Our point-by-point rebuttal of Plimer’s Book

This Internet article is based on word-processor-printed notes which CSF (now CMI) has prepared as a commentary to most of the points raised in the Plimer book Telling Lies for God. The notes cover a great range of issues, though not necessarily every minor point. There is a running index throughout, based on the pages (in sequence) of the Plimer book on which the relevant issues are raised. There is some repetition, because the Plimer book raises some of the same issues more than once. Because we have already had occasion to add to these notes since the first draft was prepared (others have pointed out additional errors and distortions in the Plimer book, for example), this is not a publication as such. This information represents our comments at the point in time we last upgraded and issued a printout from the word-processor file.

The information has been prepared in good faith, and the contents are accurate to the best of our knowledge and understanding at the time of preparation.

The integrity of this ministry has been affirmed by an intensive independent enquiry by eminent citizens (with reputations outside of any sympathy they may or may not feel for CSF or its stance on creation). They chose to investigate all of the serious Plimer allegations, plus a random selection from the hundreds of other ones (they indicated that they had covered about 200 items in some depth) and found them ALL to be without any substance whatsoever and highly misrepresentative of the facts.

These notes cover not only the major allegations, but also the vast majority of the others in the book which tend to cumulatively prejudice the reader against CSF and its ministry.

CMI has available two items produced by anti-creationist US Skeptic Jim Lippard. The first was published in the world’s leading anti-creation journal, the humanist-founded Creation/Evolution. In spite of Plimer’s attempts to neutralise Lippard in the book by painting him as sympathetic to creationists, Lippard has a long track record of vigorous pro-evolutionism (see this site).

Writing in Australia’s The Skeptic15(1):53, Autumn 95, philosopher Dr William Grey from the University of Queensland (no friend of creationists, as he makes clear) reluctantly (and ever so gently) takes Plimer to task for the fact that his book contains what Grey calls ‘falsehoods, misrepresentations and distortions’. In particular, Grey is upset at the treatment Plimer metes out to fellow anti-creationist Lippard, who has challenged the ethics of Plimer’s methodology. Grey chides Plimer for ‘scholarly and moral improprieties’, while hastening to say that he believes Plimer’s book is mostly ‘admirable and right’.

A professional copywriter in New South Wales (not then connected with CSF) has gone through the Plimer book, analysing the way in which Plimer uses well-known writers’ tricks to engender various emotions and prejudices in the reader. He calls it a ‘critique of HOW the content has been expressed in terms of emotionalism and propagandist technique’. He says he did this to ‘alert the reader of the book of how the author of the book has chosen to manipulate rather than merely inform and let the evidence stand’.

We have not dealt with these rhetorical tricks used by Plimer in any detail in our notes, but a brief listing of some of these, as pointed out in the essay, is given here for the interest of readers wishing to work through the book in a scholarly, analytical manner.

• The illusion of guilt by (unsubstantiated) association (e.g. featuring comments by some extremist person or group unassociated with CSF, so that a subtle ‘linkage’ occurs in the reader’s mind).
  
  
• The illusion of guilt by cultural prejudice (e.g. dark hints at takeover by American interests; using false, emotive labels which carry certain ‘images’—e.g. ‘cult’).
  
  
• The frequent use of unsubstantiated generalisations and ad hominem attacks.
  
  
• False representations of Plimer’s impotence (a helpless academic under threat by powerful forces, when in fact he has demonstrated excellent and extremely effective use of (and support by) powerful media outlets during the publicity campaign, whereas CSF found it nigh-impossible to get a ‘fair go’); also illusions of impartiality, and of fatherly public ‘concern’.
  
  
• Misleading innuendo, often by means of a questioning technique, allowing illusions of guilt to be created which are far beyond any evidence he puts forward (even if one were to assume that all his evidence is genuinely stated). For example, in the matter of Dr Duane Gish’s qualifications, many people have been convinced after reading the Plimer book that Duane Gish had bogus qualifications, when Plimer cunningly did not actually say that, but allowed the reader to think so. Gish is a member of the prestigious honorary scholastic society Phi Beta Kappa, for example (Gish wrote about this to him years ago, inviting him to check, and we have a copy of his membership certificate), but through rhetorical flourish Plimer manages to raise a doubt in the reader’s mind about this (see more on this in these notes).
  

Because of the extremely tangled nature of the various ‘sorties’ in the book, CSF personnel have already spent an inordinate amount of time on the preparation of these notes and our other public responses. There is an ever-increasing need and demand for our ministry both here and overseas, and much of this has been hindered (including worthwhile writing and research projects) because of these wild accusations. In view of this, and in view of the fact that an independent inquiry has had access to every piece of required documentation, we trust that bona fide recipients of these notes will understand our reluctance to waste further time in going into any more detail than is contained in these voluminous notes. Therefore, only under very special circumstances will we be engaging in any further correspondence on the Plimer nonsense, which surely now has no further credibility.

Those interested in seriously delving into the very few genuine scientific issues raised by Plimer should acquaint themselves thoroughly with what creationists are saying in the areas of Flood geology—our catalogue is available free on request (or visit our Online Bookstore). For a detailed, scholarly book which is a case study in Flood geology applied to a practical field example, we suggest Dr Steve Austin’s Grand Canyon: Monument to Catastrophe. Without pretending that there are no remaining unsolved problems, the fact is that in spite of the absence of government funding and with the work of only a few dedicated, qualified earth scientists, creationist (flood) geology has made great strides since that book was published.

PP. 1–2 (of Telling Lies for God)

The misrepresentation begins early. We know of no creationists who believe that all sedimentary rocks and fossils were formed in Noah’s Flood. We also think that very few would claim that the earth was exactly six thousand years old. (Both these Plimer claims are repeated on p. 4, but there he concedes 6,000–10,000 years as our date for special creation.)

Plimer says that creation ‘scientists’ (his quote marks) ‘engage in blatant scientific fraud’. This is a completely unjustified smear, and we will show that the credibility of this and his numerous other smears and allegations is totally lacking. (No doubt there may be both creationists as well as evolutionists who have done this—but not the individuals or organizations he accuses of this in his book.) He also calls creationism a ‘cult’ all the way through. This is pure propaganda. Creationism is simply the historic, evangelical, orthodox view of the Church, which has become more and more unpopular. Plimer’s book is an attempt to marginalize the remaining adherents to what the Bible teaches and link them to unpleasant images, by repetition of words like ‘cult’, ‘cult leaders’ and ‘sect’ (thus conjuring up memories of Jim Jones, etc.).

He says that creationists with scientific qualifications ‘know it is fraud’—this is a bizarre, serious accusation, totally without foundation, and is in fact fraudulent, as will be shown later. But note here that he concedes that there are creationists with ‘scientific qualifications’ (‘genuine scientific qualifications’ on p. 14).

P. 3

Plimer claims that we use the same science and the same criticisms against Darwin’s thesis that were used 150 years ago—false. However, if it were true, it would merely show that the objections were valid. Plimer implies that only ‘a few sects and cults’ rejected evolution in 1859. This is historically false. Many in orthodox, evangelical churches have never accepted it. However, the author is the same man who stated in an interview on Sydney radio station 2JJJ that creation-believers never help others when there are bushfires and floods, and that Christians who claim to be ‘born again’ tend to have severe psychological problems and ‘savage’ personalities. Plimer says that creationism began in 1859, but of course most people, including leading scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton, etc. were creationists before 1859.

P. 4

Plimer says we believe that evolution ‘does not occur’—potentially misleading, as many changes labelled ‘evolution’ are not uphill, information-building changes, but are simply variations in species and form a part of the modern creationist model. Plimer uses his classic technique of contrasting ‘creationists’ with ‘scientists’. So by definition, no matter what someone’s scientific qualifications (which Plimer admits some creationists do have), all scientists are portrayed as believing in evolution/old earth. This is definitely misleading.

Plimer suggests that in order to establish their case, creationists need to demonstrate that ‘basic science is wrong’. This is palpable nonsense. Creationists make great use of the established laws of science (i.e. basic science such as physics and chemistry).

Plimer makes it look as if creation science depends on the claim that the speed of light has decreased. This was put forward in the 1980s as one possible hypothesis and was the subject of much controversy in creationist circles, but it is largely on the way out now because creationists have used basic science to show it to be scientifically untenable. Being well abreast of creationist writings, Plimer should know this, and therefore it appears he is not concerned with accurate representation. More on this speed-of-light issue later.

P. 5

We know of no reputable creationist who has argued that the sort of science which makes aeroplanes fly is wrong, which Plimer argues that we do. Plimer says that we use ‘calculated deceit, doctored evidence and blatant lies’, and then says he is going to ‘prove the charge of fraud’ in his book. Such accusations would have substance only if his ‘documentation’ were accurate and honest—let the reader judge.

Plimer claims that no ‘original research’ is undertaken on creationism (repeated on p. 38). Plimer must surely know this is untrue, since he is able to read the results of such research in our Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, for example. Because of the lack of personnel and funding, the amount spent on this is minuscule in comparison with evolution-based research. However, several examples could be given of our own research projects, let alone the papers published in other creationist journals and the Proceedings of the International Conferences on Creationism. (Hundreds of millions of dollars of government money is spent on evolution-based research worldwide each year. Creationist research survives on donations, which are not tax-deductible in Australia.)

P. 6

Plimer says that creationists ‘commonly accuse scientific organizations and scientists of fraud without providing evidence.’

In nearly 17 years of publishing Creation Ex Nihilo magazine, there is only one item which makes such a claim, to our recollection—the one Plimer refers to, in 1985. It was part of the regular ‘Focus’ series in which the items never have authors’ names (the actual author in this case has not been with CSF for many years, incidentally). While the current CSF management and Board would not support even one instance of such intemperate language as in the quoted comments, the fact remains that there are not ‘hundreds of thousands’ of fossil organisms that are proven evolutionary transitions, as has been well documented by other evolutionists. Any suggestion that CSF publications ‘commonly accuse scientific organisations and scientists of fraud’ is utterly wrong, as any reading of our publications will reveal.

P. 8

Plimer describes CSF (and ICR in the USA) as ‘cults’. The arguments he uses for this definition include the fact that those working for CSF have to agree to a statement of faith. By this definition, any credal churches (and most parachurch agencies) would have to be regarded as cults. Organizations like the Bible Society or Scripture Union would have to be regarded as cults. We’re not sure what he means by ‘the structure is authoritarian’. Since CSF is, in fact, a legal non-profit company controlled by a Board of Directors, there is naturally a hierarchy, but no one working for the Foundation regards it as ‘authoritarian’ in style. Furthermore, no parachurch missionary organizations (such as the two mentioned previously) allow their supporters to vote and control those organizations. Plimer makes this sound sinister. Such a process would be chaotic and make us subject to takeover by real cults. Finally, he says that CSF and ICR are ‘lucrative businesses’. This is an easily discredited smear. Four of the seven current directors of CSF are not employed by it, and receive no income from it whatsoever (one of the four is employed by an affiliated, but independent, creationist organization in the USA). The turnover of CSF is substantially less than that of some other respectable evangelical organizations, and those directors who are employed by CSF do so sacrificially; they earn considerably less than they could be earning in their own highly skilled professions.

P. 9

Plimer claims that evolution is ‘testable, reproducible’. In this he contradicts the observations of many philosophers of science. Small changes in living things do occur; the argument is whether real fish-to-man type of evolution (or any part thereof) has ever been observed. Ironically, Plimer contrasts the science which sent mankind to the moon with creationism. Ironic, because the rockets which propelled man to the moon were based upon the scientific research undertaken by creationist Wernher von Braun. Yet on p. 12 Plimer says that, ‘In today’s world of science and technology, there is not one item in use that derived from scientific research undertaken by creationists.’ Plimer hammers this point, but if he reads our literature as he claims, he should know full well that, for example, creationist Dr Raymond V. Damadian invented the life-saving MRI scanner which is in use nowadays. (Were one to use Plimer’s own intemperate language and standards, would not one be tempted to use such words as ‘lie’ and ‘fraudulent’?) To say that ‘if creationist “science” was correct, then we would have no television (and no cars, telephones, aeroplane travel etc.)’ (p. 13) is such a blatant distortion that we can only presume that this is propaganda aimed at the unsophisticated reader. Even the most committed anti-creationist, if honest, would concede that this is completely unsustainable.

P. 10

This page is amusing with its ‘warning’ that we will try to have the book banned/discredited. He had ‘leaked’ news of its impending release to us for several years (hoping we would react?). First of all, Plimer is trying to put himself in a win-win situation. If we were to try to ban this book legally as being libellous, etc., then of course, he can say that he predicted it. And if the warning causes us to refrain, so much the better—his smear campaign can go on unchecked.

P. 12

Plimer claims that we say that science is ‘the dogmatic humanistic religion of evolutionism’, when in fact we only say this about the religious aspects of evolution (origins science), not science (empirical, in-the-present operations science) as such. Another area in which Plimer misleads is by saying that creationists ‘claim that they are indulging in science and not religion’. He would know from CSF’s own writings that we do not hide our Christian motivation, and in fact later on he uses this against us—by quoting from our Statement of Faith how important and integral the Gospel is in everything we do (p. 138). Clearly he hopes his earlier statements contradicting this will be forgotten by the average reader by the time he or she reaches p. 138.

P. 14

We have never been ‘demanding, as a democratic right, that creation “science” be given equal time’ in schools. This is the language of caricature, not what the Creation Ex Nihilo magazine editorial he quotes actually says (‘co-exist, we believe, and compete’). Some creationists in the USA may have been demanding this—but not, we believe, ICR in the USA, or CSF here (the main targets of his attack).

Plimer says that creationists ‘fabricate imaginary facts’. Since his major attack is against CSF/ICR, he needs to demonstrate that either of these organizations has ever done this. This he fails to do and hence the charge itself fails, especially where there is documentation that the opposite is true. Plimer of course provides his ‘own’ alleged documentation—the reader may judge its reliability as we move on.

P. 15

Here, we see the beginning of an all-too-familiar tactic when he says that, ‘many creationists’ would like ‘the reinstatement of Old Testament law.’ Of course, this conjures up images of being stoned to death for adultery and so forth. This is a common smear technique. We could find people who believe in evolution and also believe in alien abductions by UFOs. We could then say, ‘Many evolutionists believe in alien abductions.’ Plimer’s smear is simple and effective, but to our knowledge has nothing to do with anyone in the mainstream creation movement. In fact, most mainstream creationists are traditional evangelical Christians who believe that the Old Testament law has been fulfilled in Christ.

P. 16

Plimer says that the tablets of stone with the 10 Commandments on them were just hieroglyphic-like mineral intergrowths in a rock. He thus is explaining away a key Scripture passage and implying that much of the Old Testament is just embellished stories and perceptions of natural phenomena that those unscientific people didn’t really understand. This is not the historic orthodox Christian position, for example, with respect to the 10 Commandments, which Jesus referred to as literal and real.

PP. 17–18

Plimer claims that ‘much of the Old Testament is contradictory.’ He caricatures believers in inerrancy by implying that they state that there ‘can only be a literal interpretation of the Old Testament’. Proper biblical scholarship, as practised by many scholars who believe in inerrancy, does take into account the nature of the text and the intentions of the author, figures of speech, language of appearance, etc.

Plimer’s attack, of course, is against the Bible and inerrancy in general, so he doesn’t fail to tell us about the common (but false) claim that the Bible says that pi ‘is exactly 3’ (repeated on p. 18). The Bible, of course, does not say or teach this, as shown in Creation Ex Nihilo magazine, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 24–25. Plimer invokes some anonymous liberal theologians who argue that when creationists say the Bible is true and without error, they ‘mock the Bible, and by so mocking the Bible, they are anti-Christian’. But who is mocking the Bible as full of errors? Without a trustworthy Bible there is no solid basis to Christianity; undermining the Bible’s trustworthiness is, of course, one of Plimer’s not-so-subtle objectives.

PP. 19–20

Plimer ignores the clear-cut arguments (published in our literature) showing that flat-earthism was never biblical, nor was it widely held by Church fathers. (See ‘Who invented the flat earth?’, Creation Ex Nihilo, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 48–49; also ‘Flat earth heyday came with Darwin’, Creation Ex Nihilo, vol. 14, no. 4, p. 21.) Furthermore, his statements concerning the ‘geometry’ of the Genesis story are based on his obvious lack of knowledge of what the Hebrew actually says. For example, the word translated in the King James Version as ‘firmament’ can mean ‘expanse’ or ‘stretched-outness’ and does not in any way require that this ‘expanse’ be solid.

P. 21

We cannot remember, as implied here, ever personally receiving any challenge from Plimer to show him the chapter and verse teaching the recent creation of the earth. However, if he did, he would have been told (as he undoubtedly knows) that there is no single chapter and verse, but that it is easily deducible from clear statements made in the Bible. For example, one of the world’s leading Hebrew scholars, Professor James Barr, says that the figures contained in the genealogies in Genesis provide a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later events. Barr is a liberal who does not support our view of the historical, actual truth of Genesis, yet he admits that this is what the Hebrew language used means.

P. 22

The representation of J. Osgood’s biblical chronology article is also quite inappropriate and shows that Plimer has not understood Osgood’s paper. Readers should check it for themselves. Osgood does not contradict himself, nor the Bible, but provides a coherent, logical scheme for reconciling the faulty secular chronology and evolutionary interpretation of history with the biblical record.

P. 23

Readers confused by Plimer’s subtle obscuring of the meaning of the Hebrew word for ‘day’ should consult the careful exegesis in The Genesis Record by Dr Henry Morris.

P. 24

Having talked about the calculations of Archbishop Ussher and Dr Lightfoot on p. 23, Plimer takes an incredible leap and states that creationists ‘glibly state the time, date and year of a special creation’. He should know full well that none of the mainstream creation organizations has ever done anything of the sort. If they had, then Plimer should have substantiated this ridiculous claim by a quote and reference from the creationist literature.

P. 25

His little blurb here leads those readers unfamiliar with CSF work to believe that creationists deny the normal laws of physics when they cast doubt on the results of ‘radoactive [sic] dating’. This is simply untrue. We never deny the physics involved, just question the underlying assumptions that cannot be proved, even by Plimer (who ignores them).

P. 26

Plimer says that creationists select only the ‘rare mismeasurement of ages’, and not the ‘millions of successful age dates’. This begs the question of how one knows that a particular date of say ‘x’ million years is ‘successful’ without a preconceived concept of what the age is supposed to be. It is perfectly legitimate for creationists to point to situations in which rocks of known age are given dates in the thousands of millions of years, when they are in actuality only hundreds of years old, because there is no ground for confidence that the same sorts of errors are not systematic ones which will apply to rocks of unknown age as well. What Plimer does not tell you is that we are on record as not disputing the accuracy of the measurement techniques (isotopic analyses), but rather the age interpretations of those analyses. (See also nuclear scientist Ian Hore-Lacy’s comments about Plimer’s display of ignorance of nuclear physics on p. 25 and on p. 36—quoted on p. 13 of these notes.)

P. 27

Here Plimer implies that the large ages assigned to rocks must be correct or else oil companies would not find oil. We know of several creationists (such as Slusher, Austin) who have been involved in petroleum exploration and who testify that there is no necessity to believe in these vast ages to find petroleum. We do not dispute that the ‘ages’ of sediments given by radioactive dating are generally informative in a relative sense and therefore are useful for stratigraphic correlation, which in reality is the primary reason why oil companies spend large sums ‘dating’ the rocks in their drill-holes.

PP. 27–28

Plimer tries to imply that creationists ‘abuse’ carbon dating by not understanding that its limits are around 30,000 years. Firstly, it seems that he has misunderstood (or misrepresented) the creationist argument that C-14 buildup puts an upper limit of 30,000 years on the atmosphere. This has nothing to do with the limits of sensitivity of the equipment, which incidentally nowadays is more like an alleged 50,000 years (sometimes claimed to be as much as 100,000 years when accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) is used). Secondly, we have never suggested the C-14 technique can be used directly to ‘date’ the age of the earth, as Plimer insinuates.

PP. 28–29

To suggest that doubting the results of the interpretations, based on the assumptions on which radioactive dating depends, means that one doubts the sort of physics by which nuclear bombs and the sun work confuses two separate issues. This distortion seems calculated to smear. Once again Plimer throws in the red herring of the hypothesis of a slowing speed of light. Plimer knows that for good scientific reasons most creation scientists have abandoned this hypothesis (all this is on public record in the creationist literature which Plimer claims to read). However, it still needs to be said that the theory is grossly caricatured by Plimer. Even those creationist physicists strongly opposed to the concept that light has slowed down (i.e. in history, not currently) would agree that Plimer’s imagined idea of television programs and telephone calls finishing before they had started is nonsense.

P. 29

On p. 29 Plimer quotes Wieland in a misleading context, as if Wieland’s reference was to all radiometric dating when Wieland was specifically referring to radiocarbon dating. Also, Plimer’s mention of amino acid dating completely ignores the well-recognized problems of the method, such as its temperature dependence.

Actually, Plimer has misrepresented the technique of amino acid racemisation dating, in an embarrassingly ignorant way. The situation is in fact the reverse of what he describes. Living organisms do not contain ‘coil-like amino acid structures’ in ‘constant balance between the number of left-handed and right-handed coils’. In living things, the amino acids (of which proteins are made up) are only ever the left-handed forms. (There are two chemical possibilities, which are mirror images of each other, and have nothing to do with any ‘coils’.)

Left-handed and right-handed forms have a tendency to change to the opposite form, and so after the organism dies, the ‘left-handed only’ composition begins to head towards a ‘natural’ situation, in which there is eventually, long after death, the 50-50 ‘balance’ between left-handed and right-handed forms which Plimer erroneously claims exists in life! (For a good description, see Geoscience Canada Reprint Series 2 (ed N.W. Rutter): March 1985 Dating Methods of Pleistocene Deposits and their Problems, pp. 23–30. The authors deal candidly with the many major problems of the method, and counsel caution.)

P. 30

It needs to be said at this point that creationists of repute have not hidden the fact that there are unsolved problems in creationist science (just as there are unsolved problems in evolutionary science). The purpose of these notes is not to deal with every such problem which Plimer raises (because for one thing, each answer would require copious pages). It is simply to show that the way in which he blasts his version of our statements as fraud is intemperate and abusive of the facts. However, many of the issues he mentions, such as the assumption that rates of sand formation prove that thick sediments take millions of years to accumulate, are overwhelmingly easy to challenge. Plimer has clearly ignored the published original research in our own Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, (vol. 3, pp. 25–29. Berthault, G., 1988, ‘Experiments on lamination of sediments’; 1990, ‘Sedimentation of a Heterogranular Mixture: Experimental lamination in still and running water’, Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, vol. 4, pp. 95–102; Berthault, G., and Julien, P., 1994, ‘Experiments on stratification of heterogeneous sand mixtures, Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 37–50), in which experiments have shown that varved rock formation (the example he mentions involving the glacial lakes in Scandinavia) can be imitated in the laboratory as a consequence of the different settling characteristics of grains of sand and mud during contemporaneous rapid deposition, not vast timespans. Repeatedly Plimer ignores the fact that all the ‘dating’ methods he extols are based on the unproven (and unprovable) assumption that geological processes have always occurred at generally the same rate at which they do today. This is the fatal flaw in Plimer’s geology.

P. 31

Plimer indicates that ‘the solubility of calcium carbonate in groundwater can be determined in a test-tube’. So what? He completely ignores such critical factors as the presence of cracks and fissures in limestone, and the acidity and temperature of the groundwater (especially the presence of humic acid, associated with the decay of organic material, and carbonic acid from dissolved atmospheric carbon dioxide in rainwater). Also, the quantity of calcium carbonate dissolved will obviously be greater if a large volume of water is involved. Once this is realized, any intelligent school student can understand (to put it simplistically) that if a little drop of acidic groundwater can rapidly dissolve a little amount of calcium carbonate, then a huge amount of acidic groundwater (as a result of catastrophic flooding) can rapidly dissolve a huge amount of limestone. Plimer ‘snows’ the unsophisicated reader.

Plimer discusses the reversals of the earth’s magnetic field, but fails to mention the published papers (to which attention has been drawn several times in our Creation Ex Nihilo magazine—in Nature, one of the world’s leading science journals, and Earth and Planetary Science Letters) showing that field evidence indicates that these reversals must have taken place in weeks, not in many thousands of years, as the standard view holds. Is Plimer ignorant of the repeated field studies done by world-recognized palaeomagnetism experts Coe and Prévot proving this? Indeed, it was creationist Dr Russell Humphreys who predicted, based on his creationist research, that this field evidence would be found—and it has been. Plimer cannot admit this as it would destroy his melodramatic straw-man caricature of creationists.

P. 32

Plimer implies dishonesty on our part by saying that we do not tell our readers that ‘continental drift relies on evolution, radioactive dating and palaeomagnetic dating’. Fact: One can hold to the concept of continental drift without holding to any of those concepts, and Plimer would, or should, know this (for example, matching rock types and strata from continent to continent, and matching coastlines). Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift, without any mention of evolution, before radioactive or palaeomagnetic dating had arrived on the scene. However, it was creationist Antonio Snider-Pellegrini in 1858 who proposed the original assembly of continents that then drifted, some 54 years before Wegener.

On p. 32, Plimer demonstrates his ignorance of elementary terrestrial magnetic observations. He denies that the earth’s magnetic field is decaying! This has been known and measured as a worldwide effect for over 150 years, as published in the US Department of Commerce ESSA Technical Report IER 46-IES 1 produced by the Institute for Earth Sciences, Boulder, Colorado and available from the US Government Printing Office in Washington DC. Plimer says that if the magnetic field was decaying, ‘the liquid outer core would be freezing’. Where on earth does Plimer get such an idea? He provides no justification whatsoever, perhaps thinking he can fool readers by dazzling them with his supposed scientific knowledge. In fact, if the earth’s magnetic field is caused by circulating electric currents, then those currents would naturally decrease as a result of impedance and thermal effects, so one would expect that magnetic field to decay, just as creation scientists have been at pains to point out. Presumably, Plimer confuses the difference between assumption and reality. Evolutionists must assume that there is a dynamo effect in the liquid outer core to keep the field from decaying to zero over billions of years. However, it is generally acknowledged that there is as yet no satisfactory model of such a dynamo (e.g. Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics, vol. 15 (1980), pp. 149–160 and Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 53 (1981), pp. 481–496).

Plimer then builds a tower of hypothesis upon hypothesis on his incorrect assumption of a ‘freezing outer core’, implying that if creationists were right there would be no ‘catostrophic [sic] earthquakes’ etc. He implies that the driving mechanism for continental drift is the liquid outer core, yet all geophysicists agree that it is convection currents in the mantle. Is Plimer twisting the evidence to suit his erroneous straw-man hypothesis? Dr Tom Barnes, pioneer of the freely decaying electric currents model, is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of Texas at El Paso. Plimer’s caricature is ‘way off’.

Why on earth does Plimer think that the earth’s magnetic field is ‘dreadfully inconvenient’ to creationists, such that we would try to make it ‘go away’? This is an invention from nowhere, useful only for propaganda.

P. 33

Plimer here has another slash at the decreasing-speed-of-light theory, but he again appears to misrepresent it by seeming to imply that creationists teach that the speed of light is still changing, rather than that it has changed previously, historically. If it had done so, which as we have indicated is no longer widely held for other good scientific reasons, then the caricature Plimer puts forward still would not apply. Does he misunderstand the special relativistic implications of a change in the value of c with time (which is not necessarily the same as an object travelling faster than c) or is he misrepresenting them purposely? Other authorities (Dirac, Troitskii) have toyed with the idea of constants changing with time—this is not fundamentally forbidden, as Plimer leads the reader to think. In fact, what CSF did with this hypothesis was to present it positively in our literature, but as soon as arguments against it came up, we presented pro and con arguments conscientiously and have now personally abandoned it.

P. 34

It is also not correct for Plimer to suggest, as he does here, that the mathematics used ‘does not even get past first base’. Norman, Setterfield’s collaborator, is a university professional in the field of mathematics. This is so, regardless of the subsequent fate of this (once very interesting) hypothesis. Furthermore, Plimer is absolutely wrong when he says ‘creationists do not actually do the experiments on the speed of light themselves’. Plimer’s Bibliography shows he has regularly consulted the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal (which he discusses on pp. 169–170), yet he ignores the experimental measurements of c by Dr Jay Wile published in vol. 7 (1993), pp. 88–92.

P. 35–37

Concerning the problem of the light from distant stars, Plimer once again misrepresents the alleged ‘creationist answer’. Nowhere has the same person or institution ever argued that light slowed down and was created ‘only to appear to derive from a distant source’. Those who believed the latter explanation were opposed to the light-slowing-down theory, and vice versa. Furthermore, of the various problems noted with the light-slowing-down theory by creationist scientists, and for which they eventually criticized Setterfield, the one about high energy (e.g. Adam and Eve’s procreation of children) had apparently been answered well by Setterfield in his monographs, but Plimer takes no notice of this because it makes such great caricature. (From all accounts he has university audiences in fits of laughter at the idea that every time Adam and Eve procreated children there would be the equivalent of an explosion of 500 tons of TNT. Hilarious, but not appropriate, since it suggests that such an elementary objection had not been considered. If the argument by Setterfield which answered the energy objection was wrong, Plimer has not taken the opportunity to show why.)

Creationists are not a unified force, in spite of the Plimer caricature. They are a handful of poorly funded individuals, mostly working in secular jobs and carrying out research out of hours. We believe that it was a mistake for the original speed-of-light hypothesis to be published in an unrefereed way, rather than in a refereed creationist scientific journal. It was also probably inappropriate to promote it so vigorously before it had passed such peer-review. However, all these self-correcting procedures have taken place, so this ridicule by Plimer is quite absurd and off-target.

However, considering what has actually happened to it, which is just as appropriate as what evolutionists have done with many of their own theories which have now been retired, it is outrageous for Plimer to say that creationists ‘pull every trick in the book’ (p. 37) in the context of changing c. It is also nonsense to suggest that it is presented by creationists ‘as the strongest anti-evolution argument’. We have no idea where he gets that understanding from. It has barely been mentioned, if at all, in the talks of CSF’s main speakers for years, and was never presented as our strongest argument. We conclude that once again, Plimer is playing fast and loose with reality. Incidentally, in an article printed in both the Anglican Church Scene (February 10, 1995, pp. 5–6), and Anglican News (May 1995, p. 9) nuclear scientist Ian Hore-Lacy, no friend of CSF, refers to Plimer’s pp. 25 and 36 and says Plimer ‘displays a surprising ignorance of nuclear physics’.

P. 38

Plimer says that creationists believe that ‘all fossils and sedimentary rocks’ formed in the Flood. We do not say this. We say that most of the fossils were formed by the Flood, with some being formed since then, some possibly before.

P. 39

Plimer criticizes creationism by saying that ‘the creationist model for our planet has yielded nothing’. Firstly, mining companies generally have yet to experiment, as some creationist geologists and geophysicists have proposed, to see whether their rate of success in oil and mineral exploration would be increased using a creation/Flood model. In one instance a company in Canada did, and oil was found where the evolutionary geology model had failed. Secondly, it could be argued strongly that the evolution model for our planet has yielded nothing. None of the practical discoveries depend upon the model of long ages. Stratigraphic correlation to find oil and mineral deposits more easily, etc. certainly utilizes the existence of particular suites of fossils as a characteristic of certain rock layers, but the (relative) success, of itself, makes no comment as to whether those fossils are there because of ecological factors, hydrodynamic factors, or whether they are separated from each other by alleged millions of years.

PP. 39–41

Here he has another major ‘go’ at the decreasing-speed-of-light hypothesis. It is manifestly not correct to say that Setterfield’s physics was incorrect because ‘the speed of light is a constant’—even if it is now clear that c has not changed. The great physicist Dirac explored the idea as to whether the fundamental constants may not have been gradually changing their value. Dirac would also have denied Plimer’s comments that such change would necessarily mean that no physics, electronics, etc. would work. By definition, a proposal that what was previously thought to be a constant may have changed its value might be a radical proposal, but to say that it can’t be so because ‘x is a constant’ is the logical fallacy known as ‘begging the question’.

Plimer’s point 3 is nonsense. His point 4 ignores the fact that Setterfield at least tried to show that special relativity depended only on the speed of light being constant at any given time throughout the universe, not necessarily that its value has been the same throughout all of history. Since creationists have largely abandoned the Setterfield theory, one need not go through all of the misrepresentations in the Plimer ‘list’; a very few of his points are, in fact, at least partially applicable. To give an example of either Plimer’s lack of knowledge of physics, or misrepresentation, one needs only to look at his point 10 in which he implies there is a fundamental contradiction between two statements of Setterfield. He says that in one place Setterfield says the redshift is due to a change in c, and in some other place Setterfield says it is due to a change in frequency with a constant wavelength. However, since every high school physics student should know that c = wavelength x frequency, if the wavelength is constant and the frequency changes, then so does c. So Setterfield has said the same thing, in two different ways. Is the contradiction only in Plimer’s mind, or is he deliberately misleading readers?

PP. 41–42

Plimer criticizes the editors of Ex Nihilo for not having picked up a misquote by Setterfield. Again, this is not quite what it seems. Plimer is careful to omit the last part of the Setterfield quote, which reads ‘and so are relegated to being of mere “historical interest”.’ Setterfield is actually quoting (though sloppily) from Cadusch (as shown by the quote marks); the rest, as becomes obvious once Setterfield’s full sentence is given, is his commentary/interpretation on Cadusch’s comments.

The fact that this extensive critique by Cadusch of the theory was published in our magazine incidentally refutes Plimer’s caricature that we never publish contrary opinions.

P. 43

Plimer states that Trevor Norman was a ‘junior programmer’ at Flinders University, and that he was ‘one of the service staff masquerading as a scientist’. Fact: Norman lectured in statistics and data analysis in the School of Information Science and Technology at Flinders University. He was also manager for all the computer systems in that same university department.

P. 44

Plimer tries to make Dr Snelling look dishonest, and as if he had ‘another agenda’ for citing the Setterfield/Norman monograph as a ‘technical monograph’. There is no doubt that this is an apt description of the document because that is exactly what it is. While such a description does not of itself verify the quality of its contents and the accuracy of its conclusions, it was an honest, accurate description to call it that. It was also correct for Snelling to attribute its co-authorship ‘to a member of the staff of Flinders University’, because Norman was, and is, a member of the staff at Flinders University. As indicated above, Norman is NOT a junior member of the service staff as claimed by Plimer, but the manager for all computer systems in a department that majors on computers and computing. Hardly a junior responsibility.

P. 45

Plimer implies dishonesty by Setterfield—was Malcolm a ‘very junior programmer servicing those who undertook research’ as Plimer says, or was he a ‘lecturer in computing’, which Plimer denies? Remember that the reference that Setterfield was making was to back up the validity of an independent analysis done ‘at Newcastle University’, not ‘by’ the university. It turns out that Plimer has dealt in part-truth, to put a particular bias on the story. Malcolm states that around that time he was in fact paid to do (additional to his main job) some formal lecturing in computing at the University of Newcastle. It is at the least hair-splitting, at the worst dishonest, to imply that somehow he was presented as having bogus qualifications unsuitable to back up his competence to do the computer analysis in question (Malcolm has a Master of Engineering degree). Further, although he was employed as a programmer, Malcolm states that it was totally misleading to refer to him at that time as a ‘very junior’ programmer. His 1989 official designation, for example, was ‘Senior Applications Programmer’.

PP. 45–46

Here, Plimer shows clearly that the creationist community itself has critiqued Setterfield’s theory and that critiques were published in the creationist literature. However, by now Plimer may be hoping that the average reader has forgotten he ‘set up’ the speed-of-light straw-man as the major creationist plank. It is also very inappropriate to suggest that ICR’s astrophysicist has had ‘no results’ after five years. The rejection of Setterfield’s theory by creationists generally made further work totally unnecessary. (Incidentally, any suggestion that the raw data gave no hint of a decay trend is inappropriate. Scientists debated this issue in leading journals such as Nature in the 1930s and 1940s.)

PP. 47–49

Plimer cunningly introduces another twist—he uses the fact that creationists have discredited the speed-of-light theory to make it look as if Dr Snelling is dishonest for having supported it. However, not only did Snelling not say it was definitely accurate, but his comments were made in 1988, whereas much of the progressive discrediting happened later. Further, every scientist has a right to change his mind as evidence accumulates against or for a particular theory. Clearly, Snelling had the right to remain unconvinced by the critique of Setterfield’s concept published in 1986 ‘in a journal he edited’. Plimer suggests that Snelling ‘must have known’ that the theory was ‘discredited pseudoscientific bunkum’. However, the mere fact of the publication of one critique does not make something ‘discredited pseudoscientific bunkum’, nor does it provide evidence that Snelling wrote his statements in anything other than good faith and fair scientific dealing in the light of all the then available data. Plimer’s snide suggestion of some sort of a conspiracy to mislead is most inappropriate.

What about the statements by Professor Keay and Dr Abalakin, and the alleged absence of the actual data? Of passing interest, Plimer did not reproduce the letter by Dr Abalakin (as it was printed in The Skeptic) exactly—there were minor mistakes, although for no apparent reason apart from sloppiness. However, one has good reason to maintain a high index of suspicion about this whole matter, as we will see. (It is quite difficult for us to get to the bottom of this matter, what with the chaos in the former USSR, as well as our current inability to check with Setterfield. It is worth bearing in mind in what follows that Colin Keay is a vociferous anti-creationist and colleague of Plimer’s in Australian Skeptics activity.)

As Plimer and Keay would know (presumably having read the Setterfield/Norman monograph), Setterfield references the Pulkovo data from one Kulikov, K.A, in a work called Fundamental Constants of Astronomy, pp. 81–96, 191–195, ‘Translated from Russian and published for NASA by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations, Jerusalem. Original dated Moscow, 1955.’ Not only that, he carefully tabulates all the Pulkovo observations and graphs them, by using the Russian name of each astronomer responsible for each measurement. It is highly unlikely that all of this is some wishful thinking by Setterfield, nor is it at all unreasonable for Snelling to rely on this information, published and referenced in the monograph as it was.

What makes the whole thing even more interesting is that Setterfield makes it clear that these are measurements deduced from the aberration of distant starlight. Whether the astronomers were trying to determine the velocity of light thereby is hardly relevant. Notice how the convoluted sentence in the letter by the Russian Abalakin refers indirectly to this, then concedes that Pulkovo astronomers were interested in the starlight aberration. However, rather than going on to discuss what those aberration values (which can be used to indirectly determine the speed of light) were, he stops short. Not only that, his next sentence is a complete non sequitur which, even though it starts with the word ‘So’, draws a conclusion which does not follow from anything he has said before! One cannot help wondering whether the last sentence was not written ‘on request’ to make sure that his letter puts down this creationist theory—because the letter as it stands looks to the unsophisticated reader as if the last sentence follows from the technical talk earlier on. It most certainly does not, as a little thought shows.

Plimer hammers home the alleged deception, but the reader is almost certainly being led by the nose, as we have shown.

By the way, the ‘sic’ on p. 48, bottom line, makes it look as if Snelling made an ignorant spelling mistake by writing Pulkova (as opposed to Pulkovo). Russian has a different alphabet, and when proper nouns are translated they are transliterated. Thus the Russian letter that looks identical to ‘c’ becomes ‘s’ in English, because that is how it sounds. This observatory would have ended in an ‘o’ in the Cyrillic alphabet in all probability, but in Russian the ‘o’ on an ending is often colloquially pronounced like ‘a’, as in ‘thank you’, which is sometimes written ‘spasibo’ but is pronounced more like ‘spasiba’ by many. Thus, Pulkova is a legitimate transliteration.

It seems likely that the Pulkovo astronomers made aberration measurements, which can therefore be used to derive a value for c. Even if this were not so, there is no hint that the Pulkovo measurements were not received by Setterfield in good faith from his referenced sources and passed on by Snelling in equal good faith. Any supposed incorrectness therefore rests squarely with the Russian scientists and those who reported their work, NOT with either Setterfield or Snelling. All scientists regularly accept and use data published in the scientific literature every day in good faith without personally checking every datum with those responsible. Plimer’s tactics are totally illegitimate and an unfounded smear.

P. 49

Plimer makes a great effort to make it look as if Snelling deliberately quoted an obscure source. In fact, Snelling ‘nailed his colours to the mast’ by writing the article to readers of The Australian Geologist, who would have largely been hostile to his position, knowing that many of them had the ability to correspond with observatories, travel to Russia, and so forth. If Snelling thought that the information was incorrect, it would have been a most foolish and professionally dangerous thing for him to do. Once again, Plimer is trying to paint Snelling’s bona fide action in a way that implies deceptive tactics. In fact, we would be surprised if the Pulkovo observations were not bona fide, since to our knowledge they were sent to Setterfield unsolicited from a source that had nothing to gain from their invention. Setterfield may not even have known there was such an observatory in Russia, and the Pulkovo observations came to hand long after he first published his theory. Indeed, in his letter to Professor Keay, Dr Abalakin does admit that there were ‘aberration constant determinations’ made at the Pulkovo Observatory, which he admits can be used indirectly to obtain velocity of light determinations. So why the fuss by Plimer and Keay? Is it simply to manipulate the reader’s opinion of creationists?

P. 49–52

Re the Van Flandern quote—Plimer either deliberately misrepresents or unintentionally misunderstands the issue. Van Flandern’s comments are quite reasonable, and in agreement with what Snelling wrote about Van Flandern’s work. Van Flandern was using his observations to suggest (and Setterfield said nothing else) that the gravitational constant might decrease. Setterfield simply used the observations to show that an alternative interpretation of them might be that the speed of light had varied. Since the variation was small, since it was dealing with current observations, and since, according to the Setterfield hypothesis, the difference would only be expected to be small, it should be obvious to Plimer (as a trained scientist) that Van Flandern’s argument that a small variation was not relevant is a total red herring. Snelling was totally justified in referring to Van Flandern’s work as relevant to, and as a possible confirmation of, Setterfield’s hypothesis.

The unsophisticated reader would also miss the point in Plimer’s attack on Snelling for quoting the Troitskii paper. Snelling was highlighting astrophysicist Troitskii’s argument that there could feasibly have been a change to the speed of light. Such an admission by a physicist is highly damaging to Plimer’s claims that this would mean ‘denying all physics’. Snelling did not say that such a change as proposed by Troitskii would change the use of radioactivity to date the earth. Snelling said that Troitskii ‘argues on theoretical grounds for a model of Universe evolution based on a decrease of c from an initially infinite value. With sophisticated mathematics, he shows how this would be consistent with recognised physical principles.’ Anyone who reads the Troitskii paper would agree that this is a fair summary, Plimer’s pontificating red herrings notwithstanding. (The reader wishing to have a really eye-opening dose of documentation showing Plimer’s incredible tactics should read Snelling’s paper in reply to the two previous ones by Plimer, in The Australian Geologist of September 20, 1988.)

The purpose of Snelling’s introduction of the Troitskii comment was clearly to show that the sorts of facile caricatures alleging the absolute impossibility of a change in c, which Plimer had put forward previously, were completely off the mark. Once again, Plimer presumably is hoping that his less astute readership will have missed this obvious point, that pages and pages of his previous waffle on the impossibility of the speed of light changing on theoretical grounds are seriously challenged by the existence of the Troitskii paper.

Plimer implies that because he telephoned a few university academics, presumably in Australia, who did not support the Setterfield hypothesis, therefore Snelling lies and (on p. 52) has ‘created “facts” ex nihilo’. Did Plimer check every university in the world? Hardly! Snelling’s statements were made in good faith, based upon information received which is still to the best of our knowledge correct, mostly concerning overseas people. As far as Australia is concerned, there was a practising physicist at the University of New South Wales at that time, Stephen Bewlay, who openly supported the Setterfield hypothesis, and therefore Plimer’s statement that ‘not one’ did so, could be regarded as (in his terms) ‘mischievous’. As Plimer has already quoted from Setterfield’s 1983 monograph, wherein he could read the endorsements of Bewlay and others, we conclude that it is Plimer who is ignoring the facts.

P. 52

Carl Wieland says:

‘I stand by my quote of 1988 that there were “many ill-informed and even unfair attacks”, on Setterfield’s monograph, and it is not correct to say that I knew that the work had been “discredited”. I knew that it had been attacked and I had satisfied myself that at that stage there were sound answers to the critiques. My subsequent abandonment of the theory has to do with subsequent criticisms of which I became aware. That is normal and appropriate.’

P. 54

Here one is amazed at what seems to be Plimer’s ignorance of the biological sciences. For him to write, ‘if evolution did not exist, then blood types could not be measured, diseases could not be detected and parentage could not be determined’, is bizarre, to put it kindly. See the opinion (concerning evolution) of one of the world’s leading experts on the blood disease sickle-cell anaemia (Creation Ex Nihilo magazine, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 40–41).

Plimer accuses creationists of misrepresenting palaeontology, but he fails to mention that it is evolutionist palaeontologists themselves who have indicated that the incompleteness of the fossil record (which Plimer uses as an argument) is (because of the extent to which it has now been investigated) no longer an excuse for the systematic shortage of the required transitional forms.

P. 55

Plimer says we ignore invertebrate palaeontology. However, he should be well aware that Kurt Wise, an invertebrate palaeontologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard University, was a guest speaker at our 1991 Sydney conference. Dr Wise is a creationist, even though he studied under evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould.

Once again, Plimer is pulling the wool over people’s eyes by suggesting that somehow, because oil companies use the presence of invertebrate fossils to correlate geological layers, then any denial that these invertebrate fossils were related in some evolutionary sequence means that the oil would not have been discovered. Amazing nonsense!

On the same page Wieland is accused of dismissing ‘the whole fossil record’ just because he wrote that Archaeopteryx has none of the crucial transitional structures, like scale-to-feather or limb-to-wing ‘in-betweens’. Wieland certainly does not dismiss the whole fossil record—he merely points out the lack of transitional forms between the major body forms in the fossil record, which even evolutionary palaeontologists admit is a problem for evolutionary theory. In fact, the paucity of transitional forms in the fossil record is the main reason for the saltation (jumps) theory put forward by Stephen Jay Gould.

P. 56

One would like to see Gish speak for himself, as one cannot simply assume that the information given in Plimer’s book is reliable. On the basis of documented evidence of the sorts of antics gotten up to by the skeptics, this is always something which must be seriously questioned. This evidence was documented in the video quoted by Plimer called ‘Ethics Abused’.

That being said, it should also be noted that it is only an evolutionary interpretation that Monoclonius was a transitional ancestor to Triceratops, as is the supposed 15 million years. Evolutionists such as Plimer and Miller state such relationships as if they were proven fact, but they definitely are not—they are interpretations based on a priori evolutionary presuppositions (beliefs). But what is the ‘big deal’ anyway about varieties of horned dinosaurs? The real question is how did a non-dinosaur become a dinosaur? Plimer has no answer, just cynical abuse of Dr Gish.

P. 57

The same applies to the comments of Lord Zuckerman re Lucy’s kind—which Gish is alleged to have used in debates. What Plimer neglects to tell his readers is that other evolutionists making the same claims as Zuckerman on australopithecines, such as Charles Oxnard at the University of Western Australia, published their work after Lucy was discovered. Furthermore, even the alleged comment by Gish which Plimer features makes the point that Zuckerman studied fossils which were, in evolutionary terms, ‘younger’ than Lucy. If these creatures did not walk upright in the human manner, and yet were the forms in-between Lucy and modern humans, how could Lucy be claimed (by evolutionists who say she is ancestral to us) to have walked upright? The point is that Zuckerman concluded that this whole group of creatures did not walk upright.

Concerning the issue of the Wadjak skulls and Dubois, Plimer should blame some of the evolutionist literature, as there has been much misrepresentation of both the Wadjak skulls and also Dubois’ alleged change of mind on Homo erectus. Again, we cannot speak for Gish, nor vouch for the accuracy of Plimer’s allegations. If, in fact, it turns out that any creationist has failed to modify his presentation or to check out criticisms, then this is deplorable but has nothing to do with the validity of the entire creation model. One can find many examples of slipshod practice by evolution’s disciples, but evolutionists do not for that reason dismiss evolution. History surely knows of good scientists who stubbornly kept repeating certain already-refuted ideas and concepts relating to one area of their work, or who simply were too busy charging along a particular line of work. This is not an excuse (if one is needed—the reader of these notes will see that there is good reason for ba priori skepticism of any Plimer claim), but it does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that there was a deliberate intent to deceive.

PP. 58–60

The confusion about whether Gish wrote the booklet or didn’t write the booklet is easy to understand. Gish didn’t actually write it—but it was based upon a lecture he gave and clearly he approved it. Therefore both statements are technically true, but Plimer exploits this to make it look as if Gish is being dishonest.

Regarding the earth’s crust being void of fossils, Plimer knows that the reader will probably not have the opportunity to see the booklet for himself. The booklet doesn’t actually teach this! If you check the diagram (see Appendix 1) it is clear that Gish is saying to the reader that the bottom part of the earth’s crust is void of fossils. By not showing the diagram, Plimer is able to exploit this and to quote the label on that part of the diagram verbatim in order to make it look as if this was intended deception or woeful ignorance.

Re the issue of lack of Precambrian fossils—Gish was at that time acting in perfectly good faith by quoting (and relying upon) a major geological authority (Preston Cloud) who had said that there were no unequivocal multi-cellular Precambrian fossils. Cloud, of course, was aware of the Ediacaran Precambrian fauna, so his statement was at that time therefore very potent. So, regardless of which other works on Precambrian life Cloud had published before he made that statement, they clearly were not adamant about Precambrian multi-cellular life, which was the point at issue! Hence it is incorrect to say that Gish ‘misrepresented and misquoted’. Preston Cloud clearly did not believe at that time that the Ediacaran fossils genuinely belonged in the Precambrian.

However, it is correct that the booklet needed to be corrected or withdrawn from sale (which it was—see later). It is also unfortunate that it doesn’t use the word ‘multi-cellular’ as Gish did at that time in his lectures and his book, and that this was not picked up in proofreading since abbreviations for brevity or simplicity can end up being misunderstood. The main point of the booklet is, however, unaffected—that is that the ‘explosion’ of Cambrian fauna is not preceded by any fossils which evolutionists regard as ancestral to those creatures.

Gish said that the booklet was no longer being sold, and Plimer says that therefore ‘he is a liar’ because the booklet was on sale in the foyer at the debate where Gish was when he made the comment. However, this allegation of lying turns out to be untrue. Gish was visiting Australia from the United States of America, and could not have known whether people were still selling it in a foreign country. The issue was whether it had been withdrawn from sale at its main (original) source, which is what, to the best of Gish’s knowledge, took place in the USA. In fact, we at CSF in Australia had decided not to stock it sometime before, because of this need for upgrading. So how did the booklet appear for sale? The debate was not organized by the mainstream creationist movement, and somehow the booklet appeared for sale by someone, presumably from some old stock of which Gish had no knowledge. (This presumes that Plimer did actually buy it that night, as he claims.)

P. 60

In spite of the demonstration (in reference to p. 59) that there was no lying concerning the Cloud issue, all the emphatic repeated statements about ‘lying’ have their propaganda effect. Gish honestly believed that the booklet had been withdrawn, since his own organization and CSF had done so.

P. 61

Once again Plimer makes gleeful havoc with Gish’s omission of the word ‘multi-cellular’ in reference to the earliest fossils, which is why we withdrew the comic book years before. Actually it would have been not so much Gish’s omission, but that of the writer of the booklet—however, Gish should have checked. We have always heard Gish say ‘multi-cellular’, making it clear what he meant, even in many of his lectures years ago.

P. 62

Plimer again, based upon the misleading information already discussed, hammers home his intent to imply that Gish was deliberately lying. Readers may judge such tactics for themselves. (See our comments regardings Plimer’s p. 60 also.)

Concerning Gish’s claim that the debate with Plimer was ‘the most disgusting performance he had ever experienced’—this had nothing to do with Plimer’s alleged ‘exposure’ of Gish. We were informed that many people, including some evolutionists, stated that they were also disgusted at what was almost universally regarded as rude, abusive behaviour by Plimer on the night. Even a sympathetic news report in The Sydney Morning Herald (June 25, 1988, p. 74) talked about the fact that Plimer’s talk was ‘blistering’, that he ‘mocked’ and ‘ridiculed’, that he was ‘aiming for his opponent’s kneecaps’ and that ‘much of what he said in the Gish debate cannot be repeated for legal reasons’.

Re the last paragraph on p. 65—it was not the ‘mauling’ in the sense in which Plimer portrays it that has led to any refusal to debate. It was a long litany of ethical abuses, such as the circular-type letter concerning Gish which Plimer wrote on University of Newcastle letterhead (where he was professor at the time) and sent (and of which we have a signed copy). Apart from outrageous claims of money-laundering, etc., the letter stated:

‘Furthermore, if you were at the debates in Sydney (18.3.88) or Brisbane (30.3.88), you would surely have noticed an entourage of young people (principally boys) accompanying Gish and who continually touched him. This is commensurate with testimony from elsewhere which throws enlightenment on Gish’s personal life and which makes Jimmy Swaggart look like a moral guardian of the Faith.’

[Signed] I.R. Plimer

The facts are that Dr Gish was at all times accompanied by his wife and/or his Australian hosts, who can all testify that Plimer’s sickening allegations are untrue. Carl Wieland debated the issue of origins at the Tenth Annual Convention of the Australian Skeptics in Melbourne on June 9, 1990, at their invitation. In front of this audience, he documented a number of ethical outrages, including this horrific fabrication about Gish, and then stated that until the Skeptics dissociated themselves from this sort of tactic, no debates with anyone associated with them would take place. No such repudiation (despite repeated invitations to do so) has ever been received, even though the Skeptics have never denied or questioned the validity or existence of that disgusting Plimer letter or the other matters raised, such as Plimer’s public allegations on the ABC (for which the ABC apologized) about our financial returns, as shown below.

Following is the transcript of Plimer’s comments in an interview on Robyn Williams’ Ockham’s Razor program of Sunday, January 8, 1989, at 8.45am (Eastern Summer Time) on Sydney ABC Radio Station 2FC and on Melbourne Radio Station 3AR.

‘In Australia, there’s a Queensland company called the Creation Science Foundation Ltd. It comprises only seven members, who are also the directors of the company. This company submitted no annual report for 1988, no annual report for 1987 and no annual report for 1986. The 1985 annual report to the Corporate Affairs Commission showed that almost $100,000 just disappeared. The auditors resigned a few days before this report was due to be submitted to the Corporate Affairs Commission. Here we have the creation of something into nothing.’

Appendix 2 reproduces a letter from the Office of the Commissioner for Corporate Affairs showing that we had, in fact, submitted each return on time.

On Sunday, June 4, 1989, the Australian Broadcasting Commission issued an on-air apology for this false information which had been broadcast by Professor Ian Plimer on the above national radio broadcast, as follows:

‘In this program on the eighth of January 1989, we talked about Creation Science and said that the 1985 annual return of a Queensland company, Creation Science Foundation Limited, showed that almost $100,000 had just disappeared. We should point out that this money was in fact shown partly in the 1984 return and partly in the 1985 return as losses sustained by the company. We also reported that the company had failed to lodge annual returns for 1986, 1987 and 1988. It has come to our attention, and we accept, that the annual returns for these years have in fact been lodged. We apologise for this inaccuracy and regret any harm that may have been suffered by the Creation Science Foundation or its Directors as a consequence.’

Clearly, for us to refuse to debate anyone associated with a person or organization giving their blessing to such tactics until they issue an apology and a commitment not to stoop to such levels is hardly a ‘pathetically unconvincing reason’. But Plimer cannot possibly reveal the real facts relevant to this to the readers of his book, or he would destroy his own credibility.

P. 63

Plimer naturally cannot admit to all the errors and distortions in the Price book—instead he attacks the CSF rebuttal as ‘fire-and-brimstone’ fulminations, trusting no one will read its exposé of these.

P. 64

Our understandable outrage, that such distortions could be given such wide publicity by government-funded radio without checking the facts, is stated to be our desire to censor information! Unbelievable!

PP. 64–68

Concerning the matter of the ‘Boule’ quote. It appears that Plimer is again trying to ‘snow’ his readers with a complicated series of events, perhaps hoping it will be hard for them to follow anything except for the repetition of inflammatory words.

In Duane Gish’s book Evolution: The Fossils Say No! (Creation-Life Publishers, San Diego, California, third edition,1979), Gish discussed Peking Man on pp. 127–145, using two main sources. For his evaluation of the evolutionist viewpoint, Gish used and discussed material from Fossil Man, an English translation (1957) of Les Hommes Fossiles (1952) by Marcellin Boule and H.V. Vallois, which Gish acknowledged on p. 132 of Evolution: The Fossils Say No!. For his evaluation of the creationist viewpoint, Gish used and discussed material from Science of Today and the Problems of Genesis, Book I (1969), by Patrick O’Connell, which Gish acknowledged on p. 141 of his book.

On p. 139 of Evolution: the Fossils Say No! (1979), Gish presented the disputed Boule quote, introducing it with the words:

‘In an article published in 1937 in L’Anthropologie (p. 21), Boule wrote:

To this fantastic hypothesis [of Abbe Breuil and Fr. Teilhard de Chardin], that the owners of the monkey-like skulls were the authors of the large-scale industry, I take the liberty of preferring an opinion more in conformity with the conclusions from my studies, which is that the hunter (who battered the skulls) was a real man and that the cut stones, etc., were his handiwork [the nature of this stone industry will be discussed later].’

In 1990 CSF wrote to Gish and asked him about his source for this quote. Gish replied as follows:

‘The source of my quote was from Patrick O’Connell’s book Science of Today and the Problems of Genesis. I used a secondary source.’

Gish continued:

‘It will be seen that I used the quote exactly as given by O’Connell. Certainly, then, it cannot be charged that I published a doctored quotation with intent to deceive. My only error is using, in all honesty, a quotation from a secondary source without accrediting it to a secondary source. Had I done that, they would have to charge O’Connell, not me, of doctoring the quotation, because I quoted it exactly as given by O’Connell.’

Thus the sum total of the matter is that Gish in all honesty quoted Boule from a secondary source, which in the event turned out to be a rather free translation (by O’Connell). We published this reply from Gish in A Response to Deception (1991 Revised edition), p. 14, which means that Plimer knew the true explanation. Nevertheless Plimer hides this fact from his readers in Telling Lies for God and instead charges Gish with the following offences:

• ‘numerous misquotations’ (p. 64),
• ‘a long history of multiple misquotation by Gish and his cohorts’ (p. 64),
• ‘Gish knowingly misquoted from misquotes’ (p. 65),
• ‘“He (Gish) will stop at nothing, it would seem, for the cause of converting children to creationism.”’—Zindler (p. 66),
• ‘(to Gish) means the action of lying about your own lie in order to attempt to persuade someone that you are telling the truth’ (p. 66),
• ‘scientific fraud’ (p. 66),
• ‘Gish had plagiarised O’Connell’s obscure work’ (p. 67),
• ‘deceit’ (p. 67),
• [Gish] ‘plagiarised O’Connell’s work in an attempt to deceive his readership about the writings of the eminent anthropologist, Boule’ (p. 67),
• ‘Gish was caught lying about his own lie in order to give the appearance of telling the truth’ (p. 68),
• ‘Gish was caught lying many times’ (p. 68),
• ‘Gish plagiarised the work of others’ (p. 68),
• And Plimer concludes, ‘creation “science” is fraud and this fraud is knowingly committed by the movement’s leaders’ (p. 68).

In the course of this tirade of abuse Plimer mentions a Dr Alex Ritchie four times and says,

[he] ‘undertook a magnificent piece of research to show a long history of multiple misquotation by Gish and his cohorts’ (p. 64),
‘the Creation Science Foundation used incomplete information which gave Dr Ritchie even more clues’ (p. 65),
‘The scientific fraud committed by Gish was exposed after some brilliant detective work by Dr Alex Ritchie’ (p. 66), and
‘This detective work by Alex Ritchie shows that Gish was caught lying many times, that Gish plagiarised the work of others and that Wieland was bending the truth’ (p. 68).

All of this is rubbish!

To the best of our knowledge:

There was only ever one Boule quote in dispute.
The misquotation lay in O’Connell’s free translation.Gish’s only mistake was not to acknowledge it to be from a secondary source.

As soon as the Creation Science Foundation knew from Gish about it, CSF publicized the details in A Response to Deception, which was first published in September 1990, with the revised edition in January 1991. Ritchie’s article on the subject, as referenced by Plimer, did not appear in The Australian Biologist until March 1991.

On p. 68 of Telling Lies for God, Plimer, referring to our explanation in A Response to Deception, Revised Edition, says,

‘This time, it is claimed that Gish didn’t understand French and the O’Connell version was the only English version of Boule that Gish had available. Gish should not have used Boule if he did not understand French, and to claim that the O’Connell version was the only English version that Gish had available was clearly a lie. The 1957 English version of Boule is freely available and was on the shelves years before Gish wrote his book. Gish was caught lying about his own lie in order to give the appearance of telling the truth.’

What are the facts? Well, the first fact is that it is quite OK to quote a translation without being able to speak the original language—people do it every day when they quote the Bible! The second fact is that when we said that Gish reproduced ’the only English translation available to him’, we were referring to the disputed quote and not to the whole of Boule’s article. Our statement is correct, as will be shown, since the Boule quote used by Gish does not appear as such in the English translation Fossil Men.

The section on Peking Man on pp. 130–146 of Fossil Men by Boule and Vallois is not an exact translation of Boule’s 22 page article in L’Anthropologie, but is a revised version. Fossil Men was published in England by Thames and Hudson of London in 1957, and bears the names of Marcellin Boule and Henri V. Vallois on the title page. However, the book also states that it was ‘translated by Michael Bullock from the revised and enlarged fourth edition of Les Hommes Fossiles with additional information supplied by Professor Vallois’. This fourth edition of Les Hommes Fossiles was published in Paris in 1952, which is 10 years after the death of Boule, during World War II, in 1942. From this it is safe to assume that Boule was not consulted about, nor did he approve, the changes made by Vallois to what he (Boule) had written. What changes? Well, the ‘Boule quote’ in particular. Boule originally wrote in French and the Boule quote in L’Anthropologie, p. 22 begins:

‘A cette hypothèse, aussi fantaisiste qu’ing é nieuse, je me permets de préfé rer celle-ci, qui me paraît aussi satisfaisante…’

Gish’s critic, Zindler, translated this as follows:

‘To this hypothesis, as fantastic as it is ingenious, I may be permitted to prefer one which seems to me to be just as satisfactory…’ (source: American Atheist, March 1985, p. 23, emphasis added).

It seems that Vallois changed this from the first person, as Boule had written it, to his own version in the third person, so that the translation by Michael Bullock which appeared in Fossil Men, Thames and Hudson, London, 1952, p. 145, read:

‘To this hypothesis, other writers preferred the following…’ (emphasis added).

The discerning reader may wish to ponder the fact that changing a quote is what Gish has been erroneously (and mischievously) accused of, but in this matter it is the evolutionist Vallois who has done the quote-changing. Will Plimer now accuse Vallois of lying, deceit, etc? Gish did in fact give the Fossil Men Vallois version in full, on p. 139 of Evolution: The Fossils Say No! (1979 edition), as follows:

‘To this hypothesis, other writers preferred the following, which seemed to them more in conformity with our whole body of knowledge: the hunter was a true Man, whose stone industry has been found and who preyed upon Sinanthropus.’ (Fossil Men, p. 145)

However, this is not the way Boule wrote it, so Gish was perfectly justified and totally honest in then adding the Boule quote, on p. 139 of the same edition of Evolution: The Fossils Say No!, using the only translation with which he was familiar, from O’Connell’s book Science of Today and the Problems of Genesis, which translation Gish introduced as follows:

‘In an article published in 1937 in L’Anthropologie (p. 21) Boule wrote: “To this fantastic hypothesis…I take the liberty of preferring an opinion…”.’

As we have already mentioned, Gish’s one error was in not referencing this translation to O’Connell as a secondary source. However, as Gish did not have the original French article, he was perfectly justified and totally honest in using the only translation he knew of and available to him at the time. Note: We do not dispute that O’Connell’s version is a very free translation of Boule’s French and incorporates some information from other parts of Boule’s article in L’Anthropologie—we acknowledged this in our A Response to Deception, p. 26. However this in no way negates the fact that the only place we know of (and that Gish knew of in the 1970s) where the disputed Boule quote, in the first person as used by Boule, was extant at the time Gish wrote, was, in fact, in O’Connell’s book.

It is abundantly clear, therefore, that Plimer’s allegation (p. 68) that ‘to claim that the O’Connell version was the only English version that Gish had available was clearly a lie’ is a canard (cf. Oxford English Dictionary: literally ‘duck’, meaning an extravagant or absurd story calculated as a hoax; a false report). And of Plimer’s further allegation that ‘Gish was caught lying about his own lie in order to give the appearance of telling the truth’—does not this come close to describing what Plimer himself has done? As he himself says on p. 66 of Telling Lies for God, ‘There is no word in the English language to describe someone who lies about their own lie in order to attempt to persuade an audience that they are telling the truth.’

On p. 68 of Telling Lies for God, Plimer alleges that: ‘In the new revised Response to Deception, the Creation Science Foundation publish that it is O’Connell who is guilty of fabrication …’

This is NOT true! We wrote, ‘Readers who speak French will see that Price/Zindler’s translation is quite literal, while Gish/O’Connell’s is rather more free, but in the spirit of the rest of Boule’s article.’—A Response to Deception (revised), p. 12. And on p. 26 we wrote, ‘It will be readily seen that this next paragraph [i.e. the Boule quote] is a very free translation of Boule’s French, and that it incorporates information from other parts of the L’Anthropologie article, e.g. the reference to “monkey-like skulls” was based on Boule’s comments on pages 9 and 10 of his L’Anthropologie article (see our translation of these earlier on pages 12 and 13 of this booklet).’

It is therefore totally untrue for Plimer to allege that we said O’Connell was guilty of fabrication. It is further untrue for Plimer to say (p. 66) that ‘There is no mention of monkeys anywhere in the Boule article [in L’Anthropologie].’ (Without hairsplitting about whether the word ‘singe’ should be translated ‘apes’ or ‘monkeys’.)

Furthermore Plimer’s accusation (p. 66) that Gish used ‘an amended quote from O’Connell which Gish attributed to Boule’ is absolutely misleading. Gish attributed it to Boule because O’Connell attributed it to Boule.

Also, Plimer says (p. 66) that Boule claimed that Peking Man was a true man, cleverly diverting attention from the Zindler version of the Boule quote, which indicates Boule’s belief that true man was in fact the hunter of Peking Man. Zindler’s translation reads, ‘the hunter was a true man…who made Sinanthropus [i.e. Peking man] his victim!’ Who is really twisting the truth here?

What about Plimer’s claim that Carl Wieland was ‘bending the truth’? He is referring to a New Scientist Letter to the Editor (published 23 March, 1991) in which Wieland wrote the following: ‘Price states that the Creation Science Foundation claimed that the original Boule quote “proved Gish had quoted word-for-word from Boule”. In fact we wrote that it proved he quoted O’Connell verbatim, not Boule.’ Plimer correctly quotes CSF from our A Response to Deception, that (referring to the O’Connell quote) ‘it is a word-for-word match of Gish’s quote of Boule’ but he is not correct when he says that Wieland’s letter to New Scientist denied that we had said this. A careful comparison with what Wieland wrote (reproduced above) shows that there is a very significant difference. Wieland was denying Price’s accusation that we had admitted that Gish had quoted from Boule, whereas what we were saying was that the O’Connell quote was a word-for-word match of Gish’s quote of Boule! In other words, Wieland did not deny what Plimer says he denied, but something which was subtly close, but substantially different. Notice how he is careful to refer readers to check the quote from A Response to Deception, but not to check what Wieland actually wrote in the New Scientist letter in question.

P. 69

While it is true that the geological column (the rock and fossil sequence) had been established before Darwin published his treatise, it is also true that evolution and evolutionary ideas were circulating before Darwin (Darwin’s grandfather wrote on the subject). It is also true that the time scale assigned to the rocks and fossils has been greatly modified since the column was first proposed. Leading creationist geologists of today accept the geologic column, but not the time scale associated with it. Plimer refers to the geological time scale and the sequence of rocks and fossils (the geologic column) as if the two are synonymous. They are NOT. While they go together, the time scale has been imposed on the column according to evolutionary/uniformitarian assumptions. Geologists who believed in creation and the Flood helped construct the geological column, but it was those with an evolutionary/uniformitarian bias who interpreted the column as representing millions of years (the time scale). Plimer fudges the issues—geological time today is based on the assumption of evolution; where radiometric dating contradicts the ‘evolution-time’ based on fossils, it is the radiometric date which is assumed to be wrong, and ignored.

Gish was incorrect in saying that a mixture of hydroquinone and peroxide is explosive. However, the accusation against Gish of ‘lying’ is outrageous because it is demonstrably wrong. CSF wrote to Plimer in August 1988, pointing out the unfairness of his statements at that time about Gish, and documenting that Gish had corrected his account of the bombardier beetle. Plimer has taken no notice of the documentation supplied and repeats his erroneous charges in this book published six years later.

Dr Robert Kofahl responded to the article by Christopher Weber upon which Plimer (p. 71) bases his accusations, in Creation/Evolution V.12–14, 15, 16; X.2; XVII.3. This is the same year as Weber’s anti-Gish article. Dr Kofahl acknowledged that he was the source of the error over the spontaneous explosiveness of a mixture of hydroquinone and peroxide. Kofahl read the original paper in German, but his translation provided to Gish had not been thorough and the error had arisen. Plimer was sent a copy of Kofahl’s article acknowledging this by Wieland in August 1988, but Plimer does not acknowledge Kofahl’s article, presumably because it would inhibit him from calling Gish a liar.

Plimer makes much of the difference between instabil, which he says is the German word for ‘unstable’ which would have been used in the original paper, Plimer indicates, and explosiv, German for ‘explosive’. Gish studied German during his undergraduate years (40 years before!) and would have known the difference, says Plimer, and therefore Gish lied about the mistranslation. But with Kofahl admitting that he was the source of the information in his own translation, it is clear that Gish did not attempt to use his undergraduate German to try to read this technical paper.

Plimer implies that Gish knew that the mixture of hydroquinone and peroxide was not explosive and made up the story to make it sound good to uninformed audiences! What good Gish supposedly would hope to achieve by this is not at all clear, considering the numerous other excellent examples of functions in living things impossible to explain by any evolutionary process! Indeed, the bombardier beetle itself, without the error, is still a problem for evolution, as pointed out by Kofahl.

Plimer gives his reader the impression that he himself has made a detailed study of the original German paper (p. 71). He claims that Gish could not have confused the German words for unstable and explosive. However, three native German-speakers plus two German dictionaries we have consulted indicate that there is no such word in written German as instabil, as Plimer claims. Germans sometimes use unstabil but never instabil. Perhaps it was a ‘typo’ and he typed instabil instead of unstabil? No, this does not help Plimer because the original paper by Schildknecht et al used neither unstabil or instabil. Furthermore, the word explosiv was not in the papers either. Various German conjugations of words relating to instability and explosiveness are used in the article, but not unstabil/instabillain , or explosiv. We conclude that Plimer, contrary to appearances, has never read the original papers himself, and on the basis of speculation accuses Gish of lying!

P. 71

Plimer’s charge that ‘With such public exposure, one would expect that Gish’s 1977 book would be immediately withdrawn and pulped’, is ridiculous. The error occurred in a very small part of a book on dinosaurs, in a small part of the account of the bombardier beetle, and did not significantly change the thrust of the point that the beetle is an embarrassment to evolution. Will Professor Plimer immediately withdraw and pulp his book Telling Lies for God now we have shown it to be full of errors?

Plimer makes a non sequitur which would mislead most readers. By saying that ‘Gish knew better’ he makes it appear as if Gish believed that the bombardier beetle’s mechanism could not be used to show the impossibility of evolution. To say that Gish was ‘still perfectly content to promote information which he knew was incorrect’ would only be so if Gish had failed to correct in his lectures the details of how the beetle generates the bursts of hot noxious gases.

To say, ‘Gish is clearly aware of the weakness of his bombardier beetle argument’ is incredibly misleading. Gish does not believe, as Plimer implies, that the Weber article ‘demolishes’ the argument. Kofahl’s response to Weber indicated that the argument against evolution remained sound—with the error corrected. Plime