Answers Research Journal volume 3

Volume 3 of the Answers Research Journal ran through 2010.


 * 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!

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 * 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 complains 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 &mdash; quotes from the play and trial transcript are dwarfed by creationist quotes about the play.

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 * 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: (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.)
 * "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."


 * 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.

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 * 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.

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 * 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): 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.


 * 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 article, Jason Lisle finally presents his solution to the distant starlight problem. As analyzed at the Sensuous Curmudgeon, 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, 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.

It turns out Lisle had published the same idea under a pseudonym nine years ago, making one wonder about the originality of the idea. 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. So much for creation science.

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

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 * 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: 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.
 * 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.