Monday, August 18, 2008

Intellectual Dishonesty, ICR Style

I subscribe to the ICR's Acts & Facts to stay abreast of what that side of the debate is saying. In the most recent issue, there is an editorial by Henry Morris, the late, great don of Young Earth Creationism that was written in 2006. It is called The Logic of Biblical Creationism. In it, he writes:

If there is anything certain in this world, however, it is that there is no evidence whatsoever that evolution is occurring today—that is, true vertical evolution from some simpler kind to a more complex kind. No one has ever observed a star evolve from hydrogen, life evolve from chemicals, a higher species evolve from a lower species, a man from an ape, or anything else of this sort.

He continues:

Actually, there is no evidence at all that evolution ever took place in the past either. In all recorded history, extending back nearly five thousand years, no one has ever recorded the natural evolution of any kind of creature (living or non-living) into a more complex kind. (Acts and Facts, vol. 37 (8), August 2008: 11-12)

All of this is said without a shred of evidence to support these positions. He further writes about the lack of ancestors with "half legs/half wings, half-developed heart, half-developed eye" (Morris 2006) before launching into a misguided discussion of the laws of thermodynamics that, once again, fails to consider that the earth is not a closed system.

Reading this is incredible in the sense that, in order to write verbiage such as this, you have to willingly turn a blind eye to 150 years of observations in palaeontology, geology, geomorphology, physics and many other disciplines that have successfully rebutted all of Dr. Morris' claims. Further, that he made some of these claims reflects a complete lack of understanding of the disciplines that he is criticising. The level of intellectual dishonesty here is breathtaking and reduces the Young Earth position to nothing more than a joke, on par with the Flat Earth Society. It is as if the ICR exists within its own bubble, not even conscious of what goes on in the outside world.

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