people who say it don' t even know what Riemannian means.  They just want to use jargon. It means that space is curved in an invisible dimension, but negatively curved, like a saddle. Well, that would have observable effects, and they're not seen. So this is a toy model of a hypothetical universe but we know from observation it's not true of our universe.

5. Earth is at the Center of the Universe and We're at the Bottom of a Gravity Well. This idea was concocted by Russell Humphreys and recently popular for a few years, then it crashed and burned due to its basic mathematical blunders. Humphreys denied the Copernican principle-- that the universe looks about the same no matter where you are-- and says that all the galaxies form a big sphere with the edge far away, and Earth at its center.  Anyway, Humphreys proposed that we're at the center of a spherical universe so that Earth would be at the bottom of a big gravity well, and in General Relativity, time runs slower at the bottom of a gravity well. So 6,000 years can pass on Earth while billions of years pass out in the Universe, get it? No, it sucks on many levels.

To start with, when light falls into a gravity well, it slows down, so the wavelengths get shorter; it's shifted to the blue end of the spectrum. That's the reason why the signals from GPS satellites have to be tuned to a slightly higher frequency than the receivers on Earth are tuned to-- time runs slower in Earth's gravity well, so the radiation is blue-shifted as it falls into Earth's gravity. Thus if Earth were in a huge gravity well, the light from distant galaxies would be blue-shifted, but it's actually red-shifted.

Also, there's no solution for intermediate distance objects-- what about nearby stars or planets in the solar system? They should be slowed down about as much as Earth, but instead they look very old: Mars and Jupiter's moons have tons of craters, and among the asteroids there is considerable evidences of long-term processes: from the Kirkwood gaps in asteroid orbital periods, from the tumbling rate of larger vs. smaller asteroids, and from running the orbits of asteroid families backward in time until they coalesce on the partent body from which they were broken off, etc. we know the asteroid families are tens of millions of years old. Likewise, there's no smooth way to say Earth is young, asteroids are a tiny tiny bit older, Pluto slightly older, etc. It's dead.

This idea is often conflated with long-debunked claims that galaxies are found in concentric shells with gaps between them, like a set of Russian nesting dolls with Earth at the center. The alleged evidence for the shell game is a bit of pseudoscience called "quantized red shift" meaning that red shifts from distant galaxies supposedly come in fixed intervals, therefore galaxies distance must come in shells with gaps between them (they don't, and they're not). The problem here is hypothesis fishing: if you analyze a bunch of galactic distances and test them for, say, a thousand different periodicities, the odds are that at least one periodicity will pass a statistical test at a level of 1 in a thousand, even if the data you analyze is random.  Or if you test them for, say, a million different periodicities, at least one periodicity will pass a statistical test at a level of 1 in a million, even for randomized data.
Hypothesis fishing is a classic blunder and you have to reject it by doing the Bonferroni correction and trying to reproduce the exact same method on a totally independent data set.

Anyway, if it weren't for the popularity of GPS technology, we'd still have to deal with Humphreys' shit, but now even most creationists sweep it under the rug. Except that according to the recent Texas newspaper article on ICR, the long-debunked "shells of galaxies" crap is still one of ICR's big current lines of research.

Now we'll finally get to Jason Lisle's idea, complicated yes, but smart, no.
Jason Lisle's Solution: Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC)

Lisle's solution is cobbled together from three different ideas, which we should not get mixed up together.

1. The Anisotropic Synchrony Convention. Here Lisle simply defines all events happening in the universe, no matter what the distance, as being simultaneous with what's happening now on Earth. Simultaneity of any two events depends on the observer's position, so I say events A and B are simultaneous, but if you're in a different location, you say A happened before B (unless you are sitting on my lap.) Thus, God could create the whole universe simultaneously relative to Earth (see Point 3 below), and light from distant objects would instantaneously arrive at Earth no matter the distance -- but note that all creation events would not besimultaneous relative to observers  not on Earth. Believe it or not, there is no way to falsify this because it's just a convention, so it can't be rejected on observational grounds. The problem is not terrible, but Lisle then combines it with the next two ideas, which are disastrous.

2. A variable speed of light that depends on the position of the observer, and the position and direction of travel of the photon, via the angle θ made between the eye-line from the observer to the photon and the photon's direction of travel. For all observers in the universe, not just those on Earth, photons come straight at them at infinite speed. Photons moving perpendicular to our line of sight move at the conventional c. If a photon is approaching you at a glancing angle, it decelerates precipitously, then at closest approach to you it moves at speed c, and continues to slow down after it passes you, as it recedes away finally approaching one-half the speed of light (c/2). If you jump to the left, the velocity of every photon in the universe changes. If you send a light beam to bounce off a mirror on Alpha Centauri, 4.5 light years away, in Einstein's convention it would take 4.5 years on each leg of the trip, 9 years total. But in Lisle's convention, it will take 9 years to get there and zero time to bounce back. From the point of view of the guy on Alpha Centauri, your light beam came to him instantly, and then took 9 years to bounce back to you.

This idea of Lisle's is disastrous as it would induce an observable gravity field in General Relativity (GR) and also mucks up two physical constants known from electromagnetic theory, the permeability and permittivity of free space, which must then become position-and-angle dependent instead of being constants. The variable, position-dependent speed of light (2) is a separate idea added onto the Synchrony Convention (1) above, though Lisle conflates 1 and 2, and incorrectly calls the combination a mere "coordinate transformation." Falsely calling them both a mere "coordinate transformation" was at the point of Lisle's promised refutation when two years ago he wrote "It is very easy to refute", then never delivered. He can't deliver, because (2) is not a coordinate transformation, because it sets the velocities of photons to be dependent on their position and on their direction of travel.  Lisle never writes down his alleged coordinate transformation as a matrix (which should be easy if he were telling the truth) nor differentiates the matrix as is necessary.

3. Lastly Lisle hypothesizes a Cosmogony in which God creates the universe in concentric shells, outward from the edge of the universe and coming in towards the place where Earth will finally be, with a black sphere of "uncreated" nothingness in the center that slowly contracts as God creates stars and galaxies one thin shell at a time at the inner edge of the sphere. The creation "wave" converges on the place where the Earth will be at a speed of 1/2 the speed of light (not the speed of light as some have thought, and as Lisle himself incorrectly wrote in an early paper.) The intermediate steps of creation involve one-quarter stars, half-galaxies, half-black holes, three-quarter relativistic jets, etc. etc., and all kinds of huge complex structures that are millions of miles or hundreds of thousands of light years across, that God sloooowly constructs slice by slice: imagine a 3-D printer constructing a living human baby slice by slice, while it cries, thinks, and poops, but somehow doesn't die even when it has half-arteries and half-veins, half-loops of an intestine going in and out, half-brain etc. Same idea here, but with half-stars and half-galaxies instead of a half-baby. Lisle hypothesizes this cosmogony because if ASC is assumed then all creations by shells would then be simultaneous relative to an observer on Earth, if any existed (Day 4 of Creation Week, no humans existed to watch it); though the creation process would  be highly non-simultaneous, relative to the planets and stars getting created, and in fact it would all take ~80 billion years (relative to a distant non-Earth observer) before God got around to making Earth, because the observable univserse is ~40 billion light-years across and creation shells would converge at half the speed of light.

It is not sufficient to call this cosmogony absurd or counter-intuitive. It is wrong because it is non-falsifiable; because the scientific method requires a theory to be simpler than the observations it explains, but here Lisle's "God made colliding galaxies etc. to trick us" hypothesis is always more complex than all observations; and because, significantly, it contradicts its own assumptions. YECs say that in principle, there can never be "Appearance of Age" (there is Apperance of Absence of Age) and their hypothesis is "Appearance of Maturity", but "Maturity" has no definition except in terms of "function". But this cosmogony has God slowly creating countless half-finished non-functional entities that he must intervene to prop up supernaturally when they're half-finished or quarter-finished. A baby, as it is being printed by a 3-D printer, cannot be alive or functional when its half-finished and its half-loops of intestines and blood would squirt out, it can't be "functional" without supernatural intervention. Likewise Lisle's cosmogony, to create well-balanced stars and galaxies and black holes, which all have complex internal structures and internal balance of gravitational pressure and photon pressure, would require God to supernaturally create far more fake photons and fake neutrinos and fake phonons and fake convection currents etc., all with the appearance of being from events that never happened-- far more fake photons and phony light-shows than Henry Morris ever conceived of.

More on Strange Conventions of Simultaneity.

Let's return to 1. While this convention is counter-intuitive, this idea is not disastrous and does not by itself entail testable predictions that might falsify it. All of us has have heard that Einstein's Special Relativity begins with the assumption that the speed of light is the same for all observers in the universe, so that if an airplane shoots out a light beam, the light beam still travels at only the speed of light c and not c plus the speed of the airplane. This assumption is experimentally justified by the Michelson-Morley experiment, which proved that light beams going along the direction of the Earth's movement as it revolves around the sun, have the same travel time as light beams going perpendicular to the Earth's movement.

However, Lisle and other creationists correctly and cleverly point out that the Michelson-Morley experiment only measures the total travel time for a light beam making a round trip, and there's no experimental way to measure the speed of light going one way without some kind of round trip arrangement. What if (let's say) the speed of light went faster when going north and slower when going south, or vice versa, and the round trip looked like c when averaged out? Or if light went instantaneously going north and travelled at c/2 when going south, which averages out to c?

In fact, there's no rule against that, not by itself. Einstein's convention was that the speed of light goes at c in all directions, which is simpler and makes the math easier, but it can't be proven per se. You are permitted certain other conventions, e.g. if you just have all north-going photons go faster and all south-going photons go slower in a fashion that does not depend on the position of the photon. Where Lisle screwed the pooch was by making light speed depend on the position of the photon, which turns out to not be allowed, and is not a coordinate transformation as he claims.

For the permitted synchrony conventions, we must consider some bizarre (but not forbidden) consequences for the idea of simultaneity. The pre-Einstein idea of simultaneity was that it's the same for all observers, so if events E1 and E2 are simultaneous for Bob, then E1 and E2 are also simultaneous for Julie, no matter where she is or if she's moving relative to Bob.

But with Einstein's convention, event E1 could happen before E2 for Harry, if Harry is moving relative to Bob. What matters for Einstein is direction of motion, not position. With Lisle's convention, it's position that matters, not motion: so E1 could happen before E2 for Harry, if Harry is in a different place that Bob.

Here's the classic Einstein "train" argument: Bob is standing on an embankment as a train is passing; at the moment that the center of the train passes Bob, two lightning bolts strike, E1 at the front and E2 at the back of the train. Bob says, "Both light signals come towards me at the same speed c and traveled the same distance, so I subtract the same amount off the times when I saw each flash, and conclude E1 and E2 were simultaneous." But Harry is riding the train in its center; he travels towards the photons from E1 and away from the photons from E2, so he intercepts the E1 photons before those from E2. Like Bob, Harry starts off saying, "Both light signals come towards me at the same speed c and traveled the same distance, so I subtract the same amount off both times", but because Harry saw E1's photons first, after subtraction he concludes E1 happened before E2. This is bizarre, but it's basic Special Relativity.

In Lisle's convention, what affects simultaneity is not velocity but position. All the "shells of creation" as God creates the universe are created simultaneously relative to some one point on Earth (Eden?), but not simultaneously relative to any observers not on Earth. This means that all observers outside Earth believe their planets were created long, long before Earth; and for millions of years, as they look in the direction where Earth will be, they see only a sphere of black nothingness because, relative to them, God hasn't created Earth yet. Indeed, for stars sufficiently far away but visible now in our telescopes, we still do not exist relative to them, and we can see them but they can't see us, because God has not created the Earth yet, Adam has not eaten an apple yet, and you don't exist.

This produces strange hypothetical effects. [I owe this 'mirror' argument to Tim Reeves of Quantum Nonlinearity.] Now suppose Lillith blinks into existence at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy at the moment it is created (hint: not the same time Earth is created) and Lillith immediately picks up a mirror. Back on Earth, at the moment Eve is created, she thinks the universe is all created simultaneously and assumes light from Andromeda comes to her instantaneously too, so Eve immediately sees brand new, young Lillith, way off in Andromeda, 2.5 million light years away, picking up her mirror. Now suppose Eve sends light towards Lillith; Eve thinks her light beam recedes from her at speed c/2 and thus thinks it will take 5 million years to get to Andromeda.

When Eve is 5 million years old, her light finally reaches Lillith, while Eve sees Lillith as also 5 million years old at that instant; for Eve has been watching Lillith age the whole time, and for the whole 5 million years, Lillith's mirror has been black reflecting nothingness because the Earth didn't exist yet for her. Finally Eve's light bounces off Lillith's mirror and zips back to Eve at a speed Eve thinks is instantaneous by Lisle's convention. So when Eve is really 5 million years old, she will finally see her reflection, far away, and will see herself young and newly created as reflected in a mirror held by 5-million-year-old Lillith.

What does Lillith see? At the moment she was created, she looked around and saw half of the Andromeda galaxy created (the side away from Earth), but the other half (in the direction where Earth will someday be) just black emptiness. Needless to say, the galaxy will not be "mature" or "functional" as creationists claim, because half a galaxy cannot be stable or functional; it will look like a multi-armed spiral chopped in half, with spiral arms all sliced up into disconnected half arc-circles or quarter-circles, etc. which are rotating all the time, but the rotation of disconnected half-arcs without gravitational balance will tear it to bits. Worse, at its center will be half a giant black hole, and no one knows what half a black hole would look like. If M31 had relativist jets squirting out of the galactic center (M31 doesn't, but some do), the jets could be split down the middle like Robin Hood's arrow, or part of a jet could be coming out of the black sphere of still uncreated space, phony particles contrived to look like the result of phony events that never happened: a vast, slow trick of the Deceiver-God. Then God will finish creating Andromeda slowly, relative to itself-- slice by slice, at half the speed of light, so the second half of the galaxy (radius= 50,000 ly) will take God 100,000 years to finish, relative to Lillith; or no time relative to Eve.

Lillith at her creation picks up a mirror, but sees no light from Earth at all-- just blackness in that direction-- and waits until she is five million years old. When she finally gets light from Earth, that planet and Eve look young and newly created; but Lillith (like all observers, under Lisle's convention) believes that photons approach her instantaneously, therefore Lillith subtracts zero flight time for photons coming from Earth.

Conclusion: Lillith concludes that Andromeda was created 5 million years before Earth, and that she is 5 million years older than Eve. Eve by contrast concludes that Andromeda was created (about) the same time as Earth, and that she and Lillith are the same age.

Also we see here why the shells of creation must be created at c/2 and not c: Lillith waits 5 million years before the empty black sphere in the direction of Earth get filled up with matter, but Andromeda is 2.5 million light years from where Earth will be; therefore Lisle's cosmogony creates shells of matter at speed c/2, so all large-scale structures will be completely unstable, not mature and not functional, unless God supernaturally tricks us, filling up all stars and galaxies with fake photons and fake neutrinos and fake convection currents etc. that look like the after-effects of real processes, except the events never happened. The fake light show is not creation of "maturity", so Lisle's cosmogony contradicts his claim that his all-powerful god is limited by "appearance of maturity."

In an earlier paper, Lisle, writing as Robert Newton (wow, humble), says creation will converge on Earth at lightspeed.
[Lisle]: So, we present the following picture of Creation as described in Genesis, but converted from observed time to calculated time... this creation process moves inward; space is created nearer to Earth... About 4.3 years before Earth is created, 'the beginning' occurs for the space near Alpha Centauri [which is 4.3 light years away]. ...Finally the Earth is created. [Lisle’s early paper, writing as Robert Newton.]

Apparently wrong; it should be 8.6 years before Earth is created. Probably Lisle caught this error later.

Lisle's Variable Speed of Light Creates a Gravity Field in General Relativity and is Not A Coordinate Change!

We move on to where Lisle really screwed the pooch, with his variable speed of light.
[Lisle]: The act of choosing a synchrony convention is synonymous with defining the one-way speed of light. If we select Einstein synchronization, then we have declared that the speed of light is the same in all directions. If we select ASC, then we have declared that light is essentially infinitely fast when moving directly toward the observer, and ½c when moving directly away. Under ASC, the speed of light as a function of direction relative to the observer (θ) is given by c(θ) = c/(1-cos(θ)), where θ = 0 indicates the direction directly toward the observer. [Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem. Jason Lisle. September 22, 2010. Answers Research Journal 3 (2010): 191-207. Emphasis added.]
First, it is not true that "The act of choosing a synchrony convention is synonymous with defining the one-way speed of light." This might be true for some synchrony conventions where the speed of light does not depend on position. But Lisle's variable speed of light, c(θ) = c/(1-cos(θ)), depends on θ, and θ depends the position {x1,y1,z1} of the observer and on the position {x2,y2,z2} and direction {v_x,v_y,v_z} of the photon.  

θ is the angle between your line of sight to the photon and its direction of travel: θ = 0 if it's coming at you, so c(θ) is infinite, θ = 90 degrees if perpendicular to your line of sight, so c(θ) = c, and θ = 180 degrees if receding from you, so c(θ) = c/2. If you jump to the left, the speed of every photon in the universe changes. This is not a mere synchrony convention nor is it a mere transformation of coordinates, as we'll prove below.

Valid synchrony conventions might be expressed as one or more permitted coordinate transformations, which could be written as 4x4 matrices (3 space dimensions plus time dimension). For example, you could say that all photons going north travel instantaneously and all going south travel at c/2; that is not dependent on photon position. But Lisle's c(θ) = c/(1-cos(θ)) rule is not uniquely fixed by his synchrony convention-- he does not derive c(θ) = c/(1-cos(θ)) from his convention, he merely shows that it is consistent with his convention, but "consistent with" is not a derivation or proof of uniqueness. He calls it a "transformation of coordinates" but never writes it down as a 4x4 matrix (Einstein does, that's called the Minkowski transformation) and Lisle never differentiates it.

Now Lisle was confronted with this fact by Timothy Reeves to who I am indebted for this argument.


Because it depends on positions of the observer and of the photon, it induces a gravitational field and curvature of space time. I will explain this three ways: A. intuitively, B. by proving that Lisle's rule can't be written as a mere "coordinate transformation", and C. from General Relativity and Jian Qi Shen's scientific paper on synchrony conventions and the Riemannian operator in GR.

Method A. The easiest way to see the problem is to note that in General Relativity, a speed of light that varies with position and a gravity field are the same thing. In Lisle's rule, if a photon comes at you, just missing you and glancing off, it's decelerating all the time-- that's a gravity field. This is not the case (for example) if we picked a synchrony convention where all photons going north travel instantaneously and all going south travel at c/2. Then lightspeed doesn't varies with direction but not with position, so no gravity field.

There, that wasn't so bad.

Method B. Just a Coordinate Change? At his blog, Lisle's only response to Reeves' critique was to claim that his ASC is just a mere "coordinate change." Because he says this over and over, I have to prove that his rule c(θ) = c/(1-cos(θ)) cannot ever be just a coordinate change. This should not be painful even for those who hate linear algebra.

First, a real coordinate transformation could be written as a 4x4 matrix. Lisle never does this. We want to show how velocities of photons transform in Lisle's case, but for comparison we'll first show how velocities add (for different observers) in Einstein's conventions; that's easier.

Consider an Einsteinian, special relativity transformation between two observers, Unprimed Guy and Primed Guy, one of whom is moving at velocity u relative to the other. In all of this I will consistently multiply all time coordinates t, t' and so on by the speed of light c, to give ct, ct', cdt, cdt', etc. units of meters; and I will always define v's and u's as distance /(time x c), so that all u's and v's have no units. That just makes the equations easier.

To make it even easier, I'll mostly use one space dimension x and time dimension ct. The first observer will see an event at coordinates {ct, x} while the second person "Primed Guy", traveling at speed "beta" with respect to Unprimed Guy, will see the same event at coordinates {ct', x'}. ("beta" is a unitless velocity, that is, it's the normal velocity u divided by c, = u/c.) The matrix is then 2x2.

We want to ask things such as: if a particle moves with velocity v with respect to Unprimed Guy, what is its velocity v' with respect to Primed Guy? For example, if an airplane shoots out a light beam, and it goes at lightspeed relative to the pilot, will it go faster than the speed of light relative to a ground observer?

So first we build a 2x2 matrix. The Minkowski transformation gives us the matrix:

ct' = Gamma* [ ct - beta * x]

x' = Gamma* [- beta * ct  +  x]

Gamma == sqrt( 1 - beta*beta). If we write vectors in the form {ct, x}, then Primed Guys' coordinates can be computed from Unprimed Guy's by the usual multiplication of a matrix times a vector:

{ct', x'} = M* {ct, x}

where M is a 2x2 matrix. That means that M's elements M00, M01 etc. are defined by

ct' =  M00* ct + M01* x

x'   = M10 *ct  +  M11* x

Of course subscript 0 is for time and 1 is for x.  The elements are easily seen from the above to be:

M00 = Gamma                M01 = - Gamma*beta
M10 = - Gamma*beta     M11 = Gamma

These matrix elements depend on velocity beta but not on positions {ct', x'} nor {ct, x}. As we shall see, Lisle's convention can't be written like this, because his M00, M01 etc. must depend on coordinates {ct, x} etc., which is his fatal problem.

We want to show how velocities add under Einstein conventions because that's easier. So since velocities take the form v = dx/dt, or actually I will divide by c and write

v == dx/c dt

we have to differentiate dx/dt but don't kill yourself over it. From the matrix transformation above:

cdt' = M00 * cdt + M01* dx

dx'    = M10 * cdt + M11* dx

Dividing numerator and denominator by cdt to get:

v' == dx'/cdt'  = [M10 * cdt + M11* dx] / [M00 * cdt + M01* dx]
    =  [M10 + M11* dx/cdt] / [M00  + M01* dx/cdt]

    =  [M10 + M11* v] / [M00  + M01* v]

Where I plugged in v == dx/c dt. Now we have our answer, because the matrix elements M00, M01 etc. were given above and we just stick them in:

v' = dx'/cdt'  = = [v - beta] / [1 - beta*v]

There, that wasn't so bad was it! You derived the relativistic equation for "adding" velocities. OK, now can we do this with Lisle's rules? No.

We want a guess a matrix like M00, M01 etc. that transforms from a photon's coordinates in Einstein's convention to one in Lisles' convention. What would matrix M look like? Lisle never tells us M, but we can guess some stuff about M from what he requires for photon velocities.

Consider a photon coming straight at you along the x-axis. Just like before, no change:

ct' = M00* ct + M01* x

x' = M10 * ct  +  M11* x

The only difference is that Einstein tells us M00, M01 etc. but Jason Lisle doesn't. He makes us guess at M00, M01 by dropping hints about photon velocities. So we have to relate the photon velocity in Lisle's convention, v', to the photon velocity in Einstein's convention, v. With the same trick of differentiating and rearragning we get the same equation:

v' = [M10 + M11* v] / [M00  + M01* v]

Same as before, except now we don't know what M00, M01 etc. are

Now you can see what's very wrong with this. Consider a photon coming straight at you along the x-axis.  But problem, what happens when the approaching photon zips past you? In Einstein's convention, v does not change; in Lisle's convention, v' is supposed to instantly decelerate to 1/2 (that's c/2 divided by c). The right half of the equation above does not change as the photon passes you; the left half of the equation changes infinitely. This cannot happen unless the matrix elements M00, M01 etc. depend on coordinates of observer and of photon, so that they "know" when to slow down-- but if M00, M01 etc. depend on coordinates of observer and of photon, that is no longer a mere "coordinate transformation" as Lisle claims, but instead a non-linear transformation of space-time. And a a non-linear transformation of space-time means space-time is curved. That means gravity.

Above I considered the simple case of one space coordinate and time. What if we do three space coordinates and time? Relax, I'm not going to repeat the whole thing. I'll just skip to the end.

Consider a photon coming at you at an arbitrary angle and glancing off. But I have to define the velocity of the photon as a vector with three space components along three axes, plus time, that is, {ct, v_x, v_y, v_z} for Einstein's photon velocity and {ct', v_x', v_y', v_z'} for Lisle's photon velocity. The rule for four coordinates is pretty obvious so I'll skip the blah blah blah and jump to it:

v_x' = [M10 + M11* v_x + M12* v_y + M12* v_z]/[M00 + M01* v_x + M02* v_y + M02* v_z]

There are similar equations for v_y' and v_z' which I'll skip. The speed of the photon is then

v' = sqrt( v_x'^2 + v_y'^2 + v_z'^2)

Problem: according to Lisle, the whole time the photon approaches it's decelerating. That means, again, the left-hand side of the equation changes with position, but the right hand side cannot. Not unless M00, M01 etc. depend on coordinates {x, y, z} -- but that would falsify Lisle's claim that he's only doing a coordinate transformation.

C. Jian Qi Shen's Paper on Synchrony Conventions and the Riemannian.

For a more professional take,  Timothy Reeves cited a physics paper by Jian Qi Shen [PDF] on the subject of synchrony conventions in General Relativity. He emphasizes that some syncrhony conventions are kosher, but if you don't follow the rules they produce a gravity field. Shen considers g, the spacetime metric tensor, which is used to measure distance between two points in a curved space time; the value of g tells you whether or not space is curved, and therefore whether or not a gravity field exists (more technical description below.)

Shen writes g in terms of a parameter X which in turn depends on in what way the speed of light is anisotropic-- how c varies in all directions. A "kosher" synchrony convention would be something like: all photons going north move at infinite speed; all photons going south move at c/2. In these case X would depend on direction of travel, but not depend on coordinates x, y, z, so then the g takes on a value for flat space-time, no gravity.







Shen concludes:


To be more technical, what tells you if space-time is curved is the Riemannian curvature tensor [R] that is derived from g which depends on X.

But in Lisle's convention,  X would depend on (1-cos(θ)) which in turn depends on coordinates {x,y,z} of the photon and of the observer. Thus metric tensor g depends on coordinates via X, and the Riemannian curvature tensor does not vanish, so space-time is curved, therefore Lisle's convention makes a gravity field, but this is not observed.

Compare this to what Lisle wrote:

The anisotropic synchrony convention is just that—a convention. It is not a scientific model; it does not make testable predictions. It is a convention of measurement and cannot be falsified any more than the metric system can be falsified. [Jason Lisle, 2010]
It makes testable predictions, it can be falsified, it was falsified.

Problems with Permittivity and Permeability of Free Space

Lisle has more problems with two physical constants that are important in electromagnetic theory, the permeability of free space μ0 and the permittivity of free space, ε0. These two constants are involved in electronics, setting the strength of electrostatic attraction and the relationship between current and and magnetic field. They are together intimately connected to the speed of light c, so Lisle mucking with the speed of light will mess with them too. In ordinary units c is determined by the identity  

c^2 = 1/ μ0ε0.

Since Lisle makes c depend on θ which varies with the position of the photon, μ0 and ε0 must depend on position as well. For this point I am indebted to a comment by Gabriel Hanna, who writes:
Nowhere does Lisle address this point, and I can’t believe he is ignorant of it. When you do experiments with magnets and capacitors, you always get the same value for the speed of light even though you have no idea what direction that light might be moving in... If you forget that light is an electromagnetic wave, then you can accept Lisle’s analysis.

…Einstein assumed the Maxwell equations were true. Lisle just abolishes them without mentioning that he did so. Every engineer and scientist has seen the derivation of the invariant speed of light from the Maxwell equations. [Gabriel Hanna comment]
Hanna emailed Jason Lisle and like so many, got no substantive response:

He [Lisle] says that e0 and m0 are tensors, different in every direction, and doesn’t say anything about how many experiments must now come out totally wrong. He also says that ASC is a convention and can’t be experimentally distinguished from Einstein’s. He also repeats that the speed of light can only be measured by a round trip, and that Einstein said that he was merely assuming light to be anisotropic, when Einstein explicitly said in 1916 that no experiment has demonstrated anisotropy of light. [Gabriel Hanna comment]

A Final Comment on the Deceiver-God and His Creation With "Appearance of Maturity"

Because Lisle is today's most aggressive pusher of  "Appearance of Age" argument, I'm going to discuss its paradoxes in more detail. The term "Omphalos" means "belly button" and is used to describe generic creationist arguments in which God deceptively makes the universe look different then it actually is, typically by creating the appearance of an ancient history that never really happened. The term was coined by Phillip Henry Gosse in his 1857 creationist book. Much like creationists after him, he argued by analogy: God had to create Adam with a belly button "omphalos" even though Adam had never been connected to an umbilical cord, because the function of the human body requires a belly button; and likewise, the function of the planet Earth requires fake fossils in the ground that look just like dead animals even though they never really lived.

Gosse's "fake fossils" idea was received very negatively by all sides, and today all big-money creationists would deny that they employ it; but in fact, all YECs, especially Jason Lisle, still invoke Omphalos for countless things-- for certain fossils, for starlight, or radiometric dating, or tree rings in ancient trees-- they just grew sneakier about it, choosing their Omphalos targets by carefully assessing what their target audience would consider absurd and what they could get away with.

All big-money creationists today would deny that they believe dinosaur fossils are fake-- but in fact, they only really assert the reality of fossils of complex animals and plants from the post-Cambrian era (e.g. dinosaurs). Many older or non-dinosaur fossils can still be tricks, for example, fossil stromatolites (multi-layered bacterial mats) and Grypania (multicellular algae) if they are pre-Cambrian are dismissed as not organic but made in some vague way, while post-Cambrian stromatolites that look just the same are indisputably organic. YECs treat dinosaurs and pre-Cambrian fossils differently because 1. Kids love dinosaurs but don't know about stromatolites or Grypania, and YECs know what their audience knows, and 2. YECs say that Noah's Flood started in the geological column at about the time of the Cambrian explosion, that is, with the first trilobite fossils. (By contrast the Ultra-Orthodox rabbi Menachem Schneerson did in fact teach his fanatical followers that dinosaur fossils are fakes planted by the devil; and some Jews in Israel demanded that dinosaur cartoons be taken off of kid's milk cartons because dinosaurs never existed.) Furthermore, there are huge numbers of pre-Cambrian marks from long, long before the dinosaur era like sedimentary strata, raindrop impressions, water ripples, dessication cracks, granite intrusions, etc. that look like records of past events, but which YECs like Robert Gentry say were created directly by God during Creation Week to look just like events that never happened.

Tree rings in very ancient trees, like the bristlecone pines are up to 4,900 years old which makes the oldest 600 years older than Noah's Flood. Tree rings don't just look old, they record history, for example forest fires, droughts, climatic cycles, etc. and they agree with each other and with known cyclic variations in solar output. Observe how Frank Lorey, writing for Jason Lisle's current employer, the ICR, bats away tree rings with a bit of Deceiver-God.

[Frank Lorey of ICR]: Also, creation had to involve some superficial appearance of earth history. Trees were likely created with tree-rings already in place. Rocks would likely have yielded old dates by the faulty radio-isotope methods in use today. Even man and animals did not appear as infants. This is known as the "Appearance of Age Theory." [Frank Lorey, M.A. 1994. Tree Rings and Biblical Chronology. Acts & Facts (ICR). 23: (6)]

Note that Morris and his ICR colleagues all used to call it "Appearance of Age theory", but later YECs later decided we must never call it that, we must only call it "Appearance of Maturity" since changing the name of a problem solves the problem. You see, the term "Appearance of Age" that they made up was a dirty trick played on them by evil evolutionists! And evolutionists even brainwashed Henry Morris, I guess, since he called it "Appaerance of Age" in The Genesis Flood.

Now they tell us, see, everything in the Garden of Eden was perfect, so any "Appearance of Age" can't be real but is just a trick played on them by evolutionist brainwashing; and they've been tricked because Adam ate an apple in the Garden and "Fell" and that makes our reason and our senses unreliable, as creationism itself amply proves. Now YECs insist that appearance of Age cannot ever be objectively real, but Appearance of Youth is objectively real. Here's Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis on fake tree rings.
[Ken Ham]: [on Creation Week] The various original plants, including trees, would have mature fruit... Perhaps trees even had tree rings, as a regular part of the tree’s structure. Adam and Eve and the animals were created mature and fully functional so they could reproduce. But none of these things were “old” or “looked old.” [Ken Ham. Mature for Her “Age”. AIG. August 25, 2008.]
Never looked old? His wife must love him. Again, everyone has to call it "Appearance of Maturity" now, with maturity defined in terms of "function"... but "function" undefined. This vagueness can be exploited to falsely claim observations as "predictions" of the creationist model, a business that Jason Lisle, Ph.D. has built his career on.

Lisle never claimed that dinosaur fossils are fake, and rejected Morris' hypothesis that God created phony photons, neutrinos etc. en route from distant stars, so you might think Lisle rejects Omphalos. But you'd be wrong-- he's a presuppositionalist who defends "Appearance of Age" (don't call it "Appearance of Age!") more aggressively than any other YEC today. He just applies it to a huge number of other things besides Henry Morris' fake supernovae, or Gosse's fake dino fossils. Lisle's "ASC" solution to the Starlight Problem requires a different kind of fake photons created directly by God, on a far larger scale than Morris ever imagined, but Lisle's fake photons have to be way out in space and not necessarily the ones we see.

Here's an example of how devoted to Omphalos Lisle is: at a creationist meeting, Chris Sharp asked Lisle to explain Kirkwood Gaps. What are those? Well, if you plot the time periods that it takes all asteroids to make one revolution around the sun, you get a big scatter plot of diverse time periods, but certain periods are conspicuously absent-- those which are related to the period of Jupiter by a ratio of small integers. This can be easily explained by simple physics: over millions of years, Jupiter would approach those asteroids over and over, until its giant gravity field knocked them out of that orbit, clearing out the Kirkwood Gap. Simple-- if the solar system is more than a few millions of years old. But Lisle, put on the spot, yanks Deceiver-God out of his ass:
[Christopher Sharp writes]: ...I asked [Lisle] about... the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt, showing irrefutably that the Solar System is much more than 6000 years old... I pointed out to him that after a few hundred thousand or million years of simulated time on a computer, asteroids in certain orbits are ejected, which confirms the Kirkwood gaps, to which he replied that God created the Solar System to appear that way. [Christopher Sharp on Lisle's visit to Tucson]
Lisle especially demands that we must always call it "appearance of maturity" because if you call it a different name, that makes it plausible. He insists that "Appearance of Age" can't be objectively real but claims "Apperance of Youth" all through the universe is objectively real, because the absence of age is real, but its presence cannot be.

They define "maturity", if at all, in terms of "function"... but "function" is undefined. This becomes a big problem later when you ask what's the "function" of colliding galaxies, or a supernova, or its expanding nebula; and if you can't define "function", how can you define "mature"?

Creationists of course invoke an infinite number of teleological arguments: if the moon reflects light, its purpose is to reflect light; if glaciers melt in the spring, their purpose is to melt in the spring-- these are real creationist arguments, not parodies. So how do you define "maturity" or "function" of a supernova? Is its function to blow up?

Well, what Lisle does is, first he asks what real scientists have observed, and then he computes what scientific facts he can lie to his church audience about (some of Lisle's favorite "ha ha sucker" lies: scientists never observed stars or solar systems forming! Spiral galaxies can't last more than a few million years, because they'll unwind!), and he takes the sum of those two sets and tells his church audience that those are the "predictions" of the creationist model. Fraudictions, more like it.

All YECs including Lisle also deny that their god is a deceiver, feigning to be angry about it, on the grounds that God said one thing in the Bible and contradicted himself in the rocks and bones and stars, but he told the truth in the Bible, and contradiction is not deception. Of course, in the Bible God makes no mention of minutely arranging the ratios of daughter and parent isotopes in rocks, so that the more deeply buried rocks look much older than the surface rocks, or making fake stromatolites, or arranging asteroids into the Kirkwood Gaps. So he never really told us what he did or how he did it, or when or how we will some more Appearance of A-- excuse me, Maturity.

Conclusion: Lisle's Magical Cosmogony Fails

I raise all these issues of how you define "maturity" and "function" because Lisle's cosmogony, in which God slooowly creates the universe in concentric shells, contradicts all their jive about how God is required to create a "mature" universe, how their all-powerful God is unable to create a non-mature universe, like "mature" relativistic jets that are a hundred thousand light years long and would take at least a hundred thousand years to form, or the "mature" after-effects of galaxies colliding, or star clusters that penetrate our galaxy and in their "mature" form are torn up to shreds like shredded cotton run over sand paper.

In Lisle's cosmogony, God creates quarter-stars, then half-start, then three quarter stars, etc. and he does so slowly. The intermediate stages are not mature and not functional. Some stars are 100 times bigger than our sun, and at speed c/2 it would take God a long time to finish one. A star is a complicated machine, and it depends on balance. In Lisle's cosmology, when God has a star one-third finished, either the thing is not stable, not mature and not functional, and it will collapse or explode; or else God is supernaturally creating vast numbers of fake photons, fake phonons, fake convection currents etc. that appear to come from events that never happened: more Omphalos. The photons normally start from nuclear fusion in the core and take a very long time to work their way to the surface. The photon pressure pushing "up" is required to balance the gravitational weight pulling down, or else the whole shebang is unstable, and will either collapse or explode. But when God has a star is one-quarter finished, he would need to create fake photons that appear to come from the core of the star (which doesn't exist yet) produced by nuclear reactions (that never happened) in order to balance the whole thing.

Stars have complex internal structures, including convection currents far larger than many Earths that swirl around the interior, spherical harmonic vibrations jiggling the surface like a snare drum, solar flares and vast magnetically-guided storms that burst from the surface. All of these are part of their function and thus, "maturity." When God has a star one-quarter finished, they either collapse, or else God  supernaturally creates huge numbers of fake phonons, magnetic fields etc. from events that never happened.

Similar arguments apply for even bigger structures: colliding galaxies, relativistic jets a hundred thousand light years long, vast nebulae, star birthing regions, elephant trunks, the Great Cosmic Bubble in the Magellanic Cloud, and on and on. All these structures would take Lisle's God a long time to slowly build, slice by slice, and the intermediate stages would not be mature and not functional, thus contradicting creationist blather about "Appearance of Maturity".

Reading Jason Lisle's blog, it's clear he wants his acolytes to know as little as possible about large-scale cosmic structure: he wants church audiences to think there basically is no large-scale structure in space-- like stars are just, you know randomly distributed or something! He knows the structure of the universe plus YEC requires an Omphalos Deceiver-God creating phony photons and phony particles in relativistic jets like records of make-believe histories that never happened.

Monday, March 17, 2014

James Tour and Intelligent Design's Fairy Tales of "Persecution" of Creationists

Prof. James Tour is one of the few real scientists who signed the Discovery Institute's anti-evolution petition "A Dissent from Darwinism." He is a professor of Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Rice University in Texas. The DI's anti-evolution petition currently has about ~851 names, not all of them scientists (they let in medical doctors, philosophers like Stephen Meyer, and mathematicians like David Berlinski and Granville Sewell), but Tour is a real scientist. The DI name list grows at a rate of about one dozen names a year. (For comparison, the competing pro-evolution petition is called "Project Steve"; it is limited to real Ph.D.s in hard sciences or life sciences who must be named "Steve", which is about 1% of the general population. It now has 1,300 names and grows at a rate of about 60+ per year. Without the "Steve" limitation, it would likely have 130,000 names and grow at 6,000 names per year, compared to a dozen for the creationist petition. Note that creationists and ID proponents universally assert that "more and more" scientists or "an increasing number" are embracing creationism, but their rate of growth is at best 500 times slower (=6,000 / 12) than the growth rate of pro-evolution scientists.)

On his website, Tour wrote an anti-evolution piece called "Layman’s Reflections on Evolution and Creation. An Insider’s View of the Academy" which attempts to explain why he signed the creationist petition. This piece has been trumpeted at the obnoxious anti-science ID website Uncommon Descent. At no point in his piece does Tour present actual evidence against the theory of evolution, but he does shovel up the creationists' favorite evidence-substitute: vague claims that "the Academy" persecutes (in unspecified ways) creationist scientists, whom he tells us he will never, never name. The claim that unnamed scientists persecute unnamed creationists at unknown places at unspecified times serves as their substitute for evidence, by explaining their total absence of evidence against evolution: instead of "the dog ate my homework", the excuse is, "the National Academy of Science ate my homework." You see, creationists really would like to present the evidence against evolution, gosh, they would like to-- but it's kept somewhere far away, buried in a wooden casket under the sand of an island somewhere in the South Pacific, location unknown. The far-away casket is carefully guarded by unnamed "creation scientists", but none are permitted to dig up the box and show us what's in it. Evil evolutionists would destroy their careers if they did that. Meanwhile, teach the controversy!

So Tour serves up another Christian martyrbation fantasy, full of the turn-ons of being tortured and dominated, like 50 Shades of Grey for the pseudoscience set, but his piece unusual in its vagueness. Christians nowadays are full of fake stories of their own martyrdom, to deflect blame from themselves for persecuting Galileo, inventing anti-black racism and anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, the Crusades, the Conquistadores, extermination of Native Americans, trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Confederacy, the Nazi Holocaust, etc., so they have to flip the frame to where they're the victim. To be fair, sometimes Christians really are victims (in Muslim countries), but in the USA the number of real victims is outstripped by the exponentially expanding Death Star of bullshit martyrbation fantasies. We should call bullshit on fake stories of persecution, a very recent example being pseudo-historian "Professor" David Barton's bogus claim that more Christians were killed to death for their faith in 2013 than in all the previous 2,000 years.

Here's Tour's. Let's choke on the irony:

Tour: "When the power-holders [scientists] permit no contrary discussion, can a vibrant academy be maintained?"

Riiight. Permit no contrary discussion... he says, at an ID blog that permits no comments and forbids contrary discussion. The pro-ID website that trumpeted James Tour's piece, Uncommon Descent, is infamous for banning many dozens of commenters for even the mildest criticisms of Intelligent Design: their first moderator banned dozens of people in 2007, the moderator was himself banned in 2009, the next moderator freaked out and banned dozens more in 2012, and there is actually a whole blog for all the people banned from UD. The most mainstream ID website run by the Discovery Institute, Evolution News and Views, permits no comments nor criticism, and demands that climate scientists and those who know them should be rounded up and imprisoned en masse: "Criminal prosecution of scientists... would be a good start," but not the end, according to the Discovery Institute.  The DI demands that scientists be permanently silenced through massive, ideologically targeted firings and defunding of research, telling us explicitly what should be done to scientists:

"There's a simple solution. Defund these credentialed losers who hide behind... worthless 'science'... take their money away." [Discovery Institute, Evolution News and Views]

Why? Because the DI calls science

[Science is] "ninety-five percent...garbage, the rest of it is irreproducible..."

(When asked to back up these claims with evidence, the DI refuses to provide a source for such figures, endlessly repeating their demand for politically targeted firings, defunding research, and the destruction of scientific institutions.) Above,  James Tour says he wants a "vibrant academy." If Intelligent Design extremists win, would any "vibrant" research be permitted besides Christian theology? Would any Academy exist, vibrant or otherwise?

Back to James Tour, who mildly asserts he wants "discussion." He claims no scientists anywhere understands macroevolution, though we know many sophomores who do; but Tour politely claims he'd like to have lunch with someone who could explain evolution to him. We know his offer is bullshit, because some years back, anti-creationist Dr. Nick Matzke took him up on his lunch offer and Tour chickened out.

So no, he's not interested in discussion. The real point is the martyrbation fantasies.

Tour: "In the last few years... I have witnessed unfair treatment upon scientists that do not accept macroevolutionary arguments and for their having signed the above-referenced statement [Dissent from Darwinism]."

Witnessed, have you? Witnessed. Uh huh... OK, give us their names and emails; let us find out if they really were "scientists", as you claim, and see how "unfair" their treatment was. Perhaps they tried some "there are no beneficial mutations" bullshit and they got schooled by a geneticist? What do you call "unfair"? Let us check your stories of persecution. But no, Tour announces:

"I will comment no further regarding the specifics of the actions taken upon the skeptics..."

Oh. I'm shocked. Wow. Didn't see that one coming. 



I could have a heart attack from that surprise.

So you will never produce one jot of evidence to support your most crucial evidence-substitute (I imagine the phrase 'evidence substitute' pronounced with a French accent.) So we will not be presented with evidence against evolution, which ought to be falsifiable, nor will we be provide even with the evidence substitute.

'Gee, teacher, the same dog that ate my homework also ate my homework substitute!' Is your claim of persecution important or is it not? If it is, cough up evidence or GTFO.

Why, oh why, are you shirking a scientists' duty to present evidence. He asked dryly.

Tour: "I love and honor my colleagues too much for that."

Oh. So you're not just a story-teller, but you're a self-congratulatory story-teller. You have failed as a scientist to present evidence; and not presented an evidence substitute; and now you compound it by blathering egotistically about how you wuv, truly wuv your friends, possibly imaginary.

Anyway, if any professor was unfairly fired-- and the ID creationists have been looking for a decade for a non-bullshit story about a creationist professor fired for his creationist beliefs-- if he was discriminated against, we can find a paper trail, right? Get some real evidence, right?

Tour: "...the unfair treatment upon the skeptics of macroevolution has not come from the administration level."

Oh. So there will never be a paper trail, and Tour will never be presenting his evidence-substitute.

Strangely, I, unlike Tour, can easily list, name, and document many examples of real scientists and professors fired for their stance on evolution... fired because they supported evolutionary theory, that is.

Christian colleges have fired and continue to fire numerous professors and scientists for teaching theistic evolution, or for supporting evolution outside the classroom. In past decades, fired evolutionist professors included Daniel Wonderly, P. Edgar Hare, Richard M. Ritland, Harold E. James Jr., Edward N. Lugenbeal, and Howard Van Till. In more recent years, La Sierra University fired Prof. Lee Greer and three trustees, and Shorter University fired Prof. Richard Pirkle and 60 (that's 6 times 10) faculty and administrators either for believing in evolution or for not being sufficiently intolerant towards homosexuality. Reformed Theological Seminary fired Bruce Waltke; Calvin College fired Prof. John Schneider and investigated Daniel Harlow. Olivet Nazarene University banned Prof. Richard Colling from teaching evolution, and banned his textbook, and then eventually forced him out of his job. Eastern Nazarene College fired Prof. Karl Giberson. Bryan College closed Todd Wood's research center (Wood is a creationist but admitted there was evidence for evolution.)

[EDIT: Below, a source called "Bible and Science Forum", presumably a religious source, comments that Todd Wood was not fired per se, but rather "The entire institution [Bryan College] had major budget problems and revenue shortfalls. If Wood had found enough private donors, he would have remained there. No need to concoct an alleged firing which never happened. There are dozens of REAL "YEC political correctness" at dozens of fundamentalist schools." They did not support this claim with evidence, but I know of no contravening evidence, so I copy it here for your consideration.]

Bryan College then forced all their faculty to sign a statement committing them to Biblical creationism and a literal Adam and Eve, presumably at the expense of their jobs if they didn't.

The reaction of Intelligent Design proponents is to support freedom of belief. Ha ha, I'm kidding. They'd never support that.

In fact the Discovery Institute supports the widespread firing of scientists who believe in evolution. The Discovery Institute declares that firing, censoring, and gagging scientists who believe in evolution is "inevitable", because any religious college or university

"inevitably draws lines... If you want to retain the mission, you can't at the same time tell faculty that 'Anything goes.'" [Discovery Institute, 2014]

By "draws lines", the DI author, Klinghoffer, means fire those evolutionist professors. Gag them! But the fired science faculty didn't teach "Anything goes"; they were science faculty applying the scientific method.

The Young Earth creationists at Answers in Genesis stood up for freedom of belief and and opposed the firing of evolutionist profs and said "teach the controversy." Ha ha, I'm kidding again.

In fact, AIG's chief imam, Ken Ham, criticized the "Biblical literalism" statement that Bryan College forced all profs to sign, because it was too darn tolerant and permitted too much freedom of belief; it might possibly allow some "wiggle room" where life is young but the Universe is old, etc.:

Ken Ham: "Also, I need to state that even if a college takes a stand on a literal Adam and Eve, that does not necessarily mean they also stand on six literal days of creation, a young earth (and universe), or stand against evolution of the various kinds of animals and plants." ["Did Adam and Eve Come from An Ape-Woman?", Ken Ham, AIG, April 21, 2014]

Meanwhile, ID proponents individually do everything they can to mess up scientists: IDer William Dembski reported Prof. Eric Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security as a terrorist, and DI founder Phillip Johnson tried (but failed) to get Nancey Murphy fired.

Now it was pretty easy for me to draw up that list of scientists fired for supporting evolution. The IDers' stories about scientists being fired for opposing evolution are either impossibly vague, or, upon investigation, turn out to be bullshit, like the fake stories in the movie Expelled which claimed that Richard Sternberg was fired from the Smithsonian-- an Institution where he never worked in a paid position; he was the equivalent of the patron of a library. Back to Tour:

Tour: "For the United States, I pray that the scientific community and the National Academy in particular will investigate the disenfranchisement that is manifest upon some of their own"

How the $#!@ can the NAS or anyone else "investigate the disenfranchisement" when you creationists never give accurate facts or details? All we get from James Tour is a long string of insinuations and excuses for not presenting facts.

Do you really want the NAS to investigate your stories, Tour? What would you say if they investigated you? Do you think "The dog ate my homework" is a good start for an investigation? This claim cannot be taken seriously; if the NAS really investigated such stories, Tour has already claimed he'll tell them nothing. No names, no dates, no places, no quotes.

I wonder if James Tour would support an NAS investigation into all the colleges who fired or silenced the real professors, listed above, for supporting evolutionary theory?

Tour goes on at some length about his faith, Jesus and the Bible and he's going to Heaven. It's nice that he's honest about his faith (so many IDers are sneaky weasels about it), but scientifically it's irrelevant.

The only "evidence" that Tour presents against evolution are the common creationist old wives' tales about how in private unnamed scientists admit there's really no evidence for evolution. The "in private" part is crucial because he's winking at us to signal he'll never accept any burden of evidence.

Tour: "Present day scientists that expose their thoughts on this become ever so timid when they talk with me privately. I simply can not understand the source of their confidence when addressing their positions publicly."

The word "privately" tips us off that he'll never present evidence. Sorry Dr. Tour, scientists have the responsibility of presenting evidence for their position.

Tour: "Furthermore, when I, a non-conformist, ask proponents for clarification, they get flustered in public and confessional in private wherein they sheepishly confess that they really don’t understand [macroevolution] either."

Why don't you pony up some names of these "present day scientists" whom you accuse of dishonesty-- you say they say one thing in public and another in private-- so let's hear their side of these alleged "private conversations." What were their names-- Professor Santa Claus, and his post-doc, Dr. Easter Bunny? 


Does Tour think his story is new? This particular fake story from creationists-- unnamed scientist admits in private that there's no evidence for evolution-- is about 100 years old or more. I've never, ever, observed scientists behave in the way he describes; but I have read dozens of creationist books, which often contain fantasies like this, of anonymous "atheist scientists" who admit in private, in whispered tones, that there's no evidence for evolution, but are scared to say so in public! Such stories began appearing in the 1920's.

Compare Tour's story with this creationist gem, which you might have heard: NASA scientists, using computers, discover by astronomical calculations that there was a "missing day" sometime in the last 3,000 years, and then some creationist explains to them that it was the day that Joshua in the Bible commanded the sun to stand still. This story was invented wholecloth by creationist Harry Rimmer in the 1920's. In the 1960's, creationist Harold Hill updated Rimmer's story, making it faker and more modern by adding NASA and the computers. It was always 100% bullshit.

These creationist fairy tales, like Harry Rimmer's story of "atheist scientists discover Joshua's missing day" and James Tour's fantasies of professors secretly admitting in private they know no evidence for evolution, always follow the same pattern: an always-anonymous "atheist professor" admits privately that there's evidence against evolution, but is too timid to say it in public, thus explaining why there's no evidence the whole thing ever happened. As the Church Lady would say, "How convenient." No evidence and not even an evidence substitute.

It's possible that Tour's religious imagination has caused him to start hearing things or actually seeing the stories he read about in the creationist books where he learned biology. But scientists care about reproducible EVIDENCE, not the imagination and rich fantasy life of creationists.

The cliche of the scientist who whispers in private that there's no evidence for evolution-- but he has to believe it, 'cause he's atheist-- was an old story before Tour was born, and he's not young. It's as eternal as the infamous "Lady Hope" fairy tale where Darwin repents and converts to Christianity on his deathbed, or the one where the evolutionist Ernst Haeckel gets convicted in a trial for scientific fraud-- one of those creationist stories that's a century old and never dies.

A more popular example of the fake story comes from the evangelical Christian rap group, Insane Clown Posse:

"Water, fire, air and dirt.
Fuckin’ magnets. How do they work? 
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist. 
Y’all motherfuckers lyin’ and gettin’ me pissed."
[Insane Clown Posse, "Miracles"] 

Tour's essay can be similarly summarized:

"Fuckin’ macroevolution. How does it work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist. 
Y’all motherfuckers lyin’ and gettin’ me pissed."

Actually, all physicists know just about everything about how magnets work (at room temperature anyway), and evolutionary biologists know a lot about how macroevolution works.

The real Tour: "I never thought that science would have evolved like this...."

It didn't. I think you're lying.

The point of fake creo stories is to inoculate non-scientists against all possible evidence for evolution: the natural history museum may have a bunch of transitional fossils in it, yes, but ignore 'em. Geneticists may observe lots of beneficial mutations or evolved gains in complexity, but ignore 'em-- them scientists be lyin' and gettin' me pissed. More and more creationists and ID proponents (William Dembski, John Oller, Vox Day, Kent Hovind, etc.) oppose vaccinating kids against diseases like measles, polio, rubella, but they totally believe in vaccinating students against evidence.

Monday, April 1, 2013

"A Growing Number": More and More Scientists are Abandoning Evolution

The day has come for us to admit that the theory of evolution is in a serious state of crisis. As you no doubt have heard, evolutionary theory states that blind chance can turn a lobster into a beautiful baby. Many scientists have suddenly realized it does not seem plausible that chance alone could turn a decapod crustacean into a human baby, especially an aesthetically pleasing one. Today we must admit that an increasing number of scientists are abandoning the theory of evolution and embracing creationism or intelligent design, as I will demonstrate by quoting those who really know what goes on in science: creationists.

Creationists are the only ones with the courage to tell the truth about what really goes on inside the laboratories they've never entered. They've got the guts to say it, and for at least a century they've been proclaiming loudly that the death of evolution is imminent. Someday, they knew, they'd be proven right. And that day has come.

Here are some examples, going back many decades, of creationists who had the courage to say that "more and more" scientists are opposing evolution. 

We start in 1982, when famous creationist Henry Morris wrote What is Creation Science? with a foreword by Young Earth creationist Dean Kenyon, who would later become famous as a proponent of Intelligent Design. Kenyon seems to have coined a significant phrase which would be copied by creationists for decades.
Dean Kenyon, 1982: "The creation-evolution controversy is entering a critical, perhaps even a climactic stage... more and more professional scientists holding evolutionary views are beginning to take the creationists’ scientific challenge seriously for the first time. The eventual result may well be a major change in the way the subject of origins is taught in our schools and universities." [Dean Kenyon, foreword to What is Creation Science? by Henry Morris and Gary Parker (1982). ]
Perhaps Morris learned about "more and more" form Kenyon. Wherever Morris got the idea, he ran with it for decades, and after his death his son would continue it.
Henry Morris, 1984: “...the modern [1984] scientific creationist movement has made it abundantly clear in our day that all the real facts of science support this Biblical position. Despite all the bombastic books and articles... which have opposed the modern literature on scientific Biblical creationism/catastrophism, the evidence is sound, and more and more scientists are becoming creationists all the time." [Henry Morris, History of Modern Creationism (1984), p.329-330.]
Morris was quite clear: the "modern" theory, the cutting edge science of 1984 was the theory that, 6,000 years ago, dirt turned into the human genome by sorcery. "All the time"-- when you sleep, when you wake-- the numbers of creationists increase.
Henry Morris, 1985: "There are still some die-hard uniformitarians who would question the first assumption but... more and more in the modern school of geologists are saying that everything in the geologic column is a record of catastrophe.” [Henry M. Morris, Creation and the Modern Christian, (1985), p. 241.]
By "catastrophe" he meant Noah's Flood. Morris was again clear: the "modern" school of geology, the cutting edge, the hipster trend-setters of 30 years ago were those who believed that giraffes, anacondas, kangaroos and dinosaurs queued up to get on board Noah's Ark. After the Flood, two kangaroos hopped from Mt. Ararat to Australia, anacondas slithered through Alaska to South America, etc.
Henry Morris, 1989: “Although the history of the earth and life has long been interpreted by the uniformitarian maxim... more and more geologists are returning to catastrophism.” [Henry Morris, "Evolution - A House Divided," Impact, 194, August, 1989, p. iii.]
More and more creationists are saying "more and more" all the time.  Twenty-two years after Morris, Dr. Don Boys (his biography does not tell us what his Ph.D. is in, exactly, but it's from a religious school) wrote at the Canada Free Press (whose slogan is "Without America there is no Free World") that creationists were still "more and more":
Don Boys, 2010: "No fruit fly, peppered moth or any other creature has formed a new creature through mutations and natural selection, and more and more top scientists are supporting that position. The co-holder of the 1945 Nobel Prize for developing penicillin, Sir Ernest [sic, Ernst] Chain, called natural selection and chance mutations a “hypothesis based on no evidence...”... The 1971 winner of the Nobel Prize in science, Dr. Dennis Gabor (died 1979) said: “I just cannot believe that everything developed by random mutations…” [Almost a Thousand Major Scientists Dissent from Darwin! Dr. Don Boys. Canada Free Press. May 2, 2010]
Boys doesn't just allot himself "more and more" scientists, he's now promoted them to "top scientists." To prove his point, Boys lists Ernst Chain and Dennis Gabor, who both died in 1979, some 34 years ago, before Henry Morris started saying "more and more." (The list to which he refers lists one, exactly one, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, that is, one living "top scientist.") Sure, there are "more and more" anti-evolution top scientists, in the cemetery.

Three years after Boys, lawyer and Intelligent Design proponent Casey Luskin, writing at the (misnamed, anti-evolution) website Evolution News & Views [ENV], tells us the science world is already what he calls "post-Darwinian"::
Casey Luskin, 2013: "As many ENV readers already know, we now live in a "post-Darwinian" world, where more and more evolutionary biologists are realizing that neo-Darwinism is failing, so they scramble to propose new materialistic evolutionary models..." [Casey Luskin, Three (or Four) Reasons Everyone Should Read Darwin's Doubt. ENV, April 9, 2013.]
There are still "more and more", and "Darwinism" is not just in crisis, it's already dead. Maybe long-dead, says lawyer Luskin. Since they've already won, why don't the creationists take a well-deserved vacation in this "Post-Darwinian World" that they've already saved?

Creationist Trope: "A Growing Number" or "An Increasing Number"

Not only are "more and more" scientists opposing evolution, but there is "an increasing number" or "a growing number" of scientists have turned to creationist or ID alternative theories.
Evan Shute, 1961: "I suspect that the creationist has less mystery to explain away than the wholehearted evolutionist. … I concede micro-evolution, of course, which is the origin by evolutionary processes of species, genera, and even families. An increasing number of thoughtful scientists seem to be adopting this view, which I should add is decades old, and far from being original." [Evan Shute, Flaws in the Theory of Evolution, (1961) p. 2.]
They're not just "an increasing number", they're "thoughtful" now too. (Those boring scientists who look up the definition of 'micro-evolution' and see that it means only and always evolution below the species level are just not "thoughtful" like the creationists who  think up random definitions for science jargon they don't understand.)

Twenty years later after Shute, their number was still growing and growing.
Henry Morris, 1981: “Matter of fact, there are now thousands of scientists who have become creationists, and these are in fairly recent years [recent as of 1981]. As a matter of fact most of us, including myself, once were evolutionists [sure you were], but have become convinced that creationism is a better scientific explanation. And so even though we represent a minority in science, it is a significant and a growing minority.” [Henry Morris in 1981 debate against Ken Miller.]
Henry Morris, 1982: “The discouraging situation [for creationists] of the early decades of this [20th] century is now [1982] going through a dramatic change. Instead of only a handful of Bible-believing scientists, there are now thousands. …the fact is that now, in every field of science, there can be found a significant and growing number of men and women who believe the Bible and are evangelical, witnessing Christians. …there are thousands who are unashamed literal creationists, believing that all things were created and made in the six solar days described in the first chapter of Genesis… Many have suffered one or another form of persecution for their stand, and yet they stand! ...However, it would not be appropriate to try at this point to do the same [give their names] for scientists who are still living." [Henry Morris, Men of Science, Men of God (1982), p.93-94]
Yes, of course it would be inappropriate to list their names. That would require them to exist. But trust him, there are thousands. Thousands, as of 1982-- and rapidly growing for twenty years! The theory of evolution is doomed.

Two years later, a Louisiana public school district was sued for teaching Morris-style "scientific" creationism in the Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard. Dean Kenyon, the Young Earth creationist we met above, chimed in with an affidavit giving his expert creationist opinion. His best evidence against evolution was still the "increasing numbers" of creationists.
Dean Kenyon, 1984: "Although students generally hear only one side on the origins question, increasing numbers of scientists are now abandoning evolution for a new scientific version of creationism. Creationist scientists now number in the hundreds, possibly in the thousands, in the States and in other countries. This extraordinary development.... has resulted largely from analysis of new scientific data not available to Darwin... biological creation... in fact is scientifically stronger than biological evolution." [Dean Kenyon, Affidavit in the case Edwards v. Aguillard, 1984 .]
The "increasing number" of creationists lost badly in Edwards, but Kenyon would return twenty years later, now re-made as an Intelligent Design proponent, to play a role in helping a new generation of creationists badly lose another case badly. Which we'll come back to in a moment.

Six years after Kenyon, their number was still growing and growing:
Mark Looy, 1990: “Even though the large majority of modern scientists still embrace an evolutionary view of origins, there is a significant and growing number of scientists who have abandoned evolution altogether and have accepted creation instead." [Mark Looy, "I Think; Therefore, There is a Supreme Thinker," Impact, 208, October, 1990, p. i.]
Four years after, Henry Morris' son, John D. Morris, an engineer like his father, started taking up the family, um, business. He still continues his father's tradition of originality and innovation, replacing Henry's "significant and increasing number" with "in droves." And they say creationists aren't creative!
John D. Morris, 1994: “Even scientists are leaving Darwinian evolution in droves, recognizing that strictly natural processes, operating at random on inorganic chemicals, could never have produced complex living cells.” [John D. Morris, The Young Earth, (1994), p. 121.]
But his father kept a steady hand on the family business for decades. Twenty years after the elder Morris had said their number was "growing", and forty years after Evan Shute said their number was "increasing", their number was still growing and growing and growing.
Henry Morris, 2002: "Creation scientists may be in the minority so far, but their number is growing, and most of them (like this writer) were evolutionists at one time [sure you were], having changed to creationism at least in part because of what they decided was the weight of scientific evidence." [Henry Morris, "What are Evolutionists Afraid of?", Back to Genesis, No. 168 (Dec. 2002).]
Grant Jeffrey, 2003: “As a result of the tremendous advances in the study of genetics, molecular biology, and the acknowledgement that the fossil record does not provide any support for the theory of evolution, a growing number of scientists have either publicly rejected evolution or have expressed very serious reservations about Darwin’s theory. ” [Grant R. Jeffrey, Creation, (2003), p.168]
And now, respected historian "Professor" David Barton, who has proven Thomas Jefferson was a fundamentalist Christian and opposed evolutionary theory before it was invented-- "Professor" Barton, a scholar whose title is as reliable as his factual claims.
"Professor" David Barton, 2008: "This position of intelligent design... is now embraced by an increasing number of contemporary distinguished scientists, non-religious though many of them claim to be." [David Barton, "The Founding Fathers on Creation and Evolution" (2008).]
Not only are they "an increasing number", they've now been promoted to "distinguished", though we are not told what their distinctions are exactly, nor what their names are for that matter. Perhaps like Chain and Gabor, they're "contemporary" in the sense of having been dead for 34 years.

Creationist ministry Answers in Genesis also tells us at long last, in 2009  there is "a growing number".
Answers in Genesis, 2009(?): “The history of science (and humanity) is filled with majority views being incorrect. Evolution is another such idea. ...Finally, there are a growing number of scientists, creationist and not, who do not find the supposed evidence for evolution to be valid or acceptable. ...it is past time for... the myth of evolution itself—to be dismissed once and for all.” [Answers in Genesis, Undated, apparently 2009]
"Finally" they said, 28 years after Henry Morris first said they had "a growing number" and a half-century after Evan Shute said it. But in 2009, they got their growing number "finally", meaning there was no "growing number" before 2009.

We all agree it is "past time" for evolution to be dismissed, considering that creationists have been predicting its imminent death for... 30 years... 40 years... a half-century... how far back can we go? We'll see below.

Intelligent Design Proponents Agree: There are "A Growing Number" of These Geniuses 

What about Intelligent Design? Unlike Young Earth Creationism, ID proponents say that their beliefs are not religious nor supernatural. Darwinism is a religion, Intelligent Design is a science, they say. The pro-ID website Evolution News and Views repeats this constantly: ID is not creationism because it's not religious. "ID is not theology", as David Klinghoffer writes at ENV over and over, and Jonathan Maclatchie has gotten the memo:
Evolution News and Views, 2013: "...ID does NOT invoke a supernatural force to explain biological phenomena. This is because the scientific evidence, at least on its own, does not justify an inference to a supernatural cause. ... ID is not "a particular attempt to synthesize modern science and Christian faith." [Once Again, Why Intelligent Design Is Not a "God-of-the-Gaps" Argument. Jonathan Maclatchie. ENV. January 9, 2013.]
Here, with typical consistency, ID proponent H. Wayne House reminds us that "Intelligent Design" is another term for a set of beliefs about the supernatural:
H. Wayne House, 2008: “While incendiary rhetoric from parts of the scientific community disallows any challenge to Darwinian evolution, a growing number of scientists and experts support a supernatural origin of life, also known as the theory of intelligent design.” [H. Wayne House, Intelligent Design 101 (2008), Amazon product description.]
So since ID is supernatural, and also not supernatural too, that makes it totally constitutional to teach in public schools.

Let's go back 20 years, to the first ID textbook Of Pandas and People (1993), which was sold as "not creationist", and marketed to the public school market. Can you guess who wrote it? Well, if you wanted to write a public school textbook that would pass constitutional muster, who else would you hire but the same Dean Kenyon who back in 1984 had helped the creationist side lose Edwards v. Aguillard?

Yes, Dean Kenyon, still a Young Earth creationist, but now it's OK, because after the Aguillard defeat he also calls himself an Intelligent Design proponent. Pandas was written by Kenyon and Percival Davis and a bunch of ID proponents like Michael Behe and Young Earthers like Charles Thaxton and Nancy Pearcey who think "The Flintstones" is a documentary.

What was the best evidence against evolution that brain trust could come up with?
Of Pandas and People, 1993: “Today, however, the 'creative' role of natural selection is being questioned by a growing number of scientists." [Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, Of Pandas and People, (1993), p. 67.]
"A growing number of scientists who study the fossil record are concluding that the structural differences between the major types of organisms reflect life as it was... [O]nly the long-held expectations of Darwinian theory cause us to refer to the in-between areas as gaps. If this is so, the major different types of living organisms do not have a common ancestry." [Ibid., p. 98.]
Why did the school board of Dover, Pennsylvania ever adopt Pandas, which would lead to their very expensive legal defeat?  Well, the Discovery Institute (DI), a think tank that promotes Intelligent Design, told them it would be a great idea, and they might get sued if they didn't.

In 1999 Stephen Meyer, DI philosopher and author of Signature in the Cell, and other DI fellows wrote a slick advertising brochure aimed at US school boards telling them that teaching ID in public schools was perfectly legal and Of Pandas and People was a great textbook. The best evidence for Intelligent Design that Stephen Meyer, DI philosopher, could concoct was that in 1999 there was still "a growing number" of scientists embracing ID (which Kenyon had been saying for two decades.)
Stephen Meyer, DeWolf & DeForrest, 1999: "Since the 1980s, a growing number of scientists have argued that...contrary to neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, nature displays abundant evidence of design by an intelligent agent. [They] advocate... the theory of intelligent design... [Intelligent Design in Public School Science Curricula: A Legal Guidebook. David K. DeWolf, Stephen C. Meyer, Mark E. DeForrest. 1999.]
Meyer and the DI warned them that school boards might get sued if they did NOT adopt an ID curriculum. You see, if public schools don't teach creation-- I mean intelligent design, that would be "viewpoint discrimination."
[Supreme court case] Edwards v. Aguillard encourages the teaching of other scientific theories... [A] school board that rejects a teacher's effort to teach the full range of scientific theories would place the board on a collision course with the First Amendment... Instead, we suggest, the school board should encourage the biology teacher to teach the controversy. This approach...provides it with the soundest footing from a legal standpoint." [Ibid.]
The Dover school board heeded Stephen Meyer's and the DI's dire alarms, bought their textbook, and lost the court case to the tune of $2 million. The day after that debacle, DI lobbyist Mark Ryland denied the existence of the DI document I quoted above; Ryland was immediately smacked down on camera in a public debate when another lawyer produced the document from his briefcase.

Here is ID Proponent and DI fellow the Reverend Jonathan Wells, author of The Myth of Junk DNA and Icons of Evolution, using a totally non-religious argument in a a totally non-religious document originally titled “Unification Sermons and Talks by Reverend Wells”, Unification of course referring to Rev. Sun-Myung Moon’s Unification Church, famous for its enforced conformity and mass weddings. 
The Reverend Jonathan Wells, 2000: “I asked God what He wanted me to do with my life, and the answer came not only through my prayers, but also through Father's [Rev. Sun Myung-Moon’s] many talks to us… He also spoke out against the evils in the world; among them… Darwin's theory… Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism… When Father chose me… to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle

…I am one of a growing number of highly-educated and articulate critics of Darwinism… These critics include embryologists, paleontologists, biochemists, molecular biologists, medical doctors, philosophers, and even lawyers. Unfortunately, the North American science-and-religion establishment has largely turned a deaf ear to these critics, preferring instead to abandon classical theology... [This is] analogous to the last years of Soviet communism. A small, powerful elite controls all the official information outlets while the evidence against the official position swells quietly, like a wave building offshore. Someday soon [relative to 2000]… the wave will break. I predict that the Darwinist establishment will come apart at the seams, just as the Soviet Empire did…”

[Original Title: Unification Sermons and Talks by Reverend Wells. a.k.a. "Darwinism: Why I Went for a Second Ph.D." Jonathan Wells. Earliest Wayback Machine archive: 22 Jan. 2000.]
So there is still "a growing number", but now they have been promoted to "highly educated and articulate."

There is nothing religious in the Reverend Wells' sermon about how Jesus Christ appeared to him in the human form of an elderly Korean man [as his church believes Rev. Sun Myung-Moon is the incarnation of God, Jesus Christ, returned to Earth] to order Wells to destroy Darwinism, or in Reverend Wells' demand that "classical theology" be re-imposed on the "science-and-religion establishment." No, that's pure science, as we know because Wells tells us he is "highly-educated", and he says there are lawyers who hate evolution too. Nothing religious here, especially since, three years after appearing on the internet, the title of the article was changed (sometime between the Oct. and Dec. 2003) to “Words of the Wells Family.” Remember, ID is science, and Darwinism is religion, since, as we all know, like Anthony Wiener's penis, that which is removed from the internet will can never be retrieved.

Here is just one of the countless predictions made by ID theorist William Dembski, all equally successful:
William Dembski, 2007: “It will be interesting to see how the National Center for Science Education deals with the growing number of non-religious ID proponents.” ["ICON-RIDS: Non-Religious ID Scientists and Scholars.", by William Dembski. Uncommon Descent, June 16, 2007.]
Dembski's prediction here is compared with the facts.

As you can see, the number of "highly educated" proponents of Intelligent Design was "a growing number" in 1993, "a growing number" six years later in 1999, "a growing number" the year after that, "a growing number" seven years later in 2007, and "a growing number" in 2008. By 2013 there were "more and more." By now the number must be astronomical.

So Exactly What Number Is "The Growing Number"?

For 1963, we have actual, real numbers for the number of creationist scientists (shocking, I know) thanks to historian Ronald Numbers. When the Creation Research Society, the precursor to the Institute for Creation Research, was formed, it was very difficult for to meet their goal of just ten creationist "scientists." To get to just ten they had to loosen their standards, classifying any engineer or anyone with a Master's Degree in science as a "scientist." The story of how difficult it was for the CRS, under the leadership of fanatical eugenicist creationist Willam J. Tinkle, to get even ten loosely-defined creationist "scientists" is told by Numbers in his history book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design. If that's just the USA, then worldwide, let's say the number of creationists was 20 or in the low tens.

Since the early 1960's, we have only the numbers of creationists provided by creationists themselves to rely on. What do creationists say about their own numbers?

In 1972, Henry Morris gave us a ballpark figure:
Henry Morris, 1972: "There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of scientists today who once were evolutionists but have become creationists in recent years. I myself was one of these, having accepted the evolutionary theory all through college... Many other scientists today can give a similar testimony." [Henry Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), p. vi]
In 1981 and for decades thereafter, as we saw above, Henry Morris confidently stated many times that the number of Bible-believing creationist scientists was in the "thousands." Moreover, he insisted every year or two that the number was "a growing number" and there were always "more and more" every year for decades, so, 32 years later, there should be... oh... maybe tens of thousands by now?

In the 1990's, Russell Humphreys, creationist, gave us a very precise figure. You'll recall that Humphreys, among other work, has proven the Earth is 6,000 years old by doing measurements on helium in zircon crystals, a study which was such cutting edge creation science that it took a half-dozen real scientists to extract which of his numbers were completely made up. Here is Humphreys being interviewed by CMI creationist Carl Wieland, and Wieland asks him the tough, hard-hitting questions.
Carl Wieland: "...How many professionally active scientists would also hold to Genesis creation?"
Humphreys: "I’m part of a fairly large scientific community in New Mexico, and a good number of these are creationists... Based on those proportions and knowing the membership of the Creation Research Society, it’s probably a conservative estimate that there are in the US alone around 10,000 practicing scientists who are Biblical creationists."

Wieland: "That’s encouraging. Dr Humphreys, thank you very much."

[Creation in the physics lab. Interview by Carl Wieland. Creation 15 (3):20–23. June 1993]
As usual with Humphreys, he does not show the calculations whereby he arrived at his published numbers. But creationists are used to being intellectually challenged with penetrating questions, such as Wieland nailing Humphreys with "That's encouraging. Thank you." Creationists call that peer review.

As you see, the number was "thousands" in 1981 and "ten thousand" in the USA alone by 1993. You will note that the increase is about one order of magnitude per decade-- a point I will return to.

Clearly, if there are tens of thousands of creationist scientists, their achievements and discoveries must be uncountable. We can all agree, their achievements and discoveries really can't be counted.

Now let's check with Republican presidential candidate Michele 'Bug Eyes' Bachmann.


Michele Bachmann, 2006: “There is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact or not... There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in Intelligent Design.” [Video Debate uploaded Oct. 12, 2006. See also: Top ten Michele Bachmann moments. The Week, October 27, 2009.]
On the one hand, it seems like the number's gone down because it went from "ten thousand" to "hundreds and hundreds." On the other hand, creationists now have been awarded huge numbers of Nobel Prizes! Hooray! They've actually been promoted! (It's possible Bug Eyes was thinking of Chain and Gabor, who again, died 34 years ago.)

But wait, the number was clearly not "hundreds and hundreds" in 2006 because that same year, Kent Hovind gave a much better number.

Hovind, also known as "Dr. Dino" and Federal Prisoner #06452-17, is currently serving a federal prison term of ten years, but since he's creationist, he thinks it's six days. One of the most ethical and honest of all creationists, Hovind was convicted in federal court of 58 felonies, having destroyed records, threatened federal agents, structured bank transactions to evade reporting requirements, and while in jail conspired with his creationist son Eric Hovind (still not in jail!) to conceal property deeds and vehicle titles to prevent seizure of his property as payment for his massive debts. "Dr." Hovind (he insists on the "Dr.") got his Ph.D. from Patriot Bible University, a double-wide trailer in Del Norte, Colorado, which currently charges about $1,500 per doctorate. (The first line of his doctoral dissertation was, "Hello, my name is Kent Hovind", one of its few sentences without a spelling error.)
Federal Prisoner #06452-017, 2006: “According to the Washington Times [...] 55% - barely over half of the scientists - believe Darwinian evolution.” [Kent Hovind, Truth Radio 26 May 2006 @ 10:30 (Tape 1), cited at http://kent-hovind.com/quotes/evolution.htm]
Since the number of scientists is in many hundreds of thousands, and since Dr. Dino counts 45% of them as anti-Darwinist, that means that by 2006, there were hundreds of thousands of anti-Darwinist scientists.

For more current numbers, here is a recent writer of letters to an Oklahoma paper.
Joshua Ashwood, 2012: "Psalm 14:1 declares that fools say there is no God. The apostate Charles Darwin didn’t want to believe in God, so he devised the modern theory of evolution... So according to scripture, Darwin was a fool and all that subscribe to his anti-God theory are idiots. Should Christians listen to a pack of fools...? ...Evolutionists are simply part of the wicked unbelieving world.

Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur and Henry Morris are but a few of the thousands of scientists who did and do believe that scientific evidence supports special creation, the earth’s young age, Noah’s flood, etc., instead of evolution. These men are genuine scientists every bit as much, if not more so, than evolutionary scientists." ["Evolution Proves Ungodly Folly." Joshua Ashwood. Muskogee Phoenix [OK]. October 4, 2012.]
Well, Louis Pasteur didn't believe in a young Earth or Noah's Flood. But what's important is that, as the letter writer says, creationist Henry Morris, author of The Genesis Flood, is just as great a scientist as Isaac Newton or Louis Pasteur, even though Morris was a civil engineer, who in his entire life, never once invented an original hypothesis that was tested and confirmed by observation. Still we know he was a greater scientist than Charles Darwin or Alfred Russell Wallace or Watson and Crick or Marie Curie or Motoo Kimura or Tomoko Ohta or Jacques Monod or Jack Szostak, because engineer Morris believed dirt turned into the human genome by sorcery and dinosaurs were carried on Noah's Ark, while those other punters rebelled against God.

The same year, conspiracist tabloid WorldNetDaily, Anders Breivik's favorite source of religious inspiration for kid-killin', put the number at hundreds.
WorldNetDaily, 2012: “To put it simply – no Darwin, no Hitler,” said [Rev. D. James] Kennedy

All this [Holocaust] happened, said Kennedy, because of a set of theories based on “a crumbling scientific foundation.” As WND reported recently, hundreds of Ph.D. scientists are now stepping forward and publicly dissenting from Darwinian theory. [Stunning Darwin-led-to-Hitler video - $4.95 today only! WorldNetDaily. Jan. 17, 2012.]
If "hundreds" seems like a disappointment, fear not. You'll recall that in 2012 physicists announced the discovery of the long-predicted Higgs Boson, causing creationists all over the Internet to explode into rage. This triumph of science made many creationists want to chew the face off the next physicist they saw, no doubt an arrogant atheist.

Physicist Sean Carroll presented himself for face-chewing. When Carroll released his book about the discovery of the Higgs boson, creationist "ChosenByGrace" wrote the following review. Here she blames the theory of evolution for America's national debt, and says evolution and atheist physicists have enslaved Americans.
ChosenByGrace, 2012: "Sean Carroll is a typical atheist physicist who arrogantly disregards creationists... he does not even acknowledge they exist... The liberal media and filled with money sapping money-obsessed morons, willing to indebt any generation of Americans into becoming slaves. It's already happened, and Americans in general are all debt slaves because of atheism-theoretical-physics cultists like this, and the idiot atheists who worship delusional morons like this. This man won't acknowledge theistic scientists let alone creationist ones... That is arrogant, a delusion of grandeur, bigoted, and "extremist" in the way liberals use it. It's great he claims that "you can do good science" despite believing in God... but why did he then... not acknowledge the millions of scientists who say the reason the universe exists is because God willed it? This is what happens when you care more about money... than having truth." [Amazon Review of Sean Carroll’s Particle at the End of the Universe, by Chosenbygrace Notworks "eternian.wordpress.c0m", Nov. 13, 2012.]
So there you go, there are now millions of creationist scientists. Now that's a growing number! But just how fast are they increasing?

Is There a Trend in the Claimed Numbers of Creationists?

Let's see if we can spot a trend in the above claimed numbers.

1963: creationists in the low tens, according to historian Numbers.

1972: creationists in the "hundreds or thousands", according to Henry Morris.

1982: definitely "thousands" of creationist scientists, according to Henry Morris.

1993: ten thousand in the USA, perhaps tens of thousands worldwide, according to Russell Humphreys.

2006: Hundreds of thousands, according to Kent Hovind.

2012: "Millions" according to "ChosenByGrace Notworks."

There's a clear pattern: the number of claimed creationist scientists increases by one order of magnitude per decade.

If this trend continues, that means that by the year 2072, there should be two trillion creationists. Their bodies will, very quickly, form a sphere larger than the planet Earth.

By the year 2492 creationists will number 2 x 10^52. Let us assume each creationist can be fit into a volume of one cubic meter, folded up tight. By 2492 they will form a man-sphere 26 light-years in radius, expanding outward at the speed of light.

Clearly, it is time for us evolutionists to admit defeat.

Maybe there are "Fewer and Fewer" Creationists? Nooo!

But if creationists have already won-- if evolutionary theory is already dead, as they have claimed again and again for more than 100 years-- how can they claim to be victimized by the establishment? How can they claim they are martyrs? And why should we donate money to their ministries if they already won the debate?

Well, the answer is that when they need to be martyrs and victimized, there isn't "a growing number" of creationists after all, when it's necessary to raise a suitable alarm. Consider this 2011 warning siren from ICR about "a growing number" of evolutionists:
Ford, Lawrence E. 2011: "[M]ost scientists today refuse to acknowledge... the overwhelming evidence of design in the world around us points to any kind of Designer...

 ...[T]wo or three decades ago there were dozens of private Christian colleges that maintained a biblical doctrine of creation. Today, only a handful have resisted compromise.

Evangelical seminaries today are filled with professors who... train pastors that it’s okay to teach evolutionary ideas... placing science over Scripture...

That a majority of the science establishmentmost of them atheists—-believes these evolutionary ideas does not provide a sound basis for Christian doctrine. And yet, a growing number of Christians are content to allow atheistic, naturalistic ideas and people to govern their view of the Bible..." [Ford, Lawrence E. 2011. Confronting Evolutionary Ideas. Acts & Facts (ICR). 40 (1): 4-5]
That's not the kind of "growing number" they claimed before.

Here is the blog "Naturalis Historia", very sympathetic to creationism, which commits the sin of trying to keep track by name of how many creationists there actually are. "Natural Historian" asks: how many Ph.D.'s do creationists really have doing research?
[Natural Historian, 2012]: "...where are the future generations of creation scientists? ...Answers in Genesis has had some younger hires in the last decade some of were fairly fresh PhDs... but at AIG their time is spent giving talks and writing newsletter articles rather than doing any scientific research. They filter news stories and form creationists responses... but they aren’t generating new data or... creating a positive testable scientific paradigm.

Creation Ministries International (CMI) has a couple of PhD scientists on staff that received their degrees within the past 20 years... The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) has two legitimate younger PhD scientists ([Glen] Jeanson [sic] and [Jason] Lisle) both of which [sic] are actively engaged in some research and writing...

ICR [Institute for Creation Resarch] had a graduate school offering degrees in biology and geology for at least 15 years. Part of the goal of this graduate school was to train the next generation of creation scientists. Where did they all go? ...I have found fewer than five creationist scientists on the payrolls of organizations today that list a graduate degree by ICR in their educational background.

I have to believe that when Henry Morris formed ICR he envisioned hundreds of scientists today actively applying the creation model to the historical sciences not just mouthing support for it. That... obviously hasn’t happened despite the proliferation of creation science organizations...

Creationists list hundreds of PhD scientists who are creation scientists but this is not the same as saying there are hundreds of creation scientists doing creation science. The majority of these PhD scientists are simply scientists who are Christians and believe in the cause of creation science and most are likely not even familiar with the evidence for creation science.

... for a movement that claims the evidence is overwhelming for a young earth and with 30 solid years of training and recruiting... the response has been rather underwhelming."

[“The Next Generation of Creation Scientists?”, Natural Historian, Naturalis Historia (Blog), Oct. 28, 2012]
Now why is this heretic getting numbers that we know must be wrong? Welll, Henry Morris warned us very clearly back in 1982 that "it would not be appropriate to try at this point to [give the names] for [creationist] scientists who are still living." It's not appropriate to actually keep track of living creationists by name and count them by name. If you do that, you'll get numbers which are not thousands nor millions! Henry Morris clearly said that was not allowed, why don't people listen!?

How Much Research Do Creationists Really Publish?
 
OK, so they have very few Ph.D.s. But maybe those few make a lot of discoveries and inventions and publish a lot of original research. How many research articles do creationists publish? Are there "more and more"?
[Natural Historian, 2012]: "There are three main research journals that publish creation science articles... So who is writing for these journals?... I went through all the issues of theses journals from 2011. Here are quick back of the envelope calculations:
2011: 60 Total Publications by 29 Authors

Creation Research Science Quarterly (CRSQ) – 15 articles by 9 total authors
Journal of Creation – 29 articles by 15 authors
Answers Research Journal – 16 articles by 12 authors

That would be 60 total publications by 29 authors. It is only 29 authors because several not only published multiple articles in a single journal but also published in at least two of the three journals.

Three of these authors (Joubert, 10; Bergman, 8; and Oard, 6) provided for 18 of the 60 or almost 1/3 of all primary creation science publications in 2011!

The CRSQ has been around since 1965... Going back 15 years to 1996 I count 25 total articles by 14 authors with five of those (more than 1/3) being the same authors as published in 2011. Going back to the 1970s and 1980s the journal regularly published 20-30 articles per year though typically by less than 50% that many authors. The trend has been toward fewer articles by even fewer authors.

Sampling the last 20 years it appears that Reed, Oard, Bergman and Froede are responsible for up to 25% of all the publications... it is really remarkable how many active writers in the 1980s are still publishing articles after 2010.

There is a new creationist organization called Logos Research Associates... Cross referencing... I estimate at least 3/4 of the individuals are more than 50 years old and 1/2 probably more than 60.

...ICR and AIG... I am sure would love to hire more real Ph.D scientists to bolster this positions. If anyone can agree with Ken Ham about the specifics of the creation account there should be a job there for them.

...only 60 research articles in 2011 don’t tell the whole story. Of those [60] a good portion involve analysis of theological concerns rather than scientific. Many of the scientific articles are not based on new data collected but are more like commentaries and speculations... Very few actually propose hypotheses for which new data is collected and analyses to test those hypotheses...

...a 50 year old hypothesis if it were great at explaining the features of the earth’s land-forms it should be attracting a much greater professional following yet the average age of the intellectual drivers of the creationists movement is going up year after year."

[“The State of Creation Science as Measured by Scholarly Publishing”, Natural Historian, Naturalis Historia (Blog), Nov. 3, 2012]
What's that? Four authors, some of whom are certainly not scientists (Jerry Bergman insists he is, but he has never published scientific research) are responsible for one-quarter to one-third of all creationist articles on Earth in the last 20 years? More than half are over 60 years of age?

But, what about Intelligent Design? Those people state clearly they're real scientists, not creationists, and praise themselves and each other as "highly-educated." Surely they've got some cuttin' edge research... right?

While creationists have three journals to themselves, ID proponents have just one, Bio-Complexity, their flagship (and really only) journal. Mathematician Jeff Shallit runs the numbers on their cuttin' edge research, keeping track of its authors (and editors, usually the same people.)
[Jeff Shallit, 2012]: "...pseudoscience is sterile: the ideas, such as they are, lead to no new insights, suggest no experiments, and are espoused by single crackpots or a small community of like-minded ideologues...

Here is a perfect example of this sterility: Bio-Complexity, the flagship journal of the intelligent design movement. As 2012 draws to a close, the 2012 volume contains exactly two research articles, one "critical review" and one "critical focus", for a grand total of four items. The editorial board has 30 members; they must be kept very busy handling all those papers. (Another intelligent design journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design, hasn't had a new issue since 2005.)

By contrast, the journal Evolution has ten times more research articles in a single issue (one of 12 so far in 2012). And this is just a single journal where evolutionary biology research is published; there are many others.

But that's not the most hopeless part. Of the four contributions to Bio-Complexity in 2012, three have authors that are either the Editor in Chief (sic), the Managing Editor, or members of the editorial board of the journal. Only one article, the one by Fernando Castro-Chavez, has no author in the subset of the people running the journal. And that one is utter bilge, written by someone who believes that "the 64 codons [of DNA are] represented since at least 4,000 years ago and preserved by China in the I Ching or Book of Changes or Mutations".

Intelligent design advocates have been telling us for years that intelligent design would transform science and generate new research paradigms. They lied."

[The Sterility of Intelligent Design". Jeff Shallit. Recursivity (Blog). December 09, 2012]
To sum up, in the year 2011, Young Earth creationists published 60 articles, and most of
them were not even scientific research. In 2012, ID proponents published four articles and only half were research. Let's be generous and say 64 articles for Young Earth and ID creationism combined.

For comparison, how much research is published on evolution? Les Lane ran the numbers on how many published science articles have "evolution" as a keyword in the Science Citation Index (online). He shows that in 2011, there were 43,903 such articles, and the next year, that increased by 5,214. Thus, the year-over-year increase in articles published on evolution is 7,147% larger than the total number of articles published on creationism and Intelligent Design combined-- and most of the creationist articles, and half the ID articles, are not real research, but apologetics, theology, and social commentary.


Back in 1991, there were 12,008 articles on evolution, and by 2012, there were 49,117 articles, a 309% increase in 21 years, and an average increase in evolution-based articles of 8% per year.

But still, creationists did have 64 articles about science, right? Sciencey science, and that means creationists are real scientists, and that means there's a controversy and we must 'teach the controversy.' In order to see how sciencey creation science is, let's look at a recent [2013] article in Answers Research Journal, the flagship journal of Answers in Genesis, which Ken Ham announced with great fanfare as a 'peer-reviewed scientific research journal'.
Simon Turpin, 2013: "This paper will demonstrate that human physical and spiritual death, together with the death of animals, came about through the disobedience of one man by examining nine key [Bible] passages: Genesis 1, 2, and 3; Acts 3:21; Romans 5:12–21; 8:19–22; 1 Corinthians 15:22–55; Colossians 1:15–21 and Revelation 21–22...

There are three lines of evidence in Genesis 1 that rule out the possibility of any kind of death or disease before Adam’s disobedience: the length of the days of creation, the vegetarian diet prescribed to man and animals in Genesis 1:29–30, and God’s declaration that His completed creation was very good." [“Did Death of Any Kind Exist Before the Fall?”, Simon Turpin, Answers Research Journal 6 (2013): 99 –116.]
There you go: creationists do have cuttin' edge scientific research, it's just that their research is uh, Bible reading, but it's real cuttin' edge Bible reading.

A Message from 1905

I will finish with the Nazi philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Adolf Hitler's mentor and a fierce anti-Darwinist, writing in 1905. In his own time he saw "the English sickness", evolution, being "shaken off" for good.
Houston S. Chamberlain, 1905: “If we might not say that this craze [Darwinism] is only the last belated straggler of romanticism and Hegelism in alliance with flat English utilitarianism, and that a hundred years will not have passed before it will be judged as men to-day judge alchemy, … if we did not see around us … an energetic shaking off of this “English sickness”, as the Zoologist Friedrich Dreyer called it in a happy phrase, we might abandon all hope of a future for Science and culture.” [Houston S. Chamberlain, Immanuel Kant (1905), Vol. II, Chapter 6 “Plato”, p. 129]
Yes, clearly, evolutionary theory will be treated as a laugh, a joke-- like alchemy! ha ha!-- one hundred years after Chamberlain wrote that, which would have been... 2005.

"More and more" scientists are abandoning evolution. "An increasing number" are embracing creationism. There are so many of them-- so many.

Let's not ask what they've achieved, all those hundreds and thousands and millions of creationist scientists. Let's not tot up all that they've discovered. Since there are millions of them, they must have made millions of discoveries and millions of inventions. It must be incalculable. Literally.