#2828: Danny Faulkner

 

Creationism, as a pseudoscience movement with legislative bite, seems to have receded into the background of political discourse in the US the last few years, but from that background it is still heavily promoted by religious fundies and wingnuts. Few of these promoters have any relevant scientific background, of course, so Danny Faulkner stands as a rather lonely figure who actually does have credentials to brandish when flouting his young earth creationism. Faulkner is an astronomer who at one point did some actual research related to binary stars and worked at a real university, before retiring to work for Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research (he is the ‘dean’ of the Astro/Geophysics department at the ICR Graduate ‘school’), where he could pretend to teach and do research without the constraints of rigor, truth, accuracy and sensitivity to reality put upon him by his previous associations and his discipline.

 

His post-science output has been published e.g. by the cargo-cult journal Answers Research Journal, and has included a.o.

 

-       ‘Interpreting Craters in Terms of the Day Four Cratering Hypothesis’ (for volume 7). Creationists have different hypotheses on when craters appeared in the universe; Faulkner distinguishes craters created on day four of the creation week from later ones by the time-honored method of assertion.

-       ‘Did the Moon Appear as Blood on the Night of the Crucifixion?’ (for volume 7)

-       ‘A Further Examination of the Gospel in the Stars’ (for volume 6): Faulkner wades into the creationist discussion of how the stars and constellations got their names.

-       ‘Astronomical Distance Determination Methods and the Light Travel Time Problem’, (for volume 6) where Faulkner admits that astronomers measure distances correctly, which refutes young Earth creationism; but astronomers overlook the versatility of the Goddidit hypothesis. Indeed, in the very same volume, Faulkner also published his own take; in ‘A Proposal for a New Solution to the Light Travel Time Problem’, he suggests that “light from the astronomical bodies was miraculously made to ‘shoot’ its way to the earth at an abnormally accelerated rate in order to fulfill their function of serving to indicate signs, seasons, days, and years. I emphasize that my proposal differs from cdk in that no physical mechanism is invoked”.

-       ‘How Long Did the Flood Last’, for volume 8

 

Faulkner seems not only to have forgotten some parts of his education but to never actually have quite understood science. Recounting his own personal history, he has expressed significant concern “with people who put that much faith in the big bang. It is the overwhelmingly dominant model, and they’ve had a few impressive predictions, like the background radiation. But it has many problems – they keep changing the model to make it fit the data we have,” which is what science does: adjusting one’s theories in light of evidence is a strength of science; it’s the feature that shows that a theory is sensitive to the facts and what distinguishes science from dogmatism. Of course, Faulkner is also honest about what his real issue is: “my biggest concern is that it doesn’t agree at all with the Genesis account of how the world came to be”. It certainly doesn’t.

 

At least he is clear about his presuppositions. Scientific work also require background knowledge, so if the results “contradict Scripture, we need to reexamine the assumptions” (Faulkner neglects to mention the uncomfortable fact that the background theories used in scientific investigation are themselves testable and well-established by evidence), and although even creationists don’t know everything, by “starting with the key eyewitness to world history, the Bible, we take a crucial step in the right direction that others ignore.” Faulkner was also among creationist critics of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s revival of the show Cosmos, on the grounds that the show lacks scientific balance because it fails to provide airtime for evolution deniers.

 

A commitment to Biblical literalism raises some obvious questions, and much of Faulkner’s ouput the last decade has consisted not only of trying to counter inconvenient scientific results (such as trying to figure out how he can argue that radiocarbon dating doesn’t work) or desperately trying to argue (well, assert) that the results really support creationism, but of countering challenges from more consistent literalists, including in particular the flat earth movement. Faulkner has even attented some flat Earth conferences, where he encounters some absolutely fantastic pieces of irony that he unwaveringly refuses to recognize.

 

Diagnosis: Given that he can flaunt some genuine credentials, Faulkner has indeed become one of the most significant authorities within the creationist movement today. His background also puts him in a position to entertain some awareness of the insanity of what he’s doing; and he sometimes seems on the verge of being aware – to the extent that one almost starts suspecting it’s all a hoax – but blind faith is an amazing insulator.

 

Hat-tip: Rationalwiki