#592: Charles Creager jr.

Charles Creager has a bachelor of science degree from BobJones University and is thus a well-qualified creation scientist. His main claim to fame is his publication in the first volume of the Answers Research Journal (the house journal of Answers in Genesis) titled “Mars, a Testament to Catastrophe”. In this delightful article Creager claims to present evidence that Mars had a global flood as well. (Come on: it wouldn’t be consistent with the Bible if God only flooded the humans and not the Martians, would it?) He presents no new data, but insanely twists and tortures existing data from Mars rover missions (see this one) to suit his results. The scholarly references in the article are to press releases and only the pictures on NASA’s website.

Creager doesn’t seem to have contributed much else to science – though he runs his own creationist website, the Genesis Mission and had a paper “Entropy and Applied Energy” published in Creation Research Society Quarterly in 2012 – but the aforementioned paper is alone sufficient to earn him an honored place in our Encyclopedia.

Diagnosis: A rather cute attempt at “we want to do science too” without having the faintest idea what science is.

#570: Donald Chittick

Donald E. Chittick is a former Professor of Chemistry at George Fox University, and currently “adjunct professor of chemistry” at the ICR and member of the Creation Research Society. His main claims to fame rests on the authorship of “The Controversy: Roots of the Creation Evolution Conflict”, and on being one of the star witnesses for the State during the Arkansas creationist trial in 1980. Chittick has contributed overwhelming evidence in favor creationism in the form of hard-hitting empirical data such as “If the miraculous is rejected for early Genesis, then on what basis can it be accepted for the resurrection?” He is also one of those people who write “Christian” in dick quotes if used to characterize someone who supports evolution. He is, of course, on CMI’s list of scientists who accept a Biblical account of creation.

Diagnosis: Chittick may know a thing or two about chemistry, but it is likely that his understanding of scientific methodology has been acquired by the parrot method. He evidently doesn’t understand it in the slightest.

#105: Donald B. “Don” DeYoung

It seems like creationist crackpots have flocked around the middle entries of the letter ‘D’, and here is another one. Don DeYoung is a young earth creationist and a physicist whose life work is to overcome the hurdle of explaining how observable nature and science is consistent with literal Biblical six-day creation and deluge. No easy feat if you want to keep “goddidit”s at a minimum (as in here, though Don himself doesn’t particularly care for RATE).

He sums up his worldview thus: “My scientific belief in creation is largely based on two thermodynamic laws of nature. The first law states that energy is conserved or constant at all times. This rule ensures a dependable and predictable universe, whether for stars or for human life. The second basic law…describes unavoidable losses in any process which involves the transfer of energy. This law is directly related to the Curse which was placed upon nature at the fall of mankind in Eden. Secular science has no satisfactory explanation for such laws of nature, and these laws are entirely consistent with the biblical, six-day creation.”

Perceptible readers with at least a cursory knowledge of science might detect some holes in and problems with that one. Don doesn’t, however.

He is the current president of the Creation Research Society (a different beast than Tom DeRosa’s Creation Studies Institute, though their worldviews are more or less interchangeable); he also conducts workshops for children with practical and theoretical Bible-science activities, and contributes to Ken Ham’s repugnant pile of nincompoopery, Answers in Genesis. DeYoung has written several books, including “Thousands … Not Billions” and “Our Created Moon: Earth’s fascinating neighbor” (with John Whitcomb, who will appear later).

For more on Creation geophysics, see here.

Diagnosis: Possibly a nice and quiet guy, but certainly a fullblown loon. He seems to have some impact on the fringes (those already convinced; wingnutty homeschoolers and Ken Ham’s kind of people, and so on), but has rarely been considered worthy of notice elsewhere.