#891: Mark Looy

Mark Looy is Chief Communications Officer for Answers in Genesis, and as such PR manager for the Creation Museum in Kentucky, an extravagant piece of jimcrack devoted to presenting the literal creation story of the Bible (the “history book of the Universe”) as a fact, including the peaceful coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. The “Museum”, which is designed to be evangelistic, “presents the history of the Bible in a fun and entertaining way”. So you can imagine Looy saying some stupid shit from time to time, such as when he called Ben Stein a “a 21st-century Einsteinian figure”. Indeed, Looy is the go-to guy when the media want comments on and explanations of whatever nonsense the creation museum and Answers in Genesis are up to.

Looy, however, is adamant that they are doing science over at Answers in Genesis, so adamant, in fact, that you kind of suspects that he knows that he is wrong. When confronted with the fact that palaentologists don’t quite support the idea that humans and dinosaurs lived together a few centuries ago, he pointed out that “They all had to exist at the same time because they were all made on the same day. There may not be any fossil evidence showing dinosaurs and people in the same place at the same time. But it is clearly written that they were alive at the same time.” Chew on that, you silly evolutionists – you’ve overlooked one of the central claims of the earliest part of the Bible. Creationists and palaentologists use the same data, according to Looy, but different worldviews lead them to different interpretations – the creationist worldview being in particular characterized by rejecting those data, though Looy doesn’t see it that way.

After the Kansas Evolution Kangaroo Court, Looy said that “students in public schools are being taught that evolution is a fact, that they're just products of survival of the fittest … It creates a sense of purposelessness and hopelessness, which I think leads to things like pain, murder, and suicide,” an assertion he didn’t back up with evidence, and sustains a somewhat unclear link to the question of the scientific status of evolution, even if it were true.

Diagnosis: Fairly typical fanatic young-earth creationist, Looy is in fact one of the movers (though not one of the visionaries) of the young-earth creationist movement. An important figure in the battle against reason, sanity, and reality.