Dennis Garvin is a Virginia-based urologist (it seems) and young-earth creationist – not a big fish on the fundie anti-science scene, we suppose, but at least he’s been given the opportunity to do his reflections on things scientific in columns for the Roanoke Star. So in his column ‘Reflections of A Former Darwinist’ he assures us, like so many fundie denialists, that he used to be an atheist and Darwinist himself until he came to terms with the unsurmountable problems facing the theory of evolution – he’s lying, of course, but since he’s lying for Jesus, he’ll get a pass – in particular the existence of altruism, which, as Garvin sees it, is “nonsense in Darwinian term”. Some narrow-minded nerds might have reacted to wondering about such matters by consulting the literature on evolution and altruism; Garvin rejected all of science instead.
Now, he doesn’t think he rejects all of science, however. Rather, as Garvin sees it, the “six days of Genesis’ creation is easily explained by Einstein’s theory of time dilation and the application of the Common Background Radiation left over from the Big Bang”; he didn’t actually provide the ‘easy explanation’, however – the numbers for Earth’s velocity needed to sustain such insane ad-hocery would be … interesting and wouldn’t do anything to explain away even a fraction of the evidence against a recent creation anyways. Moreover, “the mystery of the Trinity has scientific logic if you apply slit lamp experiments, quantum mechanics and specifically the idea of phase entanglement”, which must be something close to a world record in handwaving.
Diagnosis: Not a significant threat to anything, at least not compared to some of the loons in the entries surrounding his. It is good to be able to laugh at some feeble nonsense now and then without the hints of existential dread, however.
I guess we'll never know how he solved the "mystery of the Trinity" in a satisfactory scientific way. And that's a shame. He could easily have won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
ReplyDelete