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The Interior Department is facing a lawsuit from a Christian geologist who claims he was not allowed to collect rocks from Grand Canyon National Park because of his creationist beliefs.
In the suit filed earlier this month, the Australian geologist, Andrew Snelling, says that religious discrimination was behind the National Park Service's (NRS's) decision to deny him a permit to gather samples from four locations in the park.
Snelling had hoped to gather the rocks to support the creationist belief that a global flood about 4,300 years ago was responsible for rock layers and fossil deposits around the world.
NPS's actions "demonstrate animus towards the religious viewpoints of Dr. Snelling," the complaint alleges, "and violate Dr. Snelling's free exercise rights by imposing inappropriate and unnecessary religious tests to his access to the park."
The lawsuit was filed May 9 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. NPS has yet to respond to the allegations.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bradley13 on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:11PM (2 children)
According to his Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org], his last scientific paper on Geology was in 1990. His publications since then (as listed in the complaint) are exclusively in creationist journals. Sorry, but that's just as relevant as publishing in any other "write only" journal.
As such, I expect that the park service does not consider him to be an active scientist, i.e., he would need an especially good proposal to justify collecting his samples. So - again looking at the complaint - he submitted three "peer reviews" of his planned study. But these are also from the fairy tale brigade: Dr. Timothy Clary (Instutute for Creation Research - ICR), Dr. John Whitmore of Cedarville University (studied at the ICR, now teaching at a fundamentalist Christian university), and Mr. Raymond Strom (also associated with the ICR). So no neutral or independent opinions at all - the reviewers are just his good buddies doing him a favor.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday May 28 2017, @04:42PM (1 child)
It gets even more bizarre if you click the first reference [noanswersingenesis.org.au] on the Wikipedia page. It appears that early in his career, Snelling lived a sort of "double life" publishing legitimate geology research in mainstream journals that clearly acknowledged the mainstream scientific consensus for the accepted age of the earth, all the while also publishing articles in Creationist sources too that completely disagreed with his mainstream articles. And neither version of this guy apparently ever cited articles of the other version.
So what's the deal here? Was he just pretending to be a "real geologist" for years, adopting mainstream scientific views in his research that he knew to be false while publishing his "real" research in creationist literature? Or does/did he actually believe that the creationist stuff is hokum?
Either way -- whether you believe his creation science or not -- the fact that he cites scientific credentials he obtained saying one thing to bolster his claims saying something completely antithetical doesn't exactly exude credibility.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @06:04PM
This is pretty common in biomed, most people just do whatever it takes to publish papers. If you ask they will even tell you this. "Do what you need to to survive", they say.