@Victor Marshall: (In my experience) the most prominent “grotesque mischaracterization …

Comment on Board requests progress reports from LSU administration by Mark Houston.

@Victor Marshall: (In my experience) the most prominent “grotesque mischaracterization of science” comes from Creationists (not necessarily SDA). Kent Hovind, Jack Cuozzo, Marvin Lubenow, those members of the RATE team who announce sensational discoveries seemingly before having made any at all, Walter Veith,
David C. Read (sorry David, I enjoyed reading the dinosaur book nonetheless) [in no particular order],…
Now hold on – they don’t really mis-characterize science, they mis-chacterize creationism as something hokey.
Anyway, such people do more harm to creationism than all “Dawkinses” combined.

Mark

Mark Houston Also Commented

Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
@Victor Marshall: Bravus is right, the accelerated-decay claim has been discussed before and I don’t want to hijack this discussion. The claim is not only outlandish (ask your favorite nuclear physicist or astrophysicist just how outlandish), but put forth without necessity. Some observations about ancient rocks have been made which neither the RATE team (nor perhaps anyone else right now) can explain. This is nice since that’s just the stuff that secures scientists’ jobs.
To claim right away that this can best be explained by accelerated nuclear decay seems a bit strange.

Mark


Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
@Victor Marshall: “This and other exciting new developments in RATE projects are confirming our basic hypothesis: that God drastically speeded up decay rates of long half-life nuclei during the Genesis Flood and other brief periods in the earth’s short history. Such accelerated nuclear decay collapses the uniformitarian “ages” down to the Scriptural timescale of thousands of years.” (from http://www.icr.org/article/new-rate-data-support-young-world/)
…this is an extremely outlandish claim for anyone trained in physics (except the RATE guys). I guess I’m not the only one uncomfortable with an outlandish claim as basic hypothesis. Also note there’s a huge difference between choosing a belief (“e.g. the earth is 6000 years old”) as basic hypothesis and starting from a claim that raises the hair on the neck of 99.98% of the world’s physicists (and I deem that a conservative guess).

Mark


Board requests progress reports from LSU administration
@Victor Marshall: The RATE-team:
I first became aware of them through Lubenow’s “Bones of Contention”. There already, sensational revelations were announced for the immediate future. Did Einstein do so in late 1904, did Feynman, Curie, Maxwell, Newton,… ever in advance? No – So one might expect the RATE team to be better than any of them.
Hey, with that amount of self-confidence you could become everything you want.
Then I investigated further, looking for papers by individual RATE members and found that at least some of them aren’t even aware about the technical basics of writing a scientific publication.
Honestly, I did not press this further and just might have missed some sensational result that came later on, only because the first findings were so disappointing – if so, please point me to such results.

I do enjoy increasing my own knowledge and understanding, even if it comes at the cost of being proven wrong.

Mark


Recent Comments by Mark Houston

What is taught at LSU
@Kevin:
Excuse me, but have you studied the full extent of Walter Veith’s “lectures”? He is an embarrassment (my favorite lecture unearths a conspiracy somehow connected to the “fact” that every American president since Abe Lincoln or so is the descendant from some royal European bloodline). Why does his name turn up here again and again?

Mark


Why Orthodox Darwinism Demands Atheism
I hope you realize that camels are perfectly adapted (or created- doesn’t matter) to a post fall (are probably post flood) environment.

Mark


Silence of the Geoscience Research Institute
@BobRyan:

The strong nuclear force is the one you see released during a fusion reaction.

…No no no – ouch! The strong nuclear force is *not* “released” during a fusion reaction (or at any other time) – this quote is a clear demonstration of a significant lack of physical knowledge (to put it in friendly terms).

Mark


Silence of the Geoscience Research Institute
@David: If you call the strong nuclear force “god” it would only be fair to give that name to electromagnetism, gravity and the weak nuclear force, too. But, whichever naming scheme you choose, this seems a bit pantheistic.

Mark


EducateTruth.com promoted on 3ABN
A sudden extreme cold snap is not necessarily related with a cold period causing glaciers to extend down south to Illinois. If all frozen mammoths really died quite exactly at the same time, they all should give the same age when dated with whatever method available. Even if the absolute age was off, the same “radiometric” age for all the mammoths we’re talking about would support your theory.

Mark