#2850: Avery Foley

Avery Foley is a prolific writer for the young-Earth-creationist and general pseudoscience organization Answers in Genesis (AiG). As such, she has promoted most of the creationist nonsense talking points associated with young-Earth creationism, such as the silly creationist distinction between micro- and macro-evolution (complete with vague handwavings about ‘information’, which Foley predictably doesn’t attempt to define) and the mythical distinction between “observational and historical science” (where the former is legitimate and the latter is not; i.e. scientists do science when they restrict themselves to counting, weighing and measuring; testing hypotheses against predictions derived from those hypotheses is pseudoscience); indeed Foley, whose scientific background is a masters of arts in theological studies from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, has written pretty extensively and thoroughly confusedly about that putative distinction. Now, Foley is adamant that she and creationists in general “love science”, but that means real science, like engineering and accountancy (as long as those disciplines “seek to study and research to honor God and uphold the authority of his Word”) not those disciplines that deal in tests of hypotheses about things that aren’t directly observable, like astronomy or physics or medicine or – in particular – evolutionary biology or climate science. 

 

One somewhat curious contribution from Foley, together with one Frost Smith, is their 2015 defense (“Celebrate Einstein’s Birthday with Pi on 3.14.15”) of what creationists call ‘uniformitarianism’, the idea that the laws of science are constant, e.g. so that the future is in principle predictable. For such constancy (including the reliability of mathematics, which is not based on empirical testing, but Foley & Smith are not the kind of writers to notice such details) is only possible, as they see it, if it were created by God: “an orderly and consistent universe because there is a consistent God who upholds the universe”, whereas “in a naturalistic worldview” any assumption of such order has to be given up. Hence, evolution is false and the Bible is right and the Earth was created in six (literal) days and so forth.

 

The curious dimension to that argument is of course that AiG rejects uniformitarianism because uniformitarianism is thoroughly incompatible with young-Earth creationism – in their own words, “a uniformitarian worldview maintains that all things have continued at the same rate without any supernatural or catastrophic events to alter them. Namely, uniformitarianism excludes the Creation by God and the global Flood”. Indeed, Foley and Smith themselves, in ‘AIG: All Scientific Dating Methods Are Wrong’, maintain that “all the dating techniques used in geology, cosmology, and physics are wrong” – not because they are able to identify any errors or mistakes but because the dating techniques yield results they don’t like, such as the universe and the Earth being billions of years old – and their (desperate) argument is precisely that “the dating techniques are based on assumptions, and the main assumption is the constancy of the process rates used to calculate those ages” and “[a]ccording to God’s Word that assumption of constancy of process rates is wrong”. Of course – we conjecture here – Foley and Smith are free to point out that the obvious contradiction between their claims is a criticism only if we assume that consitency is a virtue, and that would probably be naturalism and Satan speaking. Who knows.

 

Foley has, in fact, written quite a bit on Noah’s flood, dealing e.g. with the rather obvious question of where did all the water go together with one Troy Lacey, apparently “correspondence representative”, whatever that means. Indeed, Foley’s writings cover a wide range of topics, with the common characteristic being that it is all astonishingly inane, that she (unsurprisingly) tends to see creation everywhere – e.g. in the taste of water – and a commitment to the delusion that creationists and scientists are equally sensitive to the evidence but come to different conclusions because they come in with different presuppositions; her commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible, which isn’t a presupposition anyways because the Bible the word of God and the word of God is true, then allows here to just reject that evidence). Here is Foley’s critique of Santa Claus; note that her problem isn’t just the traditional one that children, upon discoverying that Santa isn’t real, could end up questioning the reality of other figures whose reality they shouldn’t question, but that Santa Claus’s behavior and characteristics are unchristian and contrary to scripture. And here is Foley working herself into weird knots trying to explain miracles, which she tries to claim don’t violate the laws of nature, in which case they would, of course, not be miracles.

 

Together with Ken Ham himself and Bodie Hodge, Foley is also the editor of the AiG book The Gender and Marriage War, which we haven’t looked at and neither should you.

 

Diagnosis: As inane as they come. That there may actually be people who think the laughable results of Avery Foley’s quixotic attempts to challenge science, reality, reason and consistency contain some insights to cherish is a damning indictment of Western structures of education.