Responding to the ICR

According to the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) website:

For nearly 40 years, ICR has been the leader in scientific research from a biblical perspective, conducting innovative laboratory and field research in the major disciplines of science.

Unfortunately, these people don't have a clue what science is. The ICR has been doing scientific research for 40 years? Interesting. What new discoveries have they come up with? What new knowledge have they uncovered? What diseases have they cured? The short answer is, none, none, and none.

While the ICR site does contain several dozen papers that represent the fruits of their 40 years of "innovative research," a closer examination reveals that these papers do nothing but take existing knowledge and manipulate it to support an arbitrary interpretation of The Bible.

Take "Temperature Profiles for an Optimized Water Vapor Canopy" for example. Far from advancing a means of combating global warming or normalizing rainfall across farmland, this paper merely attempts to explain how Noah's flood could really have happened. To creationists, "Maybe all that water was up in the air all along" somehow seems more scientific.

When a skeptic comes along and says, "That much water in the atmosphere would create a greenhouse effect like you've never seen," rather than abandon the water vapor canopy idea, creationists scramble for a come-back. In this case, if the sun's output were reduced to a fraction of its current amount, that would allow the canopy to exist without producing an unlivable Earthly environment. And so it goes.

Not only isn't this science, why bother with such an explanation in the first place? If you believe God created the universe, what's so hard about believing he could make it rain as long and as much as he wanted? Having God just snap his fingers to make it rain is a more consistent biblical explanation, but the ICR want to dictate what gets taught in the science classroom, and so they resort to hypothetical explanations for biblical miracles. When an arbitrary explanation is shown to be all wet, heh, instead of abandoning it and moving on, the ICR goes looking for a second hypothetical explanation that will make the first one viable. And so it goes.

What this shows is that these people are incapable of admitting, "We were wrong." It isn't religion but egotism that is the real driving force behind creationism.

Another article on the ICR website, "The 'Eve' Mitochondrial Consensus Sequence," begins with, "In order to develop a biblical model of human genetic history...." In other words, the authors started with a goal ("develop a biblical model") and then interpreted existing knowledge as required in order to achieve their goal.

Stringing a bunch of five dollar words together, using scientific-sounding terminology, and applying reason and logic to a problem doesn't turn creationism into science. Science must do more than simply justify itself using existing knowledge, it must lead us to new knowledge and, ultimately, new real-world applications.

The ICR is apparently well-funded and actively pursuing its goals. Recently, it created the National Creation Science Foundation (NCSF), whose mission is:

To promote the progress of creation science, ... [including] analysis in biosciences, astrophysics, geosciences, ecology, and technological sciences ... so that such scholarly research is designed and useful for analyzing the biblical account of creation, the Fall in Eden, the worldwide Flood, the division of languages, or other aspects of creation history as it is described within Genesis chapters 1 through 11.

In other words, if you thought the creationists would be satisfied taking over just the biology classroom, think again.

According to their website, "ICR is confident that the NCSF will ... advance the biblical creation model and thus magnify the Creator." The funny thing about goals is, people tend to achieve them -- if they are at all achievable. Thus, the NCSF will almost certainly succeed in advancing a fundamentalist Christian "biblical creation model." Whether doing so magnifies the Creator is, however, a matter of debate.

The universe is a more direct means of understanding God than is The Bible. After all, God directly created the universe, while The Bible is merely a second-hand, and sometimes third-hand, account of what certain people thought they heard God say. Doesn't it make sense, then, to study creation as a means of interpreting The Bible, rather than try to force God's creation to fit an arbitrary interpretation?

But like most religious people, creationists don't really want to understand God better. They already have all the answers and just want to recruit as many people to their camp as possible.

We can only guess how much time and money will be wasted by the NCSF, but we can guarantee one thing: they will provide the world with no new scientific knowledge and above all, no new applications.

If the creationists truly believe their own pronouncements, then let's see the NCSF do some real science, instead of just fund more papers full of sophistry. Here's a worthy goal: let the NCSF develop a cure for malaria. Malaria kills millions of people every year, with children being the most common victims. Surely, God doesn't want people to suffer like this. Surely, God would want us to use our talents (specifically, our intellects) to solve such a problem if at all we can. Therefore, if creationists really believe they're doing innovative science, let them give us a cure for this deadly disease. If they succeed, especially if they can show how creation science led to such a discovery where evil, secular science couldn't, they will get the attention of a lot of people. They will spread the Word, magnify the Creator, etc., etc.

If they fail, it will prove that creationism isn't an effective replacement for secular science. If they fail to even attempt such an undertaking, creationists will prove that they are liars who don't believe their own propaganda. They will show their true colors as heartless egotists, willing to weaken modern biology and medicine, willing to threaten the lives and health of millions, just so they can maintain the delusion that they have all the answers.