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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