Yet another signatory to the Discovery Institute petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism. Barbara Helmkamp has a PhD in theoretical physics from Louisiana State University, but
is not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, she is teaching
physics and chemistry at Credo Academy, a homeschool co-op in Denver.
Helmkamp is a young earth creationist,
and has produced some online documents where she argues against “the myth of
evolution” aimed at children; after all, creationism is a matter of religious
outreach, and doing science or finding and evaluating evidence has nothing to
do with it. She also claims that creationism is a much more explanatorily
powerful hypothesis than Big Bang or evolution, since God can do anything.
Which is not how explanation works.*
Diagnosis: Oh, the stuff the Discovery Institute dredged up
for that hilarious list of theirs. Yet Intelligent Design proponents continue
to use it. Which doesn’t put them in a particularly good light.
*If you need spoon-feeding: For E to explain p, at least it
has to be a prediction of E that p rather
than not-p. If God can do anything, then Goddidit cannot even in principle satisfy
that constraint (it is equally consistent with p as with not-p); Goddidit can
hence not explain anything whatsoever. Similarly: If I wish to know why fire
engines are red, I want to know why it is red rather than some other color. Telling me that ‘humans can paint
things in all sorts of colors’ is not an explanation for why fire engines are red. (This is not to say that failing
this minimum requirement is the only problem with Goddidit offered as an explanation; even if it did satisfy that
requirement it would still be the case that it just trades one mystery for
another, for instance.)
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