James A Huggins is a professor and chair of the department
of biology at Union University and director of their Hammons Center for
Scientific Studies. It’s not as impressive as it might sound. Union University
is a fundamentalist Southern Baptist institution and no place to get an
education – according to the University website, Huggins, who is also a pastor
at Unity Baptist Church, “prays with
students in each class as well as when they come to him for advising.” It
is instructive how Union University uses this to market their institution.
Huggins is also on the Creation Ministries International’s list of “scientists alive today who accept the Biblical account of creation”.
Of course, given that he does, in fact, have a science-related
education and a few publications on wildlife ecology that have nothing to do
with evolution, he is one of the few signatories to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism that superficially might seem to lend some air of credibility to such lists.
Diagnosis: Huggins doesn’t seem to be much in the spotlight
on these issues, but the fact that he i) does appear on these lists and is ii)
associated with something that pretends to be an institution of education is
enough to qualify him for inclusion here.
So a religious college can't be a college now? Wow, you guys are going off into some strange territory.
ReplyDeleteGood grief. Union University is not a place to get an education not because it is a religious college, but because it employs James Huggins as a professor and chair in their biology department. Huggins is demonstrably a pseudoscientist who subscribes to delusional nonsense about biology; that he is nevertheless a professor and chair in the biology department at Union, means that Union is a place to avoid for an education in science, and evidence that their standards are not very high in general.
DeleteI can't help noticing that your site is devoted to lampooning Christians. I am an atheist, so you can't accuse me of bias in that direction.
ReplyDelete"you can't accuse me of bias in that direction". An atheist can be biased in favor of Christianity, and a Christian can be biased in favor of atheism. Happens all the time. I don't know if you are biased, but it is rather striking that you feel you need to point out your religious views to preempt accusations of bias - why do you think we would accuse you of bias?
DeleteIn any case, the site here is not devoted to lampooning Christians. It is devoted to lampooning denialists and conspiracy theorists across the board. Being a creationist is a typical form of denialism that happens to be overrepresented among religious fundamentalists, and we are, indeed, lampooning creationists. It is, however, eminently possible to be a Christian and not be a denialist or creationist. Since you equate our criticism of creationists and crazy wingnuts with criticism of Christians as Christians, do you not think it is possible to be a Christian without being a creationist or crazy wingnut? In that case I suggest that it is you who have unhealthy and biased conceptions about what being a Christian involves.