#1725: Larry S. Helmick

Cedarville University is a fundamentalist, uh, "school" in Ohio where students are required to obey strict rules on behavior and severe limits on behavior and speech, and are given an “education” that is firmly Biblically literalist, young-earth creationist, and staunchly committed to “complementarian gender roles”. Its staff encompasses people like Senior Professor of Chemistry Larry S. Helmick, who is also affiliated with the Creation Research Society and has published extensively in venues like the Creation Research Society Quarterly on topics like flood geology, and this is – officially – what passes for science at Cedarville University. Helmick lists “the search for Noah’s Ark” as one of his main research interests, no less.

Helmick is also on the CMI list of scientists alive today who accept the biblical account of creation and a signatory to the Discovery Instute petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. He is, in fact, rather typical of the people who signed that one, and at least no one in their right mind would count his dissent as “scientific”.

Diagnosis: Pseudoscientist working for an anti-science institution. Apparently quite a number of young people are coming to Cedarville University under the delusion that they will receive an “education”, which is pretty sad, and Larry Helmick should be ashamed of himself (which he most surely isn’t).