Saturday, January 14, 2017

#1775: Darek Isaacs

Darek Isaacs is a young-earth creationist author and filmmaker, and (apparently) close ally/student of the Hovinds. Isaacs is the kind of guy who thinks an important objection to evolution (the theory of death to the weakest on Isaacs’s interpretation) is that it (as opposed to a literal reading of the Bible?) legitimizes rape, since evolution is all about the man propagating his DNA and all that matters in reproduction is the frequency of intercourse, whether the woman is willing or not. Oh, yes: It’s the familiar Hovind-level “understanding” of evolution, in which i) a strawman parody not even remotely related to the scientific theory in question is erected; ii) an is-ought fallacy is committed; and iii) the strawmen is rejected, by the age-old principle of wishful thinking, on the grounds of its ostensibly morally reprehensible corollaries.

Isaacs is, of course, a Biblical literalist. As such he believes that dragons are real, or at least that they were real back in Biblical times, and that 2000 years ago people understood and were appropriately scared of them. “The Bible speaks about dragons,” says Isaacs, and “our authority – everything we do, we have to measure by the word of God. That is what I believe. So we have to go to the Bible, and the Bible speaks about dragons.” It’s the kind of claim that should disqualify Isaacs from any discussion with anyone above the age of five, but which is actually relatively mainstraim among frothingly fundamentalist young earth creationists.

Isaacs is also the kind of researcher who publishes in Answer in Genesis’s house journal Answers; for volume 6, for instance, Isaacs published “Is There a Dominion Mandate?”, arguing that humans do not in fact have dominion over the earth (just think about Hurricane Sandy and all the dangerous wildlife) since The Fall.


Diagnosis: A Ray Comfort in the making, perhaps. Darek Isaacs is astoundingly silly, and one should perhaps not exaggerate his influence, but some people do apparently listen to him for other things than easy laughs.

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