To be fair, we don’t have an extensive overview of the background or career of Jorge Fernandez, or where he is currently located, but a decade or so ago, Fernandez, a young-earth creationist, was a staple at creationist “scientific” conferences (such as the 2011 Symposium Cornell University, which was, emphatically, not organized by Cornell University), and online debates, providing standard PRATT talking points against evolution as well as appeals to Expelled-style conspiracy theories. Fernandez has also published rants in the Journal of Creation, the magazine published by Creation Ministries International. As Fernandez saw (or sees) it, creationists have been unfairly silenced by scientific organizations and journals just because they cannot back up their claims by evidence (not, admittedly, how Fernandez himself put it), and such organizations and journals have neglected to take creationist attacks on evolution seriously just because the attacks are silly and already thoroughly refuted. Fernandez would for instance try to argue that the second law of thermodynamics is incompatible with evolution (it obviously isn’t – Fernandez’s use rather entail the prediction that snowflakes are impossible) and quote-mine Francis Crick to suggest that Crick rejected the theory of evolution (he most certainly did not).
At some point, however, Jorge Fernandez was also the president of the Citizens for Objective Public Education, a Kansas-based creationist group that in 2013 (under the subsequent leadership of Robert Lattimer) filed a federal civil rights suit that sought to ban the teaching of evolution in Kansas public schools on the grounds that science is a religion. That the group doesn’t get the difference is telling enough.
Diagnosis: Yeah, it seems like a blast from the past, but these people are still out there, and they are unlikely to have gotten much more reasonable since the heydays of intelligent design. And there is still quite a number of them, unfortunately.
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