ARCHAEOLOGISTS have long sought to explore the bible's most famous stories - and a group of evangelical christians were convinced that they had found the remains of Noah's Ark.
www.express.co.uk
More factual than Darwin's THEORY
As factual as factual gets when charlatans are involved.
Did you miss Don Patton being involved with another fraud?
Don Patton is a young-earth creationist , close associate of Carl Baugh of Paluxy River footprints-fame , and leader of Metroplex Instit...
americanloons.blogspot.com
#2093: Don Patton
Don Patton is a
young-earth creationist, close associate of
Carl Baugh of
Paluxy River footprints-fame, and leader of Metroplex Institute of Origins Science (MIOS) near Dallas. Patton is often referred to as “Dr. Patton”, and
he has claimed to have a Ph.D. (or a “Ph.D. candidacy”) in geology from Queensland Christian University in Australia, an unaccredited diploma mill.
The WND calls him a “
geologist,” which really should on its own be pretty good evidence that he isn’t.
A reasonably central figure in the creationist movement, Patton was for instance, because of his anti-science credentials, invited to testify before the
Texas Board of Education during
the 2009 evolution hearings, where his testimony
was sufficiently insane – at the “no,
The Flintstones is really a documentary”-level – to win the sympathy of board member
Barbara Cargill and subsequently earn him
the 2009 Crocoduck Award.
Patton is particularly famous for his quote-mining abilities and practices (a good collection
here; another example is
here), which often reach staggering levels of dishonesty, including quotes from
The Origin of Species(like most creationists, Patton predictably thinks of
Originas some sort of Bible for Biologists, being fully unable to comprehend that, as opposed to his own views, science, well,
evolves) of questions Darwin raises without quoting his answers (thus suggesting to his readers that Darwin had none and throws his hands up), as well as a quotation with an ellipsis that
spans four whole chaptersof the book. Otherwise, his claims are characterized by claiming that
gaps in the fossil record is evidence against evolution (no,
he really doesn’t get it), complaints about
radiometric dating, as well as the “
were you there” gambit that so nicely demonstrates the complete lack of grasp of the basic idea of
science (i.e. testing hypotheses about the not-directly-observed by their observable predictions)
so characteristic of young-earth creationists. Another illustration of his inability to distinguish scientific inquiry from religious dogma
is his tendency to refer to biologists as “
people with great faith in evolution” or “
devout evolutionists.”
Diagnosis: As delusional as they come, and as so many of them Patton compensates for lack of reason with fundamentalist zeal. It would be fair to call him “dishonest”, but we suspect he is delusional enough not to notice himself. Tireless, though – we’ll give him that.