#1606: Jeff Fears

Not much by way of notability, perhaps, but this one is both trite and disconcerting at the same time. Jeff Fears is apparently “head of the science department at Salisbury Christian School,” a hardcore creationist, uh, institution. Fears himself believes that “sound science requires no belief in evolution,” but has, it seems, not the faintest idea what either “sound science” or “evolution” actually means. Instead, he pushes a (familiar) bogus distinction between observational science (i.e. book keeping and logistics) and historical science, which requires interpretation in light of … well, faith. The point that all good scientific theories and hypotheses concern unobserved phenomena, but that you obtain evidence for or against them by deriving predictions about observable phenomena and testing the hypotheses about things that are observable now, is pretty far from Fears’s … “understanding” of science.

But he isn’t done. Fears also laments the perceived prevalence of methodoligcal naturalism – which creationists (and others) have deluded themselves into falsely thinking that modern science is committed to – and points out that, as opposed to modern evolutionists, the “founding fathers of modern science – giants like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton – interpreted evidence from a decidedly Judeo-Christian worldview and made what are arguably the most significant scientific discoveries the world has ever known, precisely from that vantage point. They were demonstrably not naturalists.” Well, he isn’t even close to getting any of this, is he?

And the clincher? “[S]ince macroevolution (salmon becoming salamanders) has never been observed [yes, this is Ray Comfort-level idiocy], faith most definitely is required […] Faith is belief in the unobservable. Hence, by definition, acceptance of macroevolution requires an ocean of faith, especially since it is attributed, not to an intelligent deity tinkering with his creation, but rather to random acts of chance.” Whee.

Diagnosis: Moron, but he seems to fancy himself a science teacher of sorts. Sad and scary.