If you didn't go to read my still-unfinished and hence unpublished page,
Fundamental Differences Between Scientists and Creationists, then please do so (these links in messages and email are the only place that the URL shows up; none of my published pages link to it and it didn't show up in a quick search on Google for that specific title).
The response of "The only reason you find these claims unconvincing is because you are not yet convinced yourself" is not the only point, since it then led to further observations. Also, a very good reason for finding creationist claims unconvincing is because they're mostly crap, which is what I learned in my initial research and which has been confirmed repeatedly since then.
On that page, I formatted a other-forum discussion into table form. Scientists and creationists have very different motivations which shows in their work and in how they test and verify their conclusions/claims and eliminate the ones that prove to be false (done all the time in science, but virtually
never in creationism, hence PRATTs, "Points Refuted A Thousand Times" in which we have to repeatedly refute the same old claims that were soundly refuted decades ago like having to deal with the Walking Dead (eg,
DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION PAGE: Earth's Rotation is Slowing which was created around 1979 because the author didn't understand leap seconds and which was soundly refuted in 1982, yet it still lives on even to the point that creationist sites are willing to deliberately lie in order to keep it because it still sounds "convincing" to the general public who also do not understand leap seconds (I worked with GPS for two decades and hence also with leap seconds); the shrinking sun claim based on a 1979 abstract (but no follow-up paper) for research that involved historic data containing systematic errors -- science tested their results and found the problem, whereas creationists thought it sounded convincing and so still keep it four decades after it had been refuted (Kent Hovind has even expanded upon it with his claim about the sun's mass loss due to "burning its fuel"
along with directly ordering his followers to never do the math to test his claim -- see my
DWise1: Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim)
So my table on the differences between scientists break down to questions and consequences:
- Science / Scientists ...
- What they are trying to do:
The scientist is either trying to make a new discovery or to test or find corroborating evidence for a previous discovery, hypothesis, or theory.
- How they measure success:
The success of the scientist's efforts depends directly on the quality of his research and on the validity of the studies that he bases his research on. Therefore, a scientist is motivated to verify his sources and to maintain high standards of scholarship.
- Scholarship
Since scientists depend so much on the validity and quality of the work of other scientists, the scientific community is motivated to police itself against shoddy or fallacious research.
- How they handle dishonesty:
Thus, a scientist who is discovered to be performing substandard or dishonest work loses his credibility and his standing in the scientific community. IOW, a career killer.
- How they handle mistakes:
Mistakes and hoaxes will still happen in science, but the near-constant scrutiny and testing will uncover them.
Please note that in the history of scientific hoaxes, they were all uncovered and eliminated by scientists, never by creationists.
- Creation Science / Creationists ...
- What they are trying to do:
A creationist is normally not trying to make a new discovery, nor to test or find corroborating evidence for a previous claim. As rustyb (a creationist denizen of that other forum) puts so succinctly in his signature, "I already know the Truth." There's little use in trying to discover something new about the "Truth" that you already know a priori, nor is there any use in testing it (which would probably be sacrilegious anyway), nor to try to add to its Completeness. Rather, what a creationist is normally trying to do is to come up with convincing claims and arguments against anything that appears to contradict "the Truth" that they already know.
- How they measure success:
It doesn't matter whether that creationist had done a proper job of researching the claim, or had even researched it at all (though it does help to make it more convincing if there's something in the bibliography, even if that source had never actually been looked at -- remember that NASA document?). It doesn't matter if the claim or argument is valid, just that it sounds convincing; after all, the creationist already "knows" that it must be true.
- Scholarship
When you research some other creationist's claim, you're not depending on that claim being true or valid; you're only depending on that claim sounding convincing.
- How they handle dishonesty:
And if a claim is discovered to be false or a creationist is discovered to practice questionable methods, none of that matters, just so long as they still sound convincing. A creationist is far more likely to face censure for theological lapses than for shoddy or questionable scholarship.
Of course, if a claim starts drawing too much negative publicity, then it is no longer convincing and must be dropped, as quietly as possible, until everybody has forgotten about it, whereupon it can be resurrected and received as a "new" claim.
- How they handle mistakes:
Mistakes and hoaxes will also happen in creation science, but in this case there is no mechanism in place to uncover them; indeed, there is much resistence to uncovering creationist mistakes and hoaxes.
One of the interesting side-effects of the shoddiness of creationist claims is that these claims pretty much take on the form of urban legends, rumors which get circulated about within the community. That can make researching into creationist claims very difficult.
For the most part, all that most creationists, including the professionals, do is to repeat another creationist's claim as if it were their own (basically plagiarism, which is a huge crime in academia). Since having scientific sources can make your claim look more convincing, creationists normally don't cite their actual creationist sources but rather instead just list their actual sources' "scientific bibliography" as if that were their own -- in my "Earth's Rotation is Slowing" page above, I cite a very rare instance when the creationist (Kent Hovind no less, so color me gob-smacked at that surprising event) cited his actual creationist sources, which enabled me to track it back to Walter Brown, the most likely "Creationist Zero" source of that leap second mistake and its resultant false claim.
For another case of what happens when creationists claim their actual sources' sources as their own, refer to my page,
MOON DUST, which details my own original research into a creationist claim which included corresponding with the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Basically, I attended a 1985 debate pitting SDSU professors Awbrey and Thwaites (who ran the only true "two-model" class I know of with members of the then-nearby ICR gave half the lectures -- they did such a good job of exposing creationist claims that the class was eventually shut down due to strong protests from campus Christian clubs) and Drs Henry Morris and Duane Gish of the ICR. Morris responded to the criticism that they depend on outdated sources by citing a "1976 NASA document written
well into the space age" (quote reconstructed from memory) of "direct measurements of meteoric dust" (the implication seemed to be that those direct measurements had been taken from the lunar surface) supporting that a 4-billion-year-old moon should be covered a layer of dust about 240 feet thick.
I wrote to Dr. Morris at the ICR and got a reply from Dr. Gish which included a letter by creationist Harold Slusher (a piece of work in himself) which detailed that claim -- here is a
PDF of that letter (with personal info redacted) as well as
an HTML-ized version for greater readability;
BTW, he signed that letter as a PhD even though that was an honorary degree or else that was his other "PhD" from a diploma mill (he was on the faculty staff in the Physics Dept at UT El Paso where the directory at first listed him as a PhD, but then later it dropped his "Dr" title and maybe just cited his MS Physics (I have received a few emails of complaint against him from his students)).
Two glaring problems:
- The letter clearly shows that the much-cited "expected" 284.8 ft-thick dust layer on the moon was not given by that "cited" NASA document (scare-quotes fully explained on my page with a summary below) but rather was the result of a calculation performed by Harold Slusher based on a formula that he had contrived himself and presented in that letter.
In contriving that formula, Slusher had inserted two extraneous factors (which implies multiplicative effect) which inflated his figures by a factor of about 10,000. So take his 284.8 feet of dust and correct for his extraneous factors and you arrive at about a third of an inch of dust, which I do believe we did actually find. Again, do please read my pages on that research, though the real zinger hasn't been revealed here yet.
- I believe it was Dr. Gish's letter that pointed me to Dr. H. Morris' page in his "Scientific Creationism" book on moon dust, a footnote of which (2nd ed., page 152) mainly just repeats the claims and "sources" of Harold Slusher's letter. I did already have a copy of that book, so I committed the unthinkable and unforgivable sin by looking it up.
In that footnote, Dr. H. Morris (to differentiate him from his son, John, who has since inherited the shop) cited that NASA document as his primary source. No, Harold Slusher was Morris' primary source, not that NASA document. Furthermore, I am very certain that Morris had never ever seen that NASA document (and I've become highly suspicious that even Slusher had never ever seen it).
But still, Dr. Henry Morris did deliberately lie to his public by claiming that NASA document as his primary source. How do I know that? Because I have personally seen that NASA document myself, so I know the rest of the creationist lie about it.
I was doing some Computer Science post-graduate work at my old university (Cal-State Fullerton; I had earned my BS Computer Science at the University of North Dakota while on active duty), so I would return to my old haunts in the library (now that everything's online, I'm lost there -- plus the campus has been closed for about a year now). While wandering through the government document stacks looking for other documents about meteoric-dust collection experiments on Gemini windows, I spotted the pertinent NASA document, the "'1976' NASA document 'Meteor Orbits and Dust' (NASA SP-135, Smithsonian Contributions to Astrophysics Vol. 2)".
Except when I pulled it off the shelf and actually looked at its cover that was not at all what it actually said. First, it was "Vol. 11" ("Volume Eleven"),
not "Vol. 2" That is actually one of my clues that Slusher had probably gotten his claim from yet another unknown creationist who had communicated with him in hand-written format. The document was a collection of papers submitted at an August
1963 conference which was printed in
1967 (
nineteen sixty-seven, not nor ever "1976") Far from being "well within the space age", that was years before our very first soft landing on the moon on 02 Jun 1966.
I replied to Dr. Gish about this
with xerox copies of the pertinent pages from that NASA document. He replied insisting that that NASA document was from "1976". I replied again
explicitly point his attention to the xerox copies of the actual pertinent pages from that NASA document. No response from the ICR.
At about the same time there was another attempt by PhDs through a parallel channel to talk with Dr. H. Morris about this. Again, within three exchanges there was no further response from the ICR.
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