Silver-level articleAnswers Research Journal

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===Volume 3 articles===
 
===Volume 3 articles===
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'''[[Answers Research Journal volume 3|Volume 3]]''' ran through 2010, publishing 14 papers and three letters for a record breaking 309 pages. The highlight of the year was undoubtedly Jason Lisle's much anticipated solution to the [[starlight problem]], his not so ground breaking [[anisotropic synchrony convention]], where he proposes light moves different speeds in different direction. An idea explored by real physicists 50 years, before being dumped on the interesting but unimportant pile. More humorously, Larry Vardiman and Wesley Brewer discovered the technique used by mainstream hydrologist of publishing multiple papers with the same basic idea and calling each one a case study, even though it was on a practical level no different than the last paper. Combined with Snelling's peer-reviews of the geology of Iseral, they managed to pad out what would have been a very thin volume. Although not without controversy, Todd C. Wood proposed that various species of hominids should be placed in the human baramin sparking the first letters discussion.
 
{{:Answers Research Journal volume 3}}
 
{{:Answers Research Journal volume 3}}
  

Revision as of 13:35, 24 January 2011

Goddidit!

Creationism

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Answers Research Journal[1] (ISSN 19379056) is a "peer-reviewed" (in the peer-creationist sense...) creation "science" "journal", with all "scare quoted" terms used loosely.[2] It is published by Answers in Genesis, and it features a lot of history, philosophy and Bible analysis pieces, but not much in the way of science. In an article about ARJ and related issues, one of the contributors states the journal's point of view: "'We have a particular viewpoint,' Purdom stated, referring to the ARJ. 'We start with the Bible as being true. And many other journals do not. They are going to start with human reasoning as the basis for truth.'”[3]

Appropriately enough for a journal of pseudoscience, authors are free to publish under pseudonyms, ostensibly to avoid persecution for their beliefs.[4][5] It should be noted that in some cases, it may be against university or company policies to publish anonymously work that you supposedly did "in the line of duty". Although, quite honestly, if that's the best publishing you can do as an academic, you probably don't deserve tenure.

Ulrich's Periodical Directory™ classifies the journal under "Religions and Theology",[6] despite having many science categories available. Upon creation of the journal, popular science magazines Scientific American[7] and Discover[8] quickly published criticism of the site. Slate[4] and AiG themselves[9] have also traded commentary, and several blogs such as the Sensuous Curmudgeon[10] and Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes[11] routinely produce criticism of the journal.

Contents

Judging criteria

"Answers" lists a bizarre set of criteria for articles submitted for publication:

  1. Is the paper’s topic important to the development of the Creation and Flood model?
  2. Does the paper’s topic provide an original contribution to the Creation and Flood model?
  3. Is this paper formulated within a young-earth, young-universe framework?
  4. If the paper discusses claimed evidence for an old earth and/or universe, does this paper offer a very constructively [sic] positive criticism and provide a possible young-earth, young-universe alternative?
  5. If the paper is polemical in nature, does it deal with a topic rarely discussed within the origins debate?
  6. Does this paper provide evidence of faithfulness to the grammatical-historical/normative interpretation of Scripture? [12]

Number 4 is by far the most important. The parallel criterion in a science journal would read, "If the paper discusses claimed evidence for science, does this paper offer a very constructive positive criticism and provide a possible pseudoscientific alternative?" Most of the published articles are invalid by criterion 2 as they are mostly re-hashed creationist propaganda.

Unlike a scientific journal, no data or methods section is required for an Answers Research Journal article, which is okay, as pretty much none of the papers have data or methods backing them up any way.

Editor-in-Chief

Andrew A. Snelling[13] is the editor-in-chief, who claims to have "more than 24 years of technical scientific publication experience,"[14] including In Six Days, Why fifty scientists choose to believe in creation.[15][16] Unfortunately the highlight of this experience includes founding the Journal of Creation. He is also quoted as saying:

It is our hope that the online publication of ARJ will encourage Christians with powerful results of the latest creationist research, providing them with new resources for use in their own research and education—and in their witnessing to the truth and authority of God’s Word.[17]

Er... and the science?

By March, 2008 Snelling had written two of the first six articles in ARJ[18] and had edited the journal in its entirety. He has ties to the Institute for Creation Research, which funded some of his work.[19][20] What a trouper!

Content analysis

Volume 1 articles

Volume 1 consisted of the 195 pages of content published in 2008. (As a comparison, the journal Biochemistry published 14038 pages in 2008, volume 47, or about 72 times more content.[21]) Highlights of vol. 1 include a piece on peer review, which takes (Sterile, 2009) Harvard Referencing (Ace McWicked 2007) to extreme (Human 2007, Pi 2010) and quite funny (Bob, 2006) levels (tmtoulouse, 2009) and an alternative explanation for the origin of oil that amounts to Goddidit. And the Great Flood also affected Mars.

Volume 2 articles

Volume 2 ran through 2009, publishing 16 papers with a total length of 210 pages. For comparison: one issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology - Volume 23 Issue 3 (March 2010) - had 17 research papers, 1 review paper and two communications for 210 page; there will be twelve issues in total this year.[22] Among the notable papers are one that says creationists should stop using conspiracy theories about Darwin as evidence (nice, but hardly science, even by the standards of the ARJ) and a paper on polonium halos.

Volume 3 articles

Volume 3 ran through 2010, publishing 14 papers and three letters for a record breaking 309 pages. The highlight of the year was undoubtedly Jason Lisle's much anticipated solution to the starlight problem, his not so ground breaking anisotropic synchrony convention, where he proposes light moves different speeds in different direction. An idea explored by real physicists 50 years, before being dumped on the interesting but unimportant pile. More humorously, Larry Vardiman and Wesley Brewer discovered the technique used by mainstream hydrologist of publishing multiple papers with the same basic idea and calling each one a case study, even though it was on a practical level no different than the last paper. Combined with Snelling's peer-reviews of the geology of Iseral, they managed to pad out what would have been a very thin volume. Although not without controversy, Todd C. Wood proposed that various species of hominids should be placed in the human baramin sparking the first letters discussion.

Anne Habermehl, January 13, 2010

Yet another review-ish article about which of two fringe creationist theories explaining Neanderthals is better. This article argues for the view ignored even by creationists, that Neanderthals were humans who lived for hundreds of years. The distinctive look of Neanderthals died out when humans didn't live long enough to develop their Neanderthal characteristics. All in 4000 years! Along with the romp through "Was Homo erectus man or ape?", this silly article is all post hoc reasoning.

Enigmatic, indeed!

Larry Vardiman and Wesley Brewer, February 17, 2010

Hmmmm... Let's look at a big storm in 1996 and pretend it extrapolates to the massive Global flood. Ignoring that this probably contradicts Flood geology, this feasibility study has one sentence about creationism: "Glaciers thousands of feet thick could have readily developed during hundreds of years following the Genesis Flood." That's nice. Any evidence of the actual post-Flood period?

John K. Reed, March 17, 2010

A review of different definitions of uniformitarianism and a request for new nomenclature, with a little whining for good measure. There is not much here in terms of science (no physical evidence), being more of a philosophical piece on the basis of science.

Jerry Bergman, March 31, 2010

An essay challenging the historical accuracy of the play Inherit the Wind, in what is supposed to be a science research journal. The article is a long rant that the play portrays creationists as stupid and ignorant, and complaints that the play fails to mention eugenics. Despite there being a section titled "The Science Facts Irrelevant", the paper at no point discusses the facts of evolution or creation, even in the context of the play. What is actually surprising is how rarely the play is referred to during the article — quotes from the play and trial transcript are dwarfed by creationist quotes about the play.

Todd C. Wood, May 5, 2010

Baraminologist Todd C. Wood produces a paper that, assuming baraminology as true, does what the title says. The results look remarkably similar to those considered the case by standard science. Even other creationists don't like this paper.

Rod J. Martin, May 26, 2010

Use Genesis to justify your global warming denialism! Some quotes to indicate how idiotic this "article" is include the following:

  • "CO2 and O2 were created early in the Creation week. Neither of these gases evolved." (Who ever said gases "evolved?")
  • "The level of CO2 in our atmosphere could increase over 1,300% before reaching the current mine safety limit, and this level has been reduced to only 42% of the prior safe limit. Today’s atmospheric concentration of CO2 is clearly safe for humans, and will be for over a thousand years at today’s rate of increase." (What does this have to do with global warming?)
  • "The earth is huge. We simply do not have a sufficient number of collection points (weather stations) to accurately determine earth’s average surface temperature."

(p.s. to the web editor: Writing carbon dioxide in your HTML version as CO2 does not help your first impression as a science journal.)

Ken Patrick, June 9, 2010

This student paper, from Cedarville University, is a good old "flood of the gaps" argument, which relies on the Australian desert being a tropical forest with a large lake in it in the last few thousand years. Pity that there is nothing in the local oral history about this forest and lake vanishing, or ever having been there at all.

Larry Vardiman and Wesley Brewer, July 13, 2010

Same as before only this time they simulate two different storms with the program and then extrapolate to get the same result as before. Well it is nice to know that their off-the-shelf simulation program works.

Jerry Bergman, July 28, 2010

In this rather unoriginal piece, Jerry Bergman attempts to argue that belief in evolution implies atheism, quoting the "usual evils" of Richard Dawkins, Judge Jones and Stephen Jay Gould in the process. (Kenneth Miller is notably absent!.) The article lacks a connection between the ideas of evolution and religions, instead focusing on argumentum ad populum concerning the percentage of biologists who are atheists. The quotes mostly focus on the evolutionists' statements that evolution and religion are incompatible, but do not investigate the reasons they say they are. The only evidence considered is that it is difficult to argue for design when mutations are observed to be random and natural selection isn't entirely deterministic, all the while ignoring theistic evolution.

letters from David N. Menton, Anne Habermehl, and David A. DeWitt, August 25, 2010

These letters scoff in disbelief that Todd C. Wood could propose that other hominids could be "human." The authors deny Wood's statistical measures, and use morphological comparisons to suggest that these three are definitely not human. The authors even admit to limitations to standard baraminology!

Three quotes sum up baraminology in general. From Anne Habelmehl:

Let me point out that we creationists can tell, merely from reading our Bible, that some fossils are human and some are not; we do not need statistical analysis to confirm this.
Historically, we creationists have rather made a laughingstock of ourselves among evolutionists in claiming that we can tell the difference between human and nonhuman fossils (Foley 2008), and this paper does nothing to reverse that situation.

And from David Menton:

Most importantly, the Bible believing creationist will be careful to confine himself to speculations that are consistent with God’s Word.

Todd Wood weighs in on his blog about these criticisms and two others (one at CMI and one at AIG):[23]

One thing is certain: all five of the sediba critics are absolutely, positively convinced that it isn't human, and their strong reactions to my work suggests that they view it as dangerous or even unchristian. What motivates these reactions? Fear? Insecurity? Perhaps more importantly, why is it so offensive just to suggest that sediba is human? If it's just a case of mistaken identity, who cares? What's the big deal? I'm totally serious about this, too. I must be missing something, and if you can explain it, I would be very grateful.

He later published a paper in the Journal of Creation Theology and Science with further analysis.[24]

Jerry Bergman, September 1, 2010

Jerry Bergman's answer: No. Is it evidence against abiogenesis? No. Is it evidence for Young Earth Creationism? No, although he seems to think so, because "we live in a world created for us to meet our needs, thus nature was created to fit our requirements." Never mind that humans drink fresh water.

Andrew A. Snelling, September 8, 2010

Yawn. Really, Andy, this stuff again? OK, you've added a long review type article thing with dates of millions of years, and then shift back to the same-old radiohalo stuff, followed by the special pleading about accelerated radioistopic decay that magically occurred during the flood but didn't burn up everything. All that based on the your measurements on 10 rocks. While we appreciate data (hint: tell your other authors, you are senior editor after all), you're going to need to do better than that!

Jason Lisle, September 22, 2010
For a more detailed explanation, see anisotropic synchrony convention.

In his long anticipated[25][26] article, Jason Lisle finally presents his solution to the distant starlight problem. As analyzed at the Sensuous Curmudgeon,[27][28] Lisle changes an assumption in relativity about the speed of light, which may create problems with Maxwell's equations. The central point of his thesis is related to the idea of the one-way speed of light, which thought experiments would indicate is not possible to measure without synchronized clocks. The speed of light can only be measured on a loop: from a source, bounced off a mirror, and back to the source, with c being the average speed of light over that path. However, Lisle propose that light comes in from the source instantaneously and is reflected back at speed c/2, giving an average round trip speed of c. This way we can see the light of distant objects instantaneously. This raises questions on why we see galaxies in various states of development, which Lisle explains with the creationist hypothesis that galaxies are created and destroyed in less than a few thousand years.[29]

It turns out Lisle had published the same idea under a pseudonym nine years ago, making one wonder about the originality of the idea.[30] Lisle also fails to cite the previous work done of this by W. Farrell Edwards in 1963 when he proposed anisotropic space and discussed its implication which he could have found, like we did, by looking it up on Wikipedia.[31] So much for creation science.

Meanwhile, Answers in Genesis publishes a mature response to criticism. Way to go!

Larry Vardiman and Wesley Brewer, October 20, 2010

Summary: Just like Yosemite.

All three of these papers hinge on the same basic idea, if the sea surface temperature of the Pacific ocean off the coast of the continental US was above 30 degrees Celsius, there would be more than four times the amount of precipitation during certain storm events and glaciers would form in just a few hundred years. The question left unanswered, why would the Pacific Ocean's sea surface temperature be more than 15 degrees above the current average during and after a global flood?

Andrew A. Snelling, December 15, 2010

For what is likely the final paper of the year, Snelling gives us a 44 page browser-hanger of an article with lots of colorful diagrams. It is an extensive description of the geology of Israel and surrounding countries, but little to nothing of it could not be found in more reliable scientific texts. Snelling states straight upfront "The sedimentary strata that cover most of Israel are an obvious record of the Genesis Flood", stating his conclusion in the first line of the abstract. The few take home point that can be sieved out of it are:

  • Dinosaur footprints are evidence for the flood, because dinosaurs would not "have lived shallow salty water where there was no food to eat". Obviously they were laid when they were treading water during the flood.
  • That "geologic processes which were occurring at catastrophic rates during the Flood are still operating today at a snail’s pace". Evidence for this include the decreasing power of post-flood volcanoes. The cited paper for this interesting tidbit examines the eruption of five volcanoes.

This paper is again nothing new or interesting in terms of evidence for a global flood. It is a discussion of geology, with the odd little bit about the flood already published elsewhere chucked in.

Accusations of deceit and questions on the peer-review process

For AiG's take on an "evolutionist"'s attempt to "discredit" the journal, see their website.[32] Interestingly, no one ever seems to try to discredit science journals for some reason, nor would a science journal editor lambast a creationist for doing so. Interestingly, Snelling comments on the evolutionist's scientific inaccuracies in an e-mail, and comments that "[U]nless you can somehow seriously demonstrate in a proper and rigorous scientific manner and therefore convince me otherwise, I must reject your paper as bogus, and an attempt to claim a prize being offered on the Internet for successful deception."

One must wonder about the journal's peer-review process. Does that mean that Dr. Snelling is hand-picking articles for this journal instead of sending it to a few reviewers and finding the reviewers' consensus? Is it really professional to imply an intent to win an internet prize without more evidence, when the journal could just reject the article on its selection criteria? Why is the submitter's e-mail and the reply to a submitter made public and not kept confidential? Even if the submitter is kept anonymous, to use one's submission to make a point is questionable ethically.

See also

Journal issues

Footnotes

  1. http://www.answersingenesis.org/arj/
  2. Loosely, as in completely inaccurately.
  3. http://www.jyi.org/features/ft.php?id=1515
  4. 4.0 4.1 http://www.slate.com/id/2184384
  5. "Any author using a pen name or who has a reason for not wanting their biographical details publicized on the AiG website should specifically request this, and their wishes will be respected." from page three of the instructions to authors (large pdf file).
  6. http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/ulrichsweb_news/uu/newTitles.asp?uuMonthlyFile=uu200712/new_titles.txt&Letter=R&navPage=9&
  7. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=news-bytes-mystery-illness-strikes-bats
  8. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/02/13/inside-a-creationist-journal/
  9. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2008/02/16/news-to-note-02162008 #5 on the list
  10. http://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com/?s=Answers+Research+Journal
  11. http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?as_q=Answers+Research+Journal&num=10&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&ctz=240&c2coff=1&btnG=Search+Blogs&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&bl_pt=&bl_bt=&bl_url=http%3A%2F%2Fhjhop.blogspot.com%2F&bl_auth=&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=a&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=2000&as_maxd=26&as_maxm=8&as_maxy=2010&lr=&safe=active
  12. http://www.answersingenesis.org/assets/pdf/arj/instructions-to-authors.pdf page nine.
  13. For more about Dr. Snelling, see here
  14. http://www.answersingenesis.org/arj/about
  15. http://www.christiananswers.net/catalog/bk-sixdays.html
  16. Whew! A whole 50! That's like a mid-sized graduate program!
  17. http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/aroundtheworld/2008/01/11/free-answers-research-journal/
  18. A critical blog post on Snelling's role as editor of Answers Research Journal is here
  19. http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/bios/a_snelling.asp
  20. https://www.icr.org/research/index/research_physci_snelling/
  21. http://pubs.acs.org/loi/bichaw
  22. Journal of Evolutionary Biology Volume 23 Issue 3
  23. http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2010/08/sediba-bad-and-ugly.html
  24. http://www.bryancore.org/jcts/index.php/jctsb/article/download/3/8
  25. "Research at Answers Research Journal," Jason Lisle's blog at AiG, 8 July 2010. Found at Internet Archive Wayback Machine, 8 July 2010 capture, accessed 1 July 2013.
  26. "Pride and Prejudice," Jason Lisle's blog at AiG, 23 July 2010. Found at Internet Archive Wayback Machine,25 Oct 2010 capture, accessed 1 July 2013.
  27. "Jason Lisle’s “Instant Starlight” Paper." The Sensuous Curmudgeon. 22 September 2010. Accessed 24 September 2010.
  28. The Sensuous Curmedgeon has since written several more posts about Lisle's hypothesis: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
  29. A more technical rebuttal can be found at Quantum Linearity: "Answers in Genesis Screws It up Again" Quantum Linearity. 2 October 2011. Accessed 28 May 2011.
  30. "More on Lisle's starlight solution." Todd's Blog. 23 September 2010. Accessed 24 September 2010.
  31. Edwards, W.F. (1963), "Special Relativity in Anisotropic Space", American Journal of Physics 31, Issue 7, pp. 482
  32. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2008/05/14/caught-in-the-act
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