Tuesday, August 27, 2013

#682: Joseph W. Francis


Joseph W. Francis is a “Professor of Biological Sciences” at The Master’s College for Christ & Scripture. He is, as his position implies, a staunch and uncompromising young earth creationist, and has made his best efforts to turn as many students as possible away from the sinful way of science and evidence. He has, for instance, contributed (usually co-written with Georgia Purdom) several articles to Answer in Genesis’s house journal Answers.

To its first volume they edited the “Proceedings of the Microbe Forum,” which consisted of nine abstracts from a creationist conference or workshop (they didn’t publish the full papers, which is a little interesting). Most of the participants apart from Francis, whose contribution was “Creation Microbiology and the Origin of Disease”, were from the Creation Research Center (Kevin Anderson, Daniel Criswell, Frank Sherwin) or Liberty University (Alan L. Gillen), or similar institutions (Yingguang Liu, Purdom), though two were listed as “Independent Scholars” and were apparently using pseudonyms so as not to negatively impact their academic careers.

To the second volume Francis and Purdom contributed “More Abundant than Stars”, which dealt with the the fledgling field of “creation microbiology” (unclear relation to microbiology or science) and attempted to “organize the field of creation microbiology” by reviewing the literature combining creationist and scientific literature, and proposed to classify microbes according to baraminological concepts. No data, no experiments, no hypothesis tested, and overall an entirely predictable effort.

Diagnosis: There seems to be no end to this line of creationist jolterheads, and they keep doing a surprisingly large variety of things in order to avoid having to do any science whatsoever. Francis is merely one of many, but he certainly carries out his perceived duties with regard to spreading ignorance and untruth.

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