ICR on the Road … and on the Ropes

ICR on the Road … and on the Ropes

Commentary By Jim Downard

The Institute for Creation Research (ICR), one of the oldest creationist organizations (roughly the same age as color television and jet airliners) has been eclipsed in the young earth creation (YEC) propaganda parade by the more glitzy Answers in Genesis of Ken Ham, the bunch with Ark Encounter, a Noah’s ark theme park.

But ICR isn’t out of the game, no siree, engaging in a steady routine of lecture events held at congenial churches around the land. Spokane got on the itinerary for one this weekend, and it’s worth a look at the speakers and what might not get on their lecture notes. Or their resumes, as all three are presented as “Dr.” this or that, though that might mislead one to think that their degrees are in relevant scientific fields and from reliable institutions.

Star of the show is ICR’s President, Randy Guliuzza, who is a medical doctor and former Air Force flight surgeon. Taking command of ICR in 2020, his big mission is driving a wedge into the flock with his relentless rejection of natural selection (something all too observable in the natural world and in the science literature Randy doesn’t read much of).

Instead, Guliuzza’s baby is continuous environmental tracking (CET), which spin he and a few colleagues present in a plethora of articles in their in-house magazine, Acts & Facts, and elsewhere.

Spoiler Alert: CET is so poorly supported that not only do regular biologists pay no attention to it whatsoever, fellow-creationist astrophysicist Jason Lisle has severed his connections with ICR over it. Biology professor — and actual “Dr.” — Joel Duff, who keeps track of such things, offered some pithy analysis of this last July on YouTube.

The other two speakers are Frank Sherwin, who has an honorary doctorate of science from Pensacola Christian College, and Tim Clarey, the only one among them with a relevant degree, a doctorate in geology from Western Michigan University. Though given his output, he might want to ask for his tuition back.

Clarey is adroit at selectively parsing secular science works to favor the YEC model. I’ve done several of my “Evolution Hour” shows on his misrepresentation of science papers, and this 2018 show on the “cold slab” claim will give you the basic idea about how badly he plays the source documentation game. (Full reference links are in the video description.)

Clarey represents another sore point in YEC land, which may not come up in the Spokane show: when the flood is supposed to have stopped in the geological record.

He is among the small body of revisionists who try and nudge the flood terminal point down way past where most YECers are comfortable locating it (the dinosaur Cretaceous) on into our more recent Cenozoic era, because it’s hard to argue the strata there are formed in any way noticeably different than any of the preceding stuff. All or nothing for them, alas.

The bulk of the ICR show’s topics are being carried by Clarey and Sherwin, presenting the current line on things already covered at grim length in their publications. Here’s what you’d learn at the ICR website (sparing you the price of admission to their roadshow).

Dinosaurs must not be related to birds and died out in the flood 4,300 years ago, except for the ones that survived for human artists supposedly to depict in paintings, into the Middle Ages even. And somehow these critters are related to the biblical behemoth and leviathan.

Mount St. Helens will be discussed, as a baby cataclysm to justify their wacky mega-cataclysm of the flood. As someone who shoveled volcanic ash off the driveway in 1980 and has kept up on the geology of the volcano and region since then, having creationists try to bring them up in our own backyard deserves points for gutsiness.

To summarize in a nutshell (accent on the nut), creationism has two main songs: “Origins or Bust” about life itself or aspects of it being impossible other than via divine creation, and “Gee Whiz” stuff marveling at the amazing (fill in the blank) but not going too far into whatever science literature there may be on them, especially their evolutionary history.

We’ll leave with something from honorary doctor Sherwin.

As it happened, this Halloween I planned to discuss one of Sherwin’s older articles in my video talks, one he did in 2012 with Brian Thomas on hybrid sharks supposedly posing a problem for evolution.

They didn’t draw on much science work (mostly general books and creationist posts), but what they did, they bungled. They declared, “Evolutionists are mystified as to the origin of sharks (as well as all other animal groups) and their associated structures,” for example, citing a secondary article from 2007 that hadn’t mentioned sharks at all,

It was actually a commentary piece about identifying whether some Neoproterozoic embryos were animals or not. That’s a time some 600 million years ago, which in the YEC cartoon is pre-flood, creation week stuff. Only Sherwin and Thomas are like other creationists in not being all that clear about their YEC model, grabbing at this or that and waving it at an audience unlikely to know much about them, and even less likely to look into things at the source level.

Still, the PowerPoint images were probably nice and the presentations confident, and maybe they’ll have made a bit on the admission fees and special lectures (at extra cost). But nothing about it will have changed any of the scientific landscape, or bring ICR any closer to having the bigger world jump on their very small bandwagon.