#2355: Royal Truman

Royal Truman is a young-earth creationist affiliated with Answers in Genesis. Truman does have a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, and is thus qualified to sign onto the Discovery Institute’s nonsense petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, and is also on the CMI list of scientists alive today who accept the biblical account of creation. Of course, we have found no actual scientific research publications to his name, so he doesn’t really seem to be a scientist, but his name fills lists that would be embarrassingly empty if stricter criteria for “scientist” were used, so there you go. He has written

several articles for the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal and the pseudoscientific Journal of Creation, but that’s not quite the same. 

Though not, perhaps, among the creationist movement’s most obvious celebrities, Truman has been in the game for a while, and may probably be credited with many now well-established creationist gambits involving misunderstandings of information theory. Some comments on some of his arguments can be found here.

Diagnosis: Though more coherent and knowledgeable than many young earth creationists, Truman’s religiously motivated misunderstandings of evolution and the scientific theories he invokes to argue against evolution are rather instructive. And he certainly provides further illumination, if any were needed, of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Discovery Institute petition.

Note: we have ultimately decided against giving a separate entry to John Trumbo, journalist of Seattle’s KOMO news and the Seattle Times. In 2012 Trumbo wrote and article, which KOMO published as news, about creationist claims about how the Arizona sandstones are proof of Noah’s flood, with utter incredulity and not a single critical point (he did include the comments from several creationists, however.) Well, Trumbo might be a creationist, but he might also just be a bad journalist, and although bad journalism is bad and may help enable lunacy, it is not exactly lunacy. KOMO news, on their side, asked readers to “please note that we shared this story on our Facebook page because it is currently one of the most popular stories on our website. We are not promoting any agenda, including ‘young-earth creationism’.” Publishing the story on their Facebook page seems to be, by definition, promoting young-earth creationism.