Creationist Ken Ham Promotes the Joke Book He Calls a Research Journal May 22, 2016

Creationist Ken Ham Promotes the Joke Book He Calls a Research Journal

Yesterday, Creationist Ken Ham promoted the Answers Research Journal, his ministry’s response to scientific publications.

CuttingEdgeCreationist

The Answers Research Journal is a creationist cutting edge professional peer reviewed journal and it’s free

“Cutting edge”? Maybe like the time someone speculated on how many frogs were on Noah’s Ark. It was either 139 or 140 members of the Anura order; he couldn’t make up his mind.

“Professional”? Maybe like the time one “researcher” performed analysis in a “more rigorous mathematical manner” consisting of the kind of basic math most kids learn before they graduate high school:

“Peer reviewed”? If your peers are equally ignorant, peer review means very little. And what peer review process allowed these passages to make it into an accepted paper?

Now if a person is not a brain, and a brain is not the thing that perceives, thinks, interprets, feels, desires, decides, and so on, which is what I will argue, then it has serious implications for what Christians are teaching about the person and brain in the light of Scripture.

If I reach for a broom to pick it up, then one of the things I do is just that: I decided to reach for the broom and pick it up. But if that is something I do, then it follows that it is something I know that I do. If you ask me why I am doing what I have just done, I will immediately be able to tell you. However, by lifting up the broom, which is what I do, I made a whole lot of things to happen which are not in any sense things that I do, but which I am nevertheless the cause of: I would have made air-particles to move; I may have freed an ant heap from the pressure that had been upon it by the broom; I may also have caused a shadow to move from one place to another. Now, if these are merely things that I made to happen, as distinguished from what I do, then I may know nothing about them. But, and this is the crucial point, it is not to say that if I am unaware of making things to happen in my brain (or body) when I think a thought, experience an emotion, or will an act that I am not the cause of the events happening within it…

Thus, if a painter is looking at a tree and thinking about it, then he is consciously directing his mind at the tree, which his mental state of thinking is of or about. But that cannot be said of a brain, simply because a brain, like any other physical object, lacks intentionality. Therefore, one brain can never be about another brain; neither is one brain able to transfer thoughts to another brain.

Neuroscientists (and many Christians) assume that the brain has a wide variety of capacities: the brain interprets and stores information, recognizes symbols, analyzes, thinks, believes, knows, designs computers, determines what is true, paints pictures, deciphers images, analyzes, prioritizes, learns, understands, remembers, and makes decisions. I have attempted to show why I think all such thinking and talking is incorrect, incoherent, and unintelligible, and what some of the implications are if Christians adopt the thinking and way of talking about the brain as most neuroscientists do. The initial reaction of readers may well be indignation and incredulity.

That’s all from one paper. That’s not research. That’s a guy who needed to meet a certain word count and picked up a thesaurus.

“Free”? Well, that’s to be expected because no one would even pay for this tripe.

When it comes down to it, the very idea of a Creationist research journal makes no sense.

Research is when you perform experiments and analyze results without any preconceived notions. You follow the evidence where it takes you. You don’t start out by assuming the universe is a few thousand years old and then pigeonhole all the evidence through that filter even when it makes no sense. That’s not how science works. When you’re citing the Bible instead of the work of other scientists, you’re not adding to scientific knowledge. You’re just wasting paper.

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