His comments on the New Horizons mission to Pluto are instructive in that regard. The fact that the mission was even launched is, to Hebert, “a tacit admission that they do not yet have in hand a plausible secular explanation for the solar system’s origin”; in other words because there are details yet to uncover, the scientists don’t know anything, and the well-established theories they have – and all the evidence for them – can be safely dismissed out of hand (together with all the evidence against a recent creation).
Indeed, one of the very purposes of the mission, to gather information about Kuiper belt objects (comets), is, as Hebert derangedly sees it, evidence that science is bunk and the universe is young. You see, “comets lose their mass so rapidly that no comets should exist at all today if the solar system really were billions of years old” … well, unless there was a supply of new ones, like the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt. Hebert’s response? “The Oort Cloud is purely hypothetical” (it isn’t) and “Does the Kuiper Belt exist?” (yes). The mission to Pluto, then, is just a desperate attempt to disprove the youth of the solar system, and it will, as such, fail. Of course, in real life the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt exist; and at some point, even the young-Earth creationists at the ICR will struggle to deny that just like creationists gave up on denying dinosaur. And it will of course not change anything; it’s not like people like Hebert are fazed by falsification. Here is a similar effort with regard to the Big Bang: Since there are unexplained details (like the maturity of distant galaxies), we can safely reject the whole thing. In fact, the Big Bang theory is also non-scientific: you see, scientists have a tendency to fill the gaps in their theories through research and have thus far been rather successful; to Hebert, that fact, that scientists find explanations for hitherto unexplained data, means that their theories are unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific. The theories are apparently also falsified. Yes, it’s a mess. “How much better to believe His testimony recorded in Genesis than to trust the speculative, ever-changing stories of those determined to deny our Creator!” asks Hebert.
That said, Hebert does think theology is absolutely essential to science. We’ll leave it to readers to assess his arguments (here).
But given his background, you’d think that Hebert would at least employ slightly more sophisticated gambits in his attacks on the theory of evolution? According to Hebert, “evolutionary doctrine” is “not genuine science” insofar as “[t]here is no empirical evidence that life can come from non-life, or that an organism can change into a fundamentally different kind of organism”. So nope; unless he’s lying, Hebert’s grasp of the theory of evolution is at the level of your average creationist youtube troll. This one is pretty striking, too. Here is a discussion of Hebert’s response to the obvious observation that creationism is really a kind of conspiracy theory; that observation is, as Hebert sees it, a pure ad hominem attack – besides, evolution is racist and communist and a lie that originates, like all lies, with Satan himself. So there. Also, “the creation-Flood model of the Ice Age is vastly superior to anything proposed by the Creator-denying scientists” because it just is, regardless of the evidence.
Hebert’s own attempts at research are published in things like Answers in Genesis’s house journal Answers (see e.g. this and this), which use … different standards than ordinary scientific journals.
Diagnosis: Aggressively insane fundie. He’s got credentials, and since creationism has a somewhat desperate shortage of people with genuine credentials, he’s quickly risen in their ranks. One genuinely wonders whether the ICR would have preferred that he stayed silent and just brandished those credentials, though; then again, it’s not like it’s people who know anything whatsoever about science that constitute their target audience.
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