Carl Baugh

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Ian Juby miseducating lecturing at Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum
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Hmmm, it seems that even geologically-confused 'yabba-daba-doo' merchants have jumped on the anti-naturalist bandwagon. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the low hanging fruit. In case you don't recognize this chap, his name is Carl Baugh; or to give him his formal academic title, Carl Baugh. He is infamous in creationist circles for being so incompetent that even other nut-cases who aren't worth listening to — such as Answers in Genesis, Creation Ministries International and Ken Ham — have expressed concerns that he might blow the whole gig.
YouTuber Gary Edwards on Baugh [1]

Carl Baugh (1936-) is an incoherent Young Earth creationist so inept at creationist apologetics that even Ken Ham has warned against relying on his bullshit.[2] He is also infamous for a stilted, staccato word salad style of speaking that makes his presentation sound "like it has been translated from Chinese by someone with with Broca'sWikipedia aphasia."[1] Also, just like "Dr." Dino, Baugh has a record of credentialism based on some rather, um, shaky documentation.[3] His biography notes that he's made at least one expedition searching for Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat.[4]

Beliefs[edit]

A crystalline firmament suspended above the planet filtered out short-wave radiation, and with its physical structure in place universal radio signals serenaded the earth with morning melodies. Planets in the Solar System were distributed at harmonic intervals on a large scale, consistent with the energy fields living seeds produce on a small scale.
—A sampling of Carl Baugh's bizarre babble from the Creation Evidence Museum of Texas website.[5]

As for the contents of his creationist claims, Baugh has latched onto the most ridiculous and transparent bunk (hence Answers In Genesis' caution against relying on him) and has stuck to all of it long after slightly less crappy apologists have cut their losses and distanced themselves from it. Examples include everything from the Paluxy River tracks (which Baugh continued to defend in The Mysterious Origins of Man), Moab Man, and that the London Hammer is a genuine out-of-place artifact and evidence for a recent creation. Indeed, The Daily Show lampooned Baugh and his views back in 2001 when it interviewed him and he claimed that human history was like The FlintstonesWikipedia (no kidding…).[6]

He has a truly mind-warping paper, entitled Crystalline Canopy Theory, posted on his website,[7] but, despite statements like "Recent analysis of astronomical polarization data demonstrates that the universe has an optical axis, and the universe appears to behave in a similar way as a crystal with optical activity", it has nothing to do with crystal woo. Instead, as the slightly more comprehensible explanation provided by CreationWiki makes clear,[8] Baugh's crystalline canopy theory hypothesis idea is a variant on the claim that the waters of Noah's flood came from a canopy above the Earth and "crystalline" refers to Baugh's notion that the canopy was made of ice crystals.

Creation Evidence Museum[edit]

The old museum

Baugh founded the Creation Evidence MuseumWikipedia (originally called Creation Evidences Museum) in a double wide trailer near Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, Texas in 1984,[9] 23 years before Ken Ham's more infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky. Later upgraded to a somewhat more attractive facility, the pseudo-museum is a "shapeless mass of… things and ideas and stuff that "isn't even wrong" and generic rocks and hyperbaric chambers and glass cases of unrelated fossils and evangelical kitsch."[10] The museum includes a "replica" of Noah's Ark purporting to demonstrate an engineering technique used in the construction of the Ark.[11] The "museum" also inexplicably includes a larger-than-life statue of American football coach Tom Landry.[10]

"Notable" works[edit]

We're sorry, the specified program is not valid.
—Trinity Broadcast Networks, in a stopped clock moment, accurately describes Carl Baugh's TV show.[12]

Baugh presented a program called Creation in the 21st Century on Trinity Broadcasting Network, featuring guests like Ian Juby and "chemist scientist" John Morris Pendleton.[note 1] This series was countered by YouTube vlogger Logicked in a series called Science in the 12th Century.[13] The program seems to have been inherited by David Rives.

External Links[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. Pendleton is an auto mechanic automotive technician with a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who likes to dress up in a lab coat and claims to have "worked in cancer research for 1 1/2 years". He has been the focus of the Hello, I'm a Scientist debunking series by YouTuber Logicked.

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 From the video entitled Fake Fossil Philosophy
  2. talk.origins, What About Carl Baugh? A Commentary by Answers in Genesis
  3. talk.origins, A Matter of Degree: Carl Baugh's Alleged Credentials (Originally published in NCSE Reports, Vol. 9, No. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1989)
  4. Director's Bio, Carl Edward Baugh creationevidence.org. Retrieved on 29 January 2016.
  5. Creation Model Session 6. creationevidence.org. Retrieved on 29 January 2016.
  6. Tyrannosaurus Redux., The Daily Show. 14 November 2001. Retrieved on 29 January 2016.
  7. Crystalline Canopy Theory
  8. CreationWiki: Crystalline canopy
  9. Creation Evidence Museum — About Us
  10. 10.0 10.1 My trip to the Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas. thewhitedsepulchre.blogspot.com. 24 October 2010. Retrieved on 29 January 2016.
  11. What's New at CEM? Noah's Ark Replica. Retrieved on 29 January 2016.
  12. Creation in the 21st Century, hosted by "Dr." Carl Baugh. tbn.org. Retrieved on 29 January 2016.
  13. Science in the 12th Century. youtube.com. Retrieved on 10 February 2016.