Answers Research Journal volume 1

Volume 1 of the Answers Research Journal was produced over 2008. The "volume" had 195 pages, which is smaller than the size of your standard issue of most scientific journals. (As a comparison, the journal Biochemistry published 14,038 pages in 2008, volume 47, or about 72 times more content. ) There were 16 papers published, three by the editor-in-chief.


 * Edited by Georgia Purdom and Joseph W. Francis, January 9, 2008

Nine abstracts from a creationist get-together. Nine is an incredibly small number of papers for a conference or workshop. Also, traditionally, when a journal publishes conference proceedings, they publish the papers in full, not just the abstracts. This adds little in the way of support for the creationist model, as we don't get to see the papers. Most of the participants are from the Creation Research Center or Liberty University. Two, listed as "Independent Scholars", are using pseudonyms so as not to impact their academic careers.


 * Alan L. Gillen, January 16, 2008

These two articles try to figure out which day microbes were formed. It's hard when Genesis gives no information to figure it out, so we can just personally muse about it. A highlight quotes from the second article that emphasizes the cutting edge of creation science sounds like a crap shoot: "I once believed that all microbes were simply created on Day Three—with all the plants (and seed-bearing life). . . . Upon further reflection on the origin of microbes, I realized that not all microbes could be classified as "seed-bearing" life, like plants, cyanobacteria, or photosynthetic bacteria. This led me to the conclusion that the Creator probably created animal-like (nonphotosynthetic) microbes on Days Five and Six.


 * Andrew Snelling, February 6, 2008

This is recycled global flood garbage. No evidence for a recent creation at all.


 * Desmond P. Allen, February 22, 2008

A philosophical piece. Don't ask. No evidence for a recent creation at all. It also combines science and religion with abandon. God is eternal. God is Spirit. Spirit is life. Spirit is the ultimate reality for both the metaphysical and the physical. The physical universe and all that is in it, including time, is the manifestation of the thought of God. He spoke, and it was so. Therefore, our physical universe is essentially a holographic image empowered by the Spirit of God. God exists aside from our temporal material paradigm, of which He is the light, the ultimate source of energy. Here there exists a certain entanglement between the quantum state and the Spirit of God. Even beyond His empowerment of the infinitesimal electromagnetic charges and the nuclear forces that bind all things together, this entanglement brings life in all its forms to the universe. This article is so bad, there has been some discussion in the blogosphere that this article is a hoax.


 * Alan L. Gillen and Frank J. Sherwin III, February 25, 2008

Want to "prove" that life was created? Cite the opinion of a famous scientist of yesteryear.

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 * Andrew A. Snelling, March 26, 2008

Radiohalo "research" from the RATE project that assumes that isotopes decayed gosh darn fast in the first few days of creation and now have come to a constant half-life. (One wonders why Genesis omits this interesting fact.) Hundreds of isotopes have precise measurements of their half-lives, and this article measures nothing of the sort. News to creationists: Just because you find more radiohalos doesn't make the evidence any better. This hypothesis has been refuted before, after all. A basic understanding of chemistry would be enough to show that the rate of radioactive decay is independent of the concentration of the nuclei. So even if God created all the radioactive elements at once, there would be no increase in the rate of their breakdown. In fact, we should see a much higher percentage of radioactive nuclei.


 * Roger W. Sanders, Kurt P. Wise, Joseph W. Francis, and Todd Charles Wood, April 9, 2008

Don't like the peer review in the scientific literature? Make up a criticism based on Christian concerns. We're not sure what this commentary "article" has to do with verifying Young Earth Creationism.
 * And then nearly two months go by... Apparently nothing exciting happened in creation science for a while. So shocking for such a developing, exciting field!


 * Dr. Jean K. Lightner, June 11, 2008

A baraminology paper with great language in the conclusions: "it seems most likely"; "it is highly doubtful"; "may not have been rigorously tested, but it is consistent with the observed data"; "it appears plausible". What conclusive conclusions! Favorite quote: Although they may come at a cost ..., chromosomal translocations may provide a degree of plasticity that is necessary for animals to adapt in a sin-cursed world. Er... OK...
 * Another month passes with no groundbreaking creation science... sad, sad...


 * Charles Creager Jr., July 23, 2008

Apparently if you have a global flood on Earth, you have one on Mars, too. (Apparently God flooded the Martians as well as the Earthlings.) This article is a complete rehash of and hatchet-job on the current data from Mars rover missions and a lot of talk of "creationist opportunity" with no new data or original conclusions. See Tharsis. Also particularly disturbing about this paper is the lack of scholarly references. Almost all the sources are citations to NASA's website (press releases, on-line pictures and figures, etc.). The only real "references" are to a meeting synopsis, an article in Creation Research Society Quarterly, and a reference to  CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. Work like that would be outright rejected at any decent journal, and any college graduate would know better than to submit work with such poor sources.
 * A groundbreaking paper must be coming as another month goes by with no articles.


 * John Woodmorappe, September 17, 2008

Wow. A creationist actually suggests a hypothesis! Of course, there are no data given to actually test the hypothesis. In fact, this article is a treatise on the binomial distribution, which the author publishes as his own (look--I generated a table!), but are actually readily calculable from any statistics book. We're also not sure about how many cubic organisms there are (really, it's in there!). Interestingly, there is only one reference--to Mr. Woodmorappe's work. Why do creationists fear referencing real data?


 * Michael J. Oard and Peter Klevberg, September 22, 2008

Two articles in one week!!! Stunning! Complete with the term "anticreationist" even!! There's something "fishy", though (an inside joke for those who have read the article), like looking only at data that fits their view.


 * Jean K. Lightner, October 8, 2008

A classic case in which the creation model is assumed and then the data is used to fit that model, reversing the usual method of science. Also, it is a classic case of argument from ignorance: The selection factors are unknown so, whammo! Evolution must be wrong, creationism must be right. Except it's not clear why the creation model is better, nor the mechanism by which the creator did his job.

(Also, ARJ seems to move pages around liberally, perhaps reflecting the fact that nothing is yet in print. Hence the chronological order and the page orders are screwed up for this paper.  Perhaps that relfects the fact than nothing has been in paper form and that any person can make a pdf.)

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 * Luke Kim, October 8, 2008

How could bacteria cause disease before the fall in such a perfect world? Let's just declare that those bacteria didn't cause disease. Yeah, that's it!


 * Andrew A. Snelling, December 10, 2008

In editor-in-chief Snelling's THIRD paper (what an extensive community...), Snelling claims that his data are "deadly" to radiodating using carbon-14. It also gives some outright incorrect statements about carbon-14 -- or, at least, highly misleading. "[N]ot a single atom of 14C formed even 1 million years ago anywhere in or on the earth should conceivably still exist." Strictly speaking this is true -- although carbon-14 is generated in the troposphere all the time. Snelling references Whitelaw's debunked article about radioactive decays as a centerpiece to his introduction. After an extensive discussion about how the fossils he is studying cannot be "truly that old," he gives an estimate of "36,400±350 to 48,710±930 years old" for the fossils, but then later concludes that they "are consistent with their burial during the Genesis Flood only, about 4,300 years ago." Huh?


 * John D. Matthews, December 17, 2008

In a classic "god of the gaps" argument, this pathetic article claims to indicate that oil was "created," since the scientists do not have a clean theory on the origin of oil. It ultimately fails as the "Biblical evidence" includes the statement that "Some kind of oil derivative was used by Noah to waterproof the Ark" (which could have been of plant origin, dipshit). Oil's usefulness is claimed as a sign that God made earth ready for habitation. (One has to wonder why it took humans so long to use it as fuel as wood was used for far longer.) This is definitely not science.


 * Doug Kennard December 31, 2008

A Professor of Bible, Theology, and Philosophy at the Houston Graduate School of Theology (who was, at the time, a professor at Bryan College) writes this ... uh ... theology piece. What it has to do with creation is unclear, other than quoting Genesis and mentioning "creation" a few times. It certainly does not support a supernatural creation in any way.


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