Sunday, February 4, 2018

#1959: Matt McClellan

Matt McClellan is the founder of Christian Worldview Press. Apparently, McClellan is also the proud holder of an M.A. in Theology from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, and an uncompromising young-earth creationist. His bio even lists two articles on creationist pseudohistory published in Answers in Genesis’s house journal Answers: For vol. 4 he penned “Ancient Egyptian Chronology and the Book of Genesis”, and for vol. 5 “Abraham and the Chronology of Ancient Mesopotamia.” McClellan does not appear to have any scientific expertise or education remotely related to the topics, but we suspect the LBTS doesn’t offer courses in critical thinking, so McClellan may not be aware of the need for such expertise.

As for the Ancient Egypt article (discussed here), it is a fine display of both confirmation bias and cherry-picking, the goal of which is to compress the durations of Egyptian dynasties to make them fit McClellan’s reading of the Bible (the goal is not accurate values, but shaving off years without rejecting too many facts and too much of the carefully selected evidence McClellan has a desire to retain.) The Mesopotamia article is discussed here. It doesn’t really even try to deal with such things as evidence. Indeed, neither article really does much except for exemplifying the low standards of the journal.


Diagnosis: Small fish, presumably, but idiotic nonetheless. By himself McClellan is probably harmless, but he is part of a movement that is not, and as such he deserves exposure.

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