Reading Darwin causes mass shootings. Mike Johnson says so. I have the transcript

By now you will know that the new Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson (Louisiana 4^th District) was among those who voted against accepting the results of the 2020 Presidential election. You may also know that he is opposed to the concept of same sex marriage, which in some way he regards as undermining individual religious freedom, and wants to pass a law making abortion illegal throughout the US. You probably also know that he has denied that human activity is a cause of global warming, and has accepted more campaign funds from the fossil fuel industry than from any other source. There is a high chance that you have heard him share Marjorie Taylor Greene’s view that the problem in mass shootings isn’t guns, it’s the human heart (Guns don’t kill people. Human hearts kill people.) What you may not know are his views on the causes of the moral decline that, like authoritarian pulpiteers throughout the ages, he sees happening all around him. He has, however, stated those views very plainly, at a presentation he gave in Louisiana in 2016, available [actually, no longer available] here. I have read the transcript of this, suffering so that you don’t have to, by good luck retained it, and despite many decades of following the utterances of people who share his views I was surprised by what I found.

Here he is, speaking at a less than overcrowded Shreveport Christian Center, which describes itself as mandated “to participate with the Lord in establishing His kingdom in all areas of our culture. We desire to use the authority given to us to promote and participate in seeing the Lord’s purposes rule in the church, business, media, arts, education, government and family arenas.” The authority, of course, is given by God. He is standing at the front of a platform, and behind him are musical instruments and two flags. The flag of the United States, and the flag of Israel. The Israeli Right has been wooing the American Religious Right for decades, and the unquestioning support of the American Religious Right has done much to make Israel what it is today.

Here’s part of what he said; the link the YouTube has gone dead, as with so many of his presentations, but I had collected the transcript and will make it available to anyone who asks for it privately. Like all academics, I am easy to find.

My account is rather rambling, although nowhere near as rambling as the original material, so I will place the main points here above the fold.

• He thinks that he became a lawyer in response to divine calling.
• He would rather have been born at the time of the founding fathers, but thinks that he is where he is now because that’s where God wants him to be.
• He thinks that the writers of the Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired.
• He thinks that the United States is a Christian nation.
• He thinks that the only real way to be a proper Christian is naïve biblical literalism, so rigorously that nowadays only 4% make the grade.
• He thinks that the US is in moral decline, and that we must identify the disease that caused that decline.
• He thinks that the disease is teaching about Darwin, imposed in the 1930s by a liberal educational elite with the collusion of progressive Supreme Court judges such as Oliver Wendell Holmes.
• He thinks that darkness is encroaching, Christians are being persecuted, students who profess a belief in God are ridiculed in universities, and he himself has been shot at with flaming arrows for his religious beliefs.
• He thinks that learning about Darwin causes people to stop believing in God, whereupon they become completely amoral.
• He thinks that the results include no-fault divorce (I don’t know why he regards that as a bad thing, but I expect his audience would agree with him), feminism (the same comments apply), the legalisation of abortion which is murder (the Bible says it isn’t, but Bible believing Christians don’t seem to know that), and in due course to mass shootings.

Darwin, Marx, Satan, and a mythical dedication

John R. Rice, photo from The Sword of the Lord

In 1954, at the height of the McCarthyite Red Scare, the anti-evolution preacher John R. Rice asked his audience to whom Marx had dedicated The Communist Manifesto. The answer, he shouted out, was Charles Darwin. It is doubtful whether Marx had even heard of Darwin when he and Engels wrote the Manifesto in 1848, but that is the least of Rice’s errors.

Carl Weinberg, in his excellent Red Dynamite, an overview of the deep links between evolution denial and right-wing politics in America, points out that Rice had the wrong book; he should have been referring to Das Kapital. But as we now know, even if he had been he would still have been wrong. Wrong book, wrong date, wrong author, wrong about Darwin’s response to the request to dedicate.

The matter is well summarised by Richard Carter, reporting in The Friends of Charles Darwin on a paper by Margaret Fay in The Journal of the History of Ideas. The same conclusions had been reached, independently, by Lewis Feuer, and Fay’s paper has a long discussion regarding their relative priority, and describing differences of interpretation between them. As for the belief that Marx had wished to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, Fay traces this to Isaiah Berlin, probably misunderstanding what Darwin actually did say in a letter to Marx.

There is no doubt that Marx greatly admired Darwin, and sent him a copy of Das Kapital, which Darwin graciously acknowledged, writing, in 1873,

Dear Sir:

I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on Capital; & I heartily wish that I was more worthy to receive it, by understanding more of the deep and important subject of political Economy. Though our studies have been so different, I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of Knowledge, & that this is in the long run sure to add to the happiness of Mankind.

I remain, Dear Sir
Yours faithfully,
Charles Darwin

Darwin’s study in Down House, photo Mario Modesto, via Wikipedia

A polite response to Marx’s gift and implied admiration, while refraining from taking any position on the merits or otherwise of the subject matter. The volume itself still languishes, with pages uncut, in the library of Darwin’s residence, Down House.

The legend that Marx had offered to dedicate his work to Darwin may also have arisen from another of Darwin’s letters, written in 1880, most probably to Karl Marx’s son-in-law Edward Aveling, with reference to Aveling’s strongly anti-religious The Students’ Darwin.:

Dear Sir:

I am much obliged for your kind letter & the Enclosure.— The publication in any form of your remarks on my writing really requires no consent on my part, & it would be ridiculous in me to give consent to what requires none. I shd prefer the Part or Volume not to be dedicated to me (though I thank you for the intended honour) as this implies to a certain extent my approval of the general publication, about which I know nothing.— Moreover though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follow from the advance of science. It has, therefore, always been my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science. I may, however, have been unduly biased by the pain which it would give some members of my family, if I aided in any way direct attacks on religion.— I am sorry to refuse you any request, but I am old & have very little strength, and looking over proof-sheets (as I know by present experience) fatigues me much.

I remain Dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Ch. Darwin

Darwin did in fact write about his changing views of religion, and at some length, in an autobiographical memoir intended only for his family, where he tells of his religious faith slipping away from him imperceptibly by degrees. He initially writes of

the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

So to that extent he was, at that time, an advocate of what is now called Intelligent Design, although for some strange reason the modern Intelligent Design movement never lists him among their supporters.

Later, however, he wrote

This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species… But then arises the doubt—can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? … The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga has built an entire theory of knowledge on misunderstanding what Darwin is saying here. Darwin is pointing out that a mind arising through evolution would not be equipped to deal with problems loftier than those relating to survival. Plantinga does not seem to realise how an evolving mind would nonetheless be constrained by experience when constructing its model of the everyday world, and applies the term “Darwin’s doubt” to his own curious belief that the correspondence of that model to reality could only have arisen through supernatural intervention. For a more technical discussion of this issue, see e.g. here.

Regarding Christianity, Darwin wrote

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.

And this is a damnable doctrine.

Emma Darwin in later life, via Wikipedia

Emma Darwin, Charles’s widow, wanted to suppress this passage, on the grounds that surely nobody believed so crude and cruel a version of Christianity any more. Yet that is the version of Christianity preached by John R. Rice, with whom this piece started, and central, as I wrote earlier, following William Trollinger, to the teachings of Answers in Genesis.

The 1880 letter was written seven years later than Marx’s presentation of Das Kapital to Darwin. Moreover, it clearly relates to a work dedicated to attacking religion, which in Das Kapital is a peripheral issue. As with the first letter, we have the formal salutation “Dear Sir”, which of course does not tell us who is being addressed.

Marx’s papers were curated by Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, but the letter was almost certainly not addressed to Marx (which, as we saw before, would have made no sense regarding either content or date) but to Edward Aveling, who became Eleanor’s lover. Aveling did in fact write to Darwin in 1880, offering to dedicate his Student’s Darwin to him, and enclosing excerpts for him to consider. A contemporary review of the work by the biologist George Romanes in Nature shows that Darwin’s criticisms were fully justified:

In itself science has no necessary relation to any such belief; it is neither theistic nor atheistic; it is simply extra-theistic… Therefore, although it may be of use in the interests of “Freethought” to represent science as not merely neutral but negative in its bearings upon religion, the attempt to do so is detrimental to the interests of science; so far as it may be successful it can only tend to increase the suspicious dislike of scientific knowledge which large masses of the general public are already too apt to harbour.

And as we know, that “suspicious dislike” is as powerful and as damaging as ever.

Feuer and Fay published their refutations of the myth of Marx’s request to dedicate in 1975 and 1978 respectively, but nonetheless the myth has persisted in creationist circles. Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, and founder of the Institute for Creation Research, referred to it repeatedly long after the story had been laid to rest. Weinberg shows a 2012 photo of a panel at the Institute for Creation Research’s Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee, California, that reads

Karl Marx is considered to be the chief founder of Communism. Although he was a professing Christian in his youth, he became an atheist and (according to some) a Satanist in college. His philosophies of history and economics were squarely based on evolutionism. In fact, he wanted to dedicate his book DAS KAPITAL to Charles Darwin, who had given him what he thought was a scientific foundation for Communism.

Satanism does seem an unlikely pursuit for the father of dialectical materialism, but according to Weinberg the suggestion that Marx had been a Satanist goes back to Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian anti-Communist dissident. Wurmbrand’s evidence included wordplay in Marx’s juvenilia, and his 1977 book Was Karl Marx a Satanist? refers in the look-inside of its Amazon page to “Karl Marx making the secret societies symbolic gesture of the ‘hidden hand.’ ”

And according to Morris, in his The Long War against God, 1989, Satan’s involvement in promoting evolution, or at any rate a materialism which is part of the same package, dates back from Darwin through the pre-Socratics to Nimrod, the mighty hunter, whom Morris, following John Milton, blames for the catastrophe of Babel. Ken Ham, of Answers in Genesis, younger relative of the Institute for Creation Research, goes further, back to when the serpent (whom Ham, like so many, unbiblically identifies with Satan) first tempted Eve. As the Rev Michael Roberts has pointed out, Milton, rather than the Bible, is the source of much of this creationist theology.

There is an article in the October 2022 issue of Creation magazine, organ of Creation Ministries International, with the title “Darwin, Marx, and two letters”, by Russell Grigg, who like me is a chemist by training, and if anyone reading this has access to the article, I would greatly appreciate hearing what it says. There may yet be more to learn from this old story.

Repost from 3 Quarks Daily

Pandas, Kitzmiller, and the frozen frog fallacy

By Paul Braterman

January 4, 2023 13:00 MST

Paul Braterman is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Texas and Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Chemistry at the University of Glasgow

This Kitzmas was different. For the first time, the Discovery Institute allowed the anniversary of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District to pass without complaining about the verdict. Perhaps they are hoping that we will forget about the incredible badness of the text that they were trying to foist on the District’s students. Of Pandas and People is carefully constructed to be as misleading as possible, and we shouldn’t let them forget this, as long as contributors and advisers responsible for it remain in position within the Discovery Institute¹, while the Institute continues to promote works such as Denton’s Evolution – A Theory in Crisis, that perpetuate the same elementary errors of logic. But first, an apparent digression. When students first come across the use of molecular or DNA sequencing in constructing phylogenetic trees, they are sometimes puzzled. They have been told that mammals are descended from fish by way of amphibians. Therefore, as a matter of common sense, they might expect that frogs should be closer to fish in evolutionary terms than we are. This is another example of the Evolution as Progress error. While amniotes have progressed through synapsid to mammal to humans, the pinnacle of creation, the frog has remained a lowly frog and should, therefore, be closer to the common ancestor, as if the ineluctable processes of molecular mutation had somehow been suspended. We might call this the “frozen frog fallacy.”

At this point, a Table like the one shown below might help:

Table of cytochrome c differences, from Of Pandas and People, Second edition. Fair use claimed.

All the multicellular organisms shown are, apart from small random fluctuations, at the same distance from the bacterium, as expected if they share a common ancestor distinct from bacteria, which have of course, independently, been accumulating their own set of changes.

All the animals shown are, apart from small random fluctuations, at the same distance from wheat, as expected if they share a common ancestor distinct from plants. And the relative number of mutations shows that the split between plants and animals is more recent than the split between multicellular organisms and bacteria. More recent yet is the split between fish and tetrapods, leaving all tetrapods (including you and me, and of course present-day frogs) at the same distance from the fish. And so on. Most tellingly, humans share a common ancestor with monkeys, more recent than their common ancestor with non-simian mammals. There is a lot more detail in the Table, for example about how to birds relate to reptiles, and how the different orders of mammal relate to each other. And of course the construction of a phylogenetic tree is based on the specific differences found, rather than the overall number.

There are now numerous published studies of the phylogenetic relationships revealed by Cytochrome C, to say nothing of the vast recent literature using numerous molecular and morphological traits to develop detailed high-resolution phylogenies, and to explore the limitations of the concept of a unique phylogeny. What is interesting about the particular Table I have quoted is its origin, and the uses that its authors make of it.

This brings us back to our original theme. The Table actually comes from Of Pandas and People, 2nd edition, 1993, which by the time of the trial had gone through five printings. The book does not give a reference to the source of the data, but much (not all) of the information can be found in a classic 1967 paper [2], which also explains the reasoning behind the method, and critically examines the assumptions made. So there is no excuse for what the book does next, which is to repeatedly assert that the data refute claims of common ancestry:

one might expect analysis to reveal that the cytochromes in fish are most similar to the cytochromes in amphibians. But this is not the case.

And again:

To use the classic Darwinian scenario, amphibians are intermediate between fish and the other band-dwelling invertebrates. Analysis of their amino acids should place amphibians in an approximately intermediate position, but it does not.

(Note the use of Darwin’s name to denote the whole of evolution. In fact, the book is obsessed with Darwin, mentioning him on almost every page, and on some pages up to 10 times. In fact, by my count, and I may have missed a few, Darwin’s name or some variant of it occurs 262 times within the 144 pages of text. This emphasis on Darwin is of course found throughout the whole of the creationist literature, although by now evolutionary theory is almost as different from what Darwin proposed as atomic theory is from that proposed by Democritus.)

These are just two of five separate reiterations of the fallacy, leading up to the extraordinary statement that

Based upon the evolutionary series, we should expect some amphibians to be closer to fish (“primitive” species) and others to be closer to reptiles (“advanced” species).

And to make sure that the message sticks, we have this Figure, with the plain implication that the data point, not to evolution, but to separate creation:

The fallacy is not merely being stated; it is being repeated, rationalised, and reinforced. The kindest explanation is that the authors simply do not understand the science that they are presenting, seeing a hierarchical structure where none exists, and imposing on their biology a perspective in terms of “higher” and “lower” which do not belong in modern science, but have been carried over, such as the power of human vanity, from a worldview more akin to Aristotle and the mediaeval Great Chain of Being. The same fallacy also occurs in Michael Denton’s 1985 Evolution – A Theory in Crisis, and while he had by 1998 [3] quietly walked away from this, his 2016 sequel, Evolution – Still a Theory in Crisis, retains his preference for Aristotelian over phylogenetic classification.

And why should this matter? Because it reminds us, and we should not forget, that the Discovery Institute does not only deal in dis-information, but in dis-education.

I thank Maarten Boudry, Glenn Branch, Joe Felsenstein, John Harshman, Kim Johnson, Larry Moran, and Massimo Pigliucci for helpful comments and links to the literature.

Footnotes and citations:Permalink

(1) Dean Kenyon (co-author), Charles Thaxton (Academic Editor), and Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, and Nancy Pearcey (contributors) all hold positions at the Discovery Institute, as do Raymond Bohlin, Walter Bradley, Robert Kaita, J.P. Moreland, and Paul Nelson, who are on the list of those thanked for being “critical reviewers”, as, also, are Meyer and Behe.

(2) Walter M Fitch and Emanuel Margoliash, Science 155(3760), 279, 1967; DOI: 10.1126/science.155.3760.279

(3) For a discussion of Denton’s revised position, see this 2006 post at Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog

Repost of https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/01/Pandas-and-Frogs.html

Leading creationist organisation appoints conspiracy theorist to key position

Posted on Monday, Jun 12, 2023 1:10AM by Paul Braterman

by Paul Braterman

One month ago today, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis appointed Martyn Iles, formerly director of the Australian Question Lobby, to the position of Chief Ministry Officer, ministry of course being Answers in Genesis’ core activity. Here’s why that matters.

Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, was the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2018 until he was abruptly sacked by the ACL Board in February 2023. Accounts of his dismissal differ. Iles described it as a result of difference in strategy; the Board wanted to move in a more political direction, making him in his own words “not the right person for that vision. I have always been a preacher first and politician second (or third…)”. The Board’s chair, however, denied that there had been any such change.

Answers in Genesis (AiG) is the world’s largest Young Earth Creationist organisation. AiG has a full-time working staff of 1200 and, according to its 2021 tax declaration, assets of almost $82 million. It owns the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Kentucky as well as other major assets, and its massive outreach programme includes formal publications, Answers magazine, and an extremely active website.

AiG is the property of Ken Ham, like Iles a product of Australian’s extreme Christian fundamentalist community. It was set up in 1994 after complex and litigious manoeuvres involving Ham and his previous associates, Creation Ministries International based mainly in Australia, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR itself had been set up by Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, when disputes arose among an earlier generation of Young Earth creationists.

There comes a time in the life of every successful businessman (it usually is a man) when he starts to consider his legacy. Ham is now 71. The vigour of his early writing, which had attracted Henry Morris’ attention in the 1980s, has faded into stale repetitiousness, and his articles on the AiG website now describe themselves as produced with the help of research staff. It seemed at one time as if Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, was his obvious heir apparent, but Hodge’s own writing is superficial and tedious. (Disclosure; both Ham and Hodge have attacked me by name in their writings.)

Iles is now, therefore, in an extremely strong position within the organisation, for which he has excellent credentials. He is a successful organiser and money raiser, and responsible for targeted interventions in Australian electoral politics. His Youtube series The Truth of It has a major following, and as we shall see is very good at what it does. Thus we can expect him to be a major influence on AiG in its direction and messaging, and to enhance its appeal and effectiveness. He has already been announced as a key speaker in next year’s homeschooling conference.

It is therefore a matter of some general concern that Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, believes in male domination (while I was preparing this piece he told us that “A word like ‘independent’ is a direct assault on God’s design for women” and that a good woman is “Submissive to husbands. including imperfect ones”), is adept at promoting an intolerant agenda in the name of freedom of speech, has (ever so obliquely) inflamed concerns about vaccines, takes the historical truth of the early chapters of Genesis for granted, and thinks abortion should be illegal because God approves of population growth, among other reasons. Worst of all, he preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world.”

For an example of Iles defending the indefensible, provided that the indefensible is based on religious belief, see his condemnation of Covid vaccine mandates.

To see him in unrestrained conspiracy mode, watch [1] his response to the World Economic Forum’s concept of a Great Reset, according to which we should use the pause imposed by Covid to rethink current industrial policy and its large-scale environmental impact. This notion offends against his core belief that the planet is in God’s hands, so that WEF’s concerns are fundamentally misguided. Like others, he presents the Reset concept, and the interest shown in it by governments, institutions, and major companies, as a conspiracy to do away with capitalism and democracy. Here, Iles is in lockstep with the Heartland Institute, a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry and for laissez-faire economics. As a sign of this conspiracy (and here I am reminded of Q-Anon) he points to the way in which the slogan Build Back Better, which occurs in the WEF literature, is echoed by politicians as diverse as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Justin Trudeau, while as co-conspirators he identifies the entire climate change movement, as well as Black Lives Matter which, like other creationist writers, Iles describes as Marxist.

Iles’ full talents are on display in his The Truth of It YouTube, Climate Totalitarianism, which I recommend to students of rhetoric. Its thousand closely argued words are a masterpiece of misdirection, false dichotomy, strawmanning and vilification of opponents’ positions (the word cancer occurs four times); emotional engagement with the concerned, leading to a promise of reassurance and erasing of anxiety; imposing an intellectual superstructure (which he calls hierarchies of control) on the Bible and then using this superstructure to argue that mere worldly science can be safely ignored; slyly referring to fossil fuels by another name (mineral resources) as put there by God for humanity to use; and hinting at massive totalitarian conspiracies behind climate policy. All reinforced by dramatic phrasing, intonation, and gestures.

The title of the series, The Truth of It, prepares us for the message that anyone Iles disagrees with has been misleading us. The individual podcast title, Climate totalitarianism, casts the entire climate issue in terms of individual freedom versus governmental overreach, echoing his recurrent motif of a conspiracy of the powerful against the godly. And his opening sentence, “Well, it looks as if in the post-pandemic world, we’re going to be increasingly preoccupied with climate change,” describes a crisis over 50 years in the making as if it was just the next thing that they want us to worry about.

Iles then gives us two examples of net zero policy in action. Firstly, the enforced shutdown of Netherlands farms, early victims of the climate juggernaut (“there will be more”). I can find no reference to these alleged closures; the most relevant EU document that I could find sought, on the contrary, to reduce the loss of farmland, but no matter; our sympathies have been engaged with the alleged victims of the juggernaut, as have our fears, since we may be next. Secondly, eating bugs rather than red meat. Clearly, the net zero policy is unnatural, disgusting, and destructive.

Where do such misguided policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.” (The word “cancer,” in connection with any concerns about human impact on the planet, occurs three more times in this presentation.)

If only our decision-makers would pay proper attention to the Bible! There they would find (Iles gives chapter and verse) that the descendants of Adam, and the descendants of Noah, were commanded to be fruitful and multiply, that Adam and his descendants were given dominion over everything on earth, and that God promised Noah that springtime and harvest would never cease as long as the Earth endures. Those who are worried about climate change have failed to recognise the hierarchy of control, according to which the planet was created to be adequate to human needs.  It is humanity’s right, and indeed duty, to get to work and enjoy what has been made available, in the secure knowledge that caring for the planet as a whole is not their responsibility, but God’s.

Notice here the construction of a vast theological superstructure on a narrow biblical foundation, followed by the claim that this superstructure is itself biblical.

Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”

Fear not. This nervousness is dispelled if we remember the hierarchy of control, and what God has promised: “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his intended Australian primary audience.

Governments pursuing environmental goals are in an extremely stressful situation, he tells us, since they are going against fundamental human nature, and must use totalitarian methods to impose their will. But this stress is unnecessary, if we remember the divinely ordained hierarchy. Humankind is steward of the planet, but God is an even greater steward, and we should listen to His word.

The most alarming part of Iles’ sermon is what he does not say. He simply bypasses the scientific evidence that business as usual risks unacceptable damage to the environment. Implicit in his position is the acceptance that such things, if they happen, will represent the working out of God’s will.

For those who see us as approaching the End Times, as I suspect Iles does, this is merely spelling out the obvious. For the rest of us, terrifying.

***

Image from AiG site. I thank Dan Phelps for useful background information about AiG’s empire, and the Rev Michael Roberts for helpful comments.

1] Disclosure. Life is short, so once I’ve got the flavour of a presentation, I just scan the transcript.

Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/06/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position.html; also at https://rightingamerica.net/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position/

Newly appointed Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis is cause for concern

By Paul Braterman

June 12, 2023 14:00 MST

Source: AiG.

This is a synopsis of a fuller version that has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily.

Panda’s Thumb readers will be familiar with Answers in Genesis, its position as the most vocal and best funded of Young Earth Creationist organisations (assets in excess of $82 million; owner of the Kentucky Creation Museum and Ark Encounter), its links with the Cornwall Alliance and hence with the fossil fuel industry, and its use of biblical arguments to dismiss concerns about the current environmental crisis. In my own reading of AiG materials, I have detected a progressive repetitiveness and loss of vigour. I have also noticed worrying signs of openness to the suggestion that we are living in the Last Days, with all that that implies for the abdication of long-term responsibilities.

These worries are intensified by AiG’s appointment last month of the lawyer Martyn Iles, until recently Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, to the newly created post of Chief Ministry Officer. Ministry is after all AiG’s entire reason for existence, and Iles, a skilful orator, also has a track record of effectiveness in political interventions, and in fundraising. Ken Ham is now 71, and we can expect Iles, 34, to become increasingly important in shaping AiG’s direction.

Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, argues from Genesis that God approves of population growth, preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world,” and regards the World Economic Forum as part of a grand conspiracy bent on suppressing individual liberty.

You can see Iles at his most frightening in his YouTube video, The Truth of It, Climate Totalitarianism (notice the carefully crafted title of the YouTube series, as well as of this particular item). In this, he uses quotations from Genesis to claim that this planet was created for the benefit of mankind.

It follows that environmentalist policies are misguided. And where do such policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.”

Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”

However, “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his then intended Australian primary audience.

Consider the logic of this argument. Restraint in resource use is unbiblical, and therefore uncalled for. Unbelievers have cause for anxiety, but for believers this anxiety is unnecessary, because God. I am forced to conclude that he sincerely believes that we are in the End Times, or, if not, that God will somehow intervene to save us from the foreseeable consequences of our actions.

To sum up, an eloquent preacher who is also a skilled political operative is rising to the top in the world’s most significant creationist organisation, while objecting in principle to concerns about what we are doing to the planet, because worrying about the planet is God’s job, not ours, and He will look after it all in His own good time.

Not good news.

Repost of https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2023/06/newly-appointed-chief-ministry.html

Answers to everything, according to God, according to Answers in Genesis’Chief Ministry Officer

Martyn Iles (L), Ken Ham (R), Ark Encounter in background. From Vision Christian Media

Abused women should submit to their husbands. Also, it is ungodly to be concerned about the climate, because rainbows. Such, at least, is the advice of the leader-in-waiting of the world’s largest and most influential Creationist organisation.

When people tell you what they are, believe them. In the 2021 Facebook posting attached below, still available [1], Martyn Iles tells us exactly what he is, and since, in May this year, he became Chief Ministry Officer at Answers in Genesis, the $28 million dollar a year concern that runs Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark Encounter and has its own private jet, we ought to pay attention. All the more so since the announcement just one month ago that he is now the designated successor to founder and CEO Ken Ham [2]. So here are his answers to the burning questions of our times, given in full to avoid the risk of quote mining, with my own commentary just in case there is any ambiguity about what is being said. And he saves the worst till last, when he explains exactly how it comes about that people disagree with him, and how we should look on such disagreement.

The answer to gender identity – “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” [Gen 1:27]

I share Iles’ concerns about the use of extreme clinical procedures, but for the very opposite reason. I do not believe in rigid gender roles, and think that people should be free to live as they wish, subject to the rights of others, without the need for mastectomy or castration. Iles, on the contrary, thinks that gender roles are God-given and rigid (more on that below), and that for that very reason people should stick to the roles that they were born for.

The answer to sexual orientation – “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” [Gen 2:22, 24]

It is difficult to know what to make of this.

How is this even meant to be an answer to someone who feels romantically attracted only to members of their own sex? But I fear that Iles will be unmoved by the observation of homosexual behaviour in numerous animal species, because he does not consider that we share a common origin with them.

The answer to racism – “since [God] himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth…” [Acts 17:26]

This on the face of it is unexceptionable. All humans share the same deep ancestry and deserve the same respect. However, as so often with Iles, there is a hidden agenda; Answers in Genesis is opposed to any kind of action to compensate groups that have been the victims of racism, on the grounds that such action is itself discriminatory and racist.

The answer to abortion – “God said to them, ‘Be Fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…’” [Gen 1:28]

Here as elsewhere (see e.g. the next item) Iles cuts through all the usual arguments by introducing a Bible verse, imposing his own interpretation on it, and using this interpretation to tell us what God wants. No need for further discussion. In this particular case, however, most of us would think that the commandment referred to has been more than fulfilled already.

The answer to climate alarmism – “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” [Gen 8:22]

Notice the question-begging language. However, he is not just attacking what he regards as excessive concern over the climate crisis, but denying on the strength of this verse that such a crisis could possibly exist in the first place. And this is the verse now quoted on every conceivable occasion by all the major creationist organisations, who are united in their opposition to fossil fuel reduction policies. None of them, however, seem to quote the parallel verse [Gen 9:11];

“I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Both verses are very limited in what they promise, the second one explicitly so. Nothing here to promise stable or temperate conditions, or to absolve us of our own responsibilities. Drought and failed harvests play a prominent role in later chapters of Genesis, while in a biblical exhortation to look after what has been provided for us, Leviticus 25:4 says that every seventh year the land itself needs to rest and recover.

The answer to abuse – “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her… Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” [Eph 5:22, 25]

This is presented, not merely as the recipe for domestic harmony on Iles’ terms, but as “the answer to abuse,” i.e. guidance on how people should behave when such harmony has completely and dangerously broken down. To tell an abusive husband to love his wife may be well-intentioned, though he will probably reply that he really does so already. To tell an abused wife to submit to her husband is to ask her to behave as so many women tragically do; to accept the completely unacceptable, at risk to her happiness, her health, and, all too often, her life. And when Iles says “submit,” he really does mean submit [3].

The answer to historic wrongs that cannot be undone – “forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.” [Col 3:13]

We are dealing here with a question that is the subject of much recent debate. What obligations if any do those of European descent owe to the peoples whom they have abused or enslaved, and whose land they have stolen? The answer according to Iles is very simple. The victims should simply forgive those who have wronged them, and the problem will disappear. I should mention, to put his opinion in context, that Iles is a white Australian [4].

The answer to life – “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” [John 3:16]

I’m not sure how this verse would actually prove useful to anyone faced with major decisions. However, I note that this is the only verse he quotes from the Gospels. It is indeed relatively rare from creationists to quote the Gospels, apart from this one verse, and even rarer for them to quote any of the actual words attributed to Jesus [5].

But how does Martyn Iles describe those who disagree with him? The final section of his post tells us:

The contemporary answer for every one of these issues is Cultural Marxism… divisive, angry, vengeful rebellion and power-grabbing between warring identity groups.

God’s answers bring peace and contentment, if only we’d submit to them, and stop running away from them.

So, for Iles, disagreement is Marxism, just as for Tim LaHaye it was humanism, and for the creationists of the McCarthy era it was Communism. If we only listened to God’s answers to these questions, all the conflicts between different interest groups would immediately disappear. Any assertions that things may be a little bit more complicated than that are “divisive, angry, vengeful rebellion and power-grabbing.”

Rebellion, of course, is the gravest of all possible sins in his theology. It is the sin of Satan, from which all others follow. But Iles’ way of looking at it does raise an interesting question. If homosexuals, assertive women, proponents of reparations to historically disadvantaged groups, and those concerned about environmental degradation, are all into the business of power-grabbing, just who is it that they are grabbing power from?

***

1] The Facebook page is here, and I am commenting on the entry for 19 May 2021, screenshot below (fair use claimed), which can also be retrieved by keyword search (Iles is so prolific that I expect some culling is unavoidable. However, the Facebook page, like the Answers in Genesis website, is out of order, difficult to search, and with numerous duplications.)

2] Some of us wondered when Ken Ham took him to his bosom how soon Iles would upstage him, just as Ken Ham, decades ago, upstaged Henry Morris and the Institute for Creation Research, but I don’t think we expected things to start happening quite so quickly. It might also be significant that while on the Answers in Genesis website, Iles is described as Chief Ministry Officer of Answers in Genesis, on his own Facebook page Iles describes himself  as “Answers in Genesis Chief Ministry Officer (USA) Managing Director (Australia).”

3] Iles, Facebook, 6^th June,

A word like “independent” is a direct assault on God’s design for women… A woman who prizes strength in independence is a woman rebelling against her nature.

4] As Iles puts it on his Facebook page, entry for 4^th September,

[R]econciliation is a once forever act. Warring parties are reconciled through repentance by the one and forgiveness by the other. That is when the past is treated as if it never happened, and a new day dawns. New wrongs may be addressed, but past wrongs may not.

The ‘reconciliation’ movement is far from that model. It is a grievance movement, pouring [sic] over sins of the past, resisting forgiveness. This opposes God’s very nature.

5] One exception is Matthew 25:41, “‘Depart from me, you who are cursed…”, Freely quoted in connection with the severity of God’s judgement, but never in its context about clothing the naked, visiting prisoners, that kind of thing.

This article was first published in 3 Quarks Daily

Roy Spencer’s stratospheric levels of denial

Frontispiece of article, Climate fearmongering reaches stratospheric heights, by Roy Spencer, also published by the Cornwall alliance. Fair Use.

When a scientist who has won awards for his work in the field disagrees with his colleagues, we must ask how much attention we should give to his opinion.

The image you’re looking at is copied from the website of Dr Roy Spencer, whose piece was also published by the Cornwall Alliance. Spencer is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, was involved in the development of satellite-based atmospheric temperature monitoring technology for which in 1996 he was honoured by the American Meteorological Society, and has received funding from NASA, NOAA, and DOE. Yet here he is using gutter tactics to assert that a piece of significant new work on the mechanism of climate change is part of an alarmist conspiracy, that the conspiracy is failing to persuade, and that the conspirators are now being forced to invoke arguments based on observations of the stratosphere. Who benefits from this conspiracy and why the overwhelming majority of climate scientists have joined it is not clear For what it’s worth, acceptance of the reality of the climate crisis is increasing among Americans, as elsewhere, for reasons that are all too obvious, and the smoke of Canadian forest fires is much more persuasive than the scholarly discussion of the stratosphere that has triggered Spencer’s extraordinary reaction.

What is going on? I’m doing my best here to make sense of what is happening, in terms of the development of the disagreements between Spencer and his scientific colleagues, and Spencer’s own personal beliefs, to the extent that these are public knowledge. This is not an ad hominem attack on Spencer’s scientific output, which has been thoroughly criticised elsewhere, but a good faith attempt to understand how he came to his present position.

In 1990, Spencer and his colleague John Christy reported that their satellite data implied less atmospheric warming than that suggested by ground-based thermometers. This disagreement with the generally accepted view deepened over the following years, with Spencer claiming that everyone else’s work was hopelessly contaminated by failure to account for the effect of clouds and that the generally agreed temperature record was distorted by the urban heat island effect, while downplaying studies that had shown his work to be in error. In 2006, he and the corresponding author of the paper he is now attacking collaborated on a report by the US Government’s Climate Change Science Program (CCSR). This report identified and corrected errors in the satellite temperature record, so that according to its press release, “There is no longer a discrepancy in the rate of global average temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere.” The report then drew the inference that “the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone.” According to an eyewitness account, the putting together of the report involved correcting an error in Spencer’s equations, and Spencer seemed unhappy with this.

Spencer has continued to maintain that the consensus view overestimates the amount of global warming, and is one of a handful of scientists who continues to attribute what is happening to changing cloud cover. This of course is an important factor, and it is perhaps natural for Spencer, a meteorologist, to see it as a driver, rejecting the conventional view that while important, it is not a primary cause. In 2008, Spencer wrote Climate Confusion, the first of a series of books in which he defends his view that CO₂ is not an important driver of climate change, describes policies aimed at CO₂ reduction as “global warming hysteria”, accuses politicians of pandering to special interests, and claims that such policies will harm the poor by restricting economic growth. We should not totally ignore those last two arguments. Biofuel programmes, for example, are beneficial to the US farming lobby but their value in reducing CO₂ emissions is hotly contested. And as I was writing this piece, the United Kingdom seemed at one point close to reneging on its commitments to Third World countries, largely as a result of its own poor economic performance. (On the other hand, it is very much the case that the heaviest direct costs of climate change are falling on the poorest countries, thus contributing to the flow of refugees from such countries towards the UK, Europe as a whole, and the US.)

Spencer has come to be closely associated with US conservatism. He has self-published a book on Amazon Kindle in praise of free-market economics, and free-market advocates would rather ignore or deny the damage caused by emissions, since that is an externality built into the true cost, but ignored by the market. He has given testimony to congressional hearings several times, and I should explain to readers outside the US that such hearings are not attempts to discover the truth and influence policy, but political street theatre. In 2010 the right-wing rabble-rouser Rush Limbaugh claimed Spencer as his official climatologist.

Spencer is a member of the advisory board to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, where he also has the status of a Senior Scholar. The Cornwall Alliance is a rather unusual organisation, as I have discussed earlier here here and elsewhere. The Alliance derives its deep motivation from its reading of the Bible, interpreting stewardship in terms of the dominion granted (Genesis 1:28) by God to a newly created literal Adam and Eve; see their statement of faith. Its main activity is arguing on scientific grounds against the consensus view that additional fossil fuel use will cause severe environmental damage, and it has direct links to the fossil fuel lobby and its dark funded activities.

The Cornwall connection immediately raises the question of Spencer’s own religious beliefs, which he discussed in a 2014 blog post. There he describes himself as a Bible-believing scientist, but avoids all discussion of evolution and the age of the earth. He tells us that he disagrees on some matters with the position of the Cornwall Alliance, and in particular that he rejects the argument that we are safe from environmental disaster because God is looking after the planet. However, he uses terminology and strawman arguments common in the creationist literature. Thus he attacks the concept of “settled science,” makes the strawman claim that the origin of life is presented as part of settled science, and describes the search by evolutionists (sic) for such a natural origin as “just as religious as the belief in a creator.”

Spencer is being less than open here. In a more complete statement preserved in the Discovery Institute’s Uncommon Descent archive, he addresses evolution directly, and repeats all the standard arguments against it. Macro evolution has never been observed, and “has virtually no observational evidence to support it.” Moths are still moths. Observed similarities can be as well explained by common design, there are no intermediate fossils connecting amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to birds et cetera, and punctuated equilibrium theory is merely an attempt to explain away the absence of the required evidence. Accepting either evolution or intelligent design is a matter of faith, and both should be discussed in schools. “At the very least, school textbooks should acknowledge that evolution is a theory of origins, it has not been proved, and that many scientists do not accept it.” There is no indication of his beliefs about the age of the Universe. However, both here and in the 2014 blog post he denounces attempts to explain its origin by natural means, claiming that this would violate the laws of thermodynamics. The same argument is made in Whitcomb and Morris’s The Genesis Flood, and repeated in young earth creationist rhetoric.

In the 2014 post, he told us that a scientist’s religious beliefs are irrelevant to judging the quality of the science, while at the same time maintaining that scientists are influenced in their work by their presuppositions. These two statements are not always entirely compatible.

Climatology is very much a case in point. If, for example, Spencer is a young earth creationist (and his choice of arguments, and self-description as “Bible believing,” suggest that this may well be the case), he will automatically reject all the information on climate change amplification that has emerged from the study of the Ice Ages, and if millions of years of variation are shoehorned in his mind into the last few thousand, then it is certainly possible for him to regard present changes as superficial by comparison.

After so long an introduction, analysis of the scientific development that prompted Spencer’s latest post seems almost anticlimactic. Greenhouse gases, as their name implies, reduce the efficiency by which Earth radiates energy into space by virtue of its infrared emissions. An increase in the temperature of the troposphere, the well-mixed lowest level of the atmosphere, combined with stratospheric cooling, is diagnostic of an increased greenhouse effect, since it directly relates temperature increase at low level to a decrease in upwards energy transfer. (The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere. It is well mixed, and extends from around 6 km above the surface at the poles to 17 km at the equator. The stratosphere is the 50 km or so above that, and shows relatively little mixing between horizontal layers.) For example, if recent warming were simply due to increased solar activity, the stratosphere would have been warmed along with the troposphere, but it wasn’t.

This much is indeed established science. In 1967, Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherall calculated the specific changes to be expected with height as the result of increased CO₂ . Repeated observations using balloons and satellites, for example here here, have confirmed that such changes are indeed taking place, and Manabe’s work on climate modelling was recognised by a share of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics.

Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The variation of temperature with height, especially in the lower part of the stratosphere, is also affected by changes in the ozone layer and in particulate content. Moreover, other events such as volcanic eruptions and changes in solar illumination can disrupt the temperature profile, and observations of the signal due to this profile are also contaminated by weather-like random fluctuations (technically known as noise). And as if this were not enough, the noise itself is distorted by the slow responses of the oceans to atmospheric temperature changes. The mathematical methods required to sort out signal from noise under these conditions, so as to specify a fingerprint that would be characteristic of human activity, were developed by Klaus Hasselmann, who with Manabe shared in the 2021 Nobel Prize.

Until recently, unambiguous experimental data were only available for the lower part of the stratosphere. The work described in the paper under discussion, a collaboration involving nine separate investigators and ten different institutions, extends our information to the entire stratosphere. This is important for several reasons. Firstly, the predicted signal of human activity actually increases with height, while the effect of weather-like fluctuations falls away. This leads to an improved signal-to-noise ratio (by a factor of five), greatly enhancing the statistical significance of the findings. Secondly, it is the lower stratosphere that contains the ozone layer, which has of course been changing recently for various reasons, and these changes affect the local temperature profile. This complication is less important at greater heights. Thus the new data enable the most rigorous test to date of Manabe’s predictions, and hence by implication of our intimate understanding of human-caused global warming. There can be few topics more important at present.

And the conclusion is unavoidable even if unsurprising. The planet is heating up, because of our actions.

Except that, with great intellectual agility, Spencer manages to avoid this conclusion, writing

The authors are taking advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge concerning the temperature effect of increasing CO₂ in the atmosphere, making it sound like stratospheric cooling is part of the fingerprint of global warming.

It isn’t. Cooling is not warming. [Emphasis in original]

It is hardly taking advantage of the public to publish in PNAS, but let that pass. It gets worse. Spencer claims there is nothing new in the paper, because there have been many earlier accounts of the temperature of the stratosphere. But the whole point of the paper is to extend our earlier knowledge to new heights (ouch! unintended pun, but let it stand.) He refers to Manabe and Wetherall’s seminal theoretical paper (see above), and accepts that its conclusions have been vindicated as regards the stratosphere. Nonetheless, he denies that the work has any real implications for what is happening lower down. But the whole point is that we now have an integrated account of the complete temperature profile of the atmosphere, from ground level to the top of the stratosphere. And he accepts this account (in view of the data in the paper, he could hardly do otherwise) of what is happening in the stratosphere, which doesn’t directly affect us, while arbitrarily rejecting its implications for climate down at the level where we all live, because it’s cloudy and complicated.

I started this piece by asking how much attention we should pay to Spencer’s opinions. I think we have our answer.

This article first appeared on The Panda’s Thumb

Answers in Genesis appoints dangerous climate change denier as Chief Ministry Officer

Image from AiG site

 “Though some weather events result from conditions on a fallen earth, Scripture is quite clear that God is in control.” This carefully crafted tweet by Answers in Genesis a few days ago is almost certainly the work of their newly appointed Chief Ministry Officer, Martyn Iles. Since God is in control, human activity cannot be responsible for the state of the planet, and the suggestion that we should adjust our policies because of their global impact is not only misguided, but impious. 

Temperatures may be higher than at any time since the origin of humankind, ice caps may be melting in Arctic and Antarctic, and the smoke from forest fires may be making the air in New York unbreathable, but all of that is beside the point, because such things are to be expected on a fallen earth. The underlying reason for global warming is not fossil fuel burning, but Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden. Thus the entire corpus of scientific evidence and climate observation is pre-emptively dismissed as irrelevant.

Notice that Iles is, despite the headline, not actually a climate change denier. He simply bypasses the question of whether climate change is happening, in order to move directly to the conclusion that if it is, we shouldn’t be trying to do anything about it. Because God. Such sophistical subtlety is central to his impressive rhetorical technique.

It would be wrong to dismiss such thinking as lunatic fringe. Lunatic, yes, but fringe, in the context of both Australian and North American politics, anything but. Over the past 20 years, a strong alliance has emerged, with its own special pseudoscience as justification, between young earth creationism, climate change denial, and conservative politics. There are, in the US at least, direct links between the creationist ministries, the fossil fuel industry, and influential right-wing think tanks. The alliance between evangelicals and climate change deniers played a major role in the election of Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister until last year, and of Donald Trump, both of whom did everything they could to block attempts to control carbon dioxide emissions. Similar alliances are at work in Alberta, and in Texas where the legislature is placing obstacles in front of the emerging renewables energy industry, despite its massive contributions to the State’s economy.

Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, has been a major force in Australian religious politics. He was the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2018 until he was abruptly sacked by the ACL Board in February 2023. Accounts of his dismissal differ. Iles described it as a result of difference in strategy; the Board wanted to move in a more political direction, making him in his own words “not the right person for that vision. I have always been a preacher first and politician second (or third…)”. The Board’s chair, however, denied that there had been any such change.

AiG is the property of Ken Ham, like Iles a product of Australian’s extreme Christian fundamentalist community. It was set up in 1994 after complex and litigious manoeuvres involving Ham and his previous associates, Creation Ministries International based mainly in Australia, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR itself had been set up by Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, when disputes arose among an earlier generation of Young Earth creationists.

There comes a time in the life of every successful businessman (it usually is a man) when he starts to consider his legacy. Ham is now 71. The vigour of his early writing, which had attracted Henry Morris’ attention in the 1980s, has faded into stale repetitiousness, and his articles on the AiG website now describe themselves as produced with the help of research staff. It seemed at one time as if Bodie Hodge, his son-in-law, was his obvious heir apparent, but Hodge’s own writing is superficial and tedious. (Disclosure; both Ham and Hodge have attacked me by name in their writings.)

Iles is now, therefore, in an extremely strong position within the organisation, for which he has excellent credentials. He is a successful organiser and money raiser, and responsible for targeted interventions in Australian electoral politics. His Youtube series The Truth of It has a major following, and as we shall see is very good at what it does. Thus we can expect him to be a major influence on AiG in its direction and messaging, and to enhance its appeal and effectiveness. He has already been announced as a key speaker in next year’s homeschooling conference.

It is thus a matter of some general concern that Iles is an extreme religious conservative, defines reality itself in religious terms, believes in male domination (while I was preparing this piece he told us that “A word like ‘independent’ is a direct assault on God’s design for women” and that a good woman is “Submissive to husbands. including imperfect ones”), is adept at promoting an intolerant agenda in the name of freedom of speech, has (ever so obliquely) inflamed concerns about vaccines, takes the historical truth of the early chapters of Genesis for granted, and thinks abortion should be illegal because God approves of population growth, among other reasons. Worst of all, he preaches that Christians must dismiss the findings of climate change science as “cultural Marxist rubbish,” because “God’s sustaining providence is crucial to our understanding of this world.”

For an example of Iles defending the indefensible, provided that the indefensible is based on religious belief, see his condemnation of Covid vaccine mandates.

To see him in unrestrained conspiracy mode, watch [1] his response to the World Economic Forum’s concept of a Great Reset, according to which we should use the pause imposed by Covid to rethink current industrial policy and its large-scale environmental impact. This notion offends against his core belief that the planet is in God’s hands, so that WEF’s concerns are fundamentally misguided. Like others, he presents the Reset concept, and the interest shown in it by governments, institutions, and major companies, as a conspiracy to do away with capitalism and democracy. Here, Iles is in lockstep with the Heartland Institute, a mouthpiece for the fossil fuel industry and for laissez-faire economics. As a sign of this conspiracy (and here I am reminded of Q-Anon) he points to the way in which the slogan Build Back Better, which occurs in the WEF literature, is echoed by politicians as diverse as Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Justin Trudeau, while as co-conspirators he identifies the entire climate change movement, as well as Black Lives Matter which, like other creationist writers, Iles describes as Marxist.

Iles’ full talents are on display in his The Truth of It YouTube, Climate Totalitarianism, which I recommend to students of rhetoric. Its thousand closely argued words are a masterpiece of misdirection, false dichotomy, strawmanning and vilification of opponents’ positions (the word cancer occurs four times); emotional engagement with the concerned, leading to a promise of reassurance and erasing of anxiety; imposing an intellectual superstructure (which he calls hierarchies of control) on the Bible and then using this superstructure to argue that mere worldly science can be safely ignored; slyly referring to fossil fuels by another name (mineral resources) as put there by God for humanity to use; and hinting at massive totalitarian conspiracies behind climate policy. All reinforced by dramatic phrasing, intonation, and gestures.

The title of the series, The Truth of It, prepares us for the message that anyone Iles disagrees with has been misleading us. The individual podcast title, Climate totalitarianism, casts the entire climate issue in terms of individual freedom versus governmental overreach, echoing his recurrent motif of a conspiracy of the powerful against the godly. And his opening sentence, “Well, it looks as if in the post-pandemic world, we’re going to be increasingly preoccupied with climate change,” describes a crisis over 50 years in the making as if it was just the next thing that they want us to worry about.

Iles then gives us two examples of net zero policy in action. Firstly, the enforced shutdown of Netherlands farms, early victims of the climate juggernaut (“there will be more”). I can find no reference to these alleged closures; the most relevant EU document that I could find sought, on the contrary, to reduce the loss of farmland, but no matter; our sympathies have been engaged with the alleged victims of the juggernaut, as have our fears, since we may be next. Secondly, eating bugs rather than red meat. Clearly, the net zero policy is unnatural, disgusting, and destructive.

Where do such misguided policies come from? From evolutionary thinking, of course. “I understand why they’re getting it wrong, because they basically believe that human beings arose on this planet quite by chance, and in time proceeded to go on a destructive, and a murderous, and exploitative, and a cancerous rampage, which must now be stopped.” (The word “cancer,” in connection with any concerns about human impact on the planet, occurs three more times in this presentation.)

If only our decision-makers would pay proper attention to the Bible! There they would find (Iles gives chapter and verse) that the descendants of Adam, and the descendants of Noah, were commanded to be fruitful and multiply, that Adam and his descendants were given dominion over everything on earth, and that God promised Noah that springtime and harvest would never cease as long as the Earth endures. Those who are worried about climate change have failed to recognise the hierarchy of control, according to which the planet was created to be adequate to human needs.  It is humanity’s right, and indeed duty, to get to work and enjoy what has been made available, in the secure knowledge that caring for the planet as a whole is not their responsibility, but God’s.

Notice here the construction of a vast theological superstructure on a narrow biblical foundation, followed by the claim that this superstructure is itself biblical.

Like a judo player, Iles now uses the very force of the environmental argument as a reason for rejecting it. “If I thought we were here by chance, and we were just one of the gazillions of planets and we were just very fortunate to be in the position that we are in, I would think the future was pretty uncertain, and I’d get pretty nervous.”

Fear not. This nervousness is dispelled if we remember the hierarchy of control, and what God has promised: “Genesis is quite clear that what we see in the world around us was substantially put there for human use, and enjoyment, and sustenance, including plants, water, minerals, and animals.” The word minerals is the only reference in the piece to fossil fuels, but its significance will not be lost on his intended Australian primary audience.

Governments pursuing environmental goals are in an extremely stressful situation, he tells us, since they are going against fundamental human nature, and must use totalitarian methods to impose their will. But this stress is unnecessary, if we remember the divinely ordained hierarchy. Humankind is steward of the planet, but God is an even greater steward, and we should listen to His word.

The most alarming part of Iles’ sermon is what he does not say. He simply bypasses the scientific evidence that business as usual risks unacceptable damage to the environment. Implicit in his position is the acceptance that such things, if they happen, will represent the working out of God’s will.

For those who see us as approaching the End Times, as I suspect Iles does, this is merely spelling out the obvious. For the rest of us, terrifying.

I thank Dan Phelps for useful background information about AiG’s empire, and the Rev Michael Roberts for helpful comments. Earlier versions of this material Appeared on Panda’s Thumb and 3 Quarks Daily.

1] Disclosure. Life is short, so once I’ve got the flavour of a presentation, I just scan the transcript.

Repost of https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2023/06/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position.html and https://rightingamerica.net/leading-creationist-organisation-appoints-conspiracy-theorist-to-key-position/

Time again for my Passover message

Biblical marriage isn’t biblical

There are two possible attitudes towards Scripture. One is to regard it as the direct and infallible word of God. This leads to certain problems. The other one, equally compatible with devotion, is to regard it as the recorded writings of men (it almost always is men), however inspired, writing at a specific time and place and constrained by the knowledge and concerns of that time. This invites deeper study of what was at stake for the writers, the unravelling of different narrative strands and voices, and discussion of whatever message the Scriptures may have for our own times. I expect that most readers here will adopt the second approach, while those who adopt the first are not to be dissuaded by mere rational argument, so why am I even discussing it?

Because we need to expose the hypocrisy of those powerful false prophets who, while claiming to be guided exclusively by Scripture, systematically misapply, distort, and even completely misquote the sacred text. That exactly is what Answers in Genesis, like other creationist organisations, does in its online writings, and in its Creation Museum and Ark Encounter.

I have come across four specific areas that concern me (no doubt there are many others):

• Climate change
• Abortion
• Entry into the Ark, and subsequent dispersal
• Biblical marriage