Perhaps I awarded September's Robert O'Brien Trophy too soon, before I became aware of "Dr" Don Boys and this breathtakingly bad piece of anti-evolution agitprop. Even by creationist standards, this is a ridiculous article, chock full of unsourced "quotes" and lots of rhetoric, but virtually no substantive argument. And the very first sentence offers a great opportunity to take a look at "Dr" Boys:
Evolution is pure quackery and purveyors of this foolishness should be branded as quacks. They are phony intellectuals (and a Ph.D. doesn't add credibility to a phony) and venders of ancient mythologies resurrected from ancient Greece.
It's interesting that he says here that a PhD doesn't add credibility to a phony. It's interesting because he refers to himself as "Don Boys, PhD" three times on this page. What is his PhD in? Your guess is as good as mine. On his personal webpage bio, he says the following:
He entered Moody Bible Institute immediately after high school, was married and continued his education at Tennessee Temple College, Immanuel College and Heritage Baptist University where he earned his Ph.D.
He doesn't say what his PhD is in, and there's just one little problem with the claim that Heritage Baptist University is where he earned his PhD - that college doesn't offer PhDs. So while he claims that a PhD doesn't add credibility, he seems to have invented precisely to lend himself such credibility. Even if he had his PhD from this "university", it doesn't appear to have any accreditation at all, even from a Christian accrediting agency.
Evolution is a fraud and people who believe it are fools, and people are fanatics who continue to believe it after looking at the facts! It is difficult to believe that there are intelligent people who believe that everything you see, feel, or smell came from, are you ready-nothing! They tell us that it is ignorant for Christians to believe that a sovereign God created everything out of nothing; however, it is very reasonable to believe that nothing created everything out of nothing! Let me get this straight: they expect me to believe that nothing became something somehow someway at sometime! A person who takes that position has not drunk long from the well of wisdom. In fact, he hasn't even gargled. But none dare call it quackery!
On the scale of creationist absurdity, I'll rate this at 850 milliHovinds. Like so many creationists, he thinks that evolution is a theory of ultimate origins, but that is nonsense. Evolution is the theory of common descent. It explains the biodiversity on Earth. It does not explain, or attempt to explain, the origin of "everything" from "nothing". Beyond that, this paragraph is nothing but empty rhetoric. Apparently "Dr" Don Boys thinks that virtually every scientist in the world is a fool and a quack, but a guy who claims a fake PhD from a diploma mill has credibility.
He then goes on to offer a series of quotes without offering a single citation for them. This is pretty much the norm in creationist propaganda, quotes get passed around and distorted as they go from one to another with no one bothering to check and see if they're accurate. In this case, he even attributes the same exact quote to two entirely different people, which would lead you to believe he doesn't have a clue who said it or where. The first ones are allegedly from Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History, who is often the target of creationist quote mining, but this one is new to me:
Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History: "Just as pre-Darwinism biology was carried out by people whose faith was in the Creator and His plan, post-Darwinian biology is being carried out by people whose faith is in, almost, the deity of Darwin."
Somehow I doubted that Patterson would use a bizarre neologism like "pre-Darwinism biology", so I changed it to "pre-Darwinian biology" and, sure enough, this is a common quote on creationist webpages. Apparently "Dr" Boys can't be troubled even to get his own quotes right. All of them seem to give the source only as "The Listener", whatever that is. Only one page I found had a date and that was October 8, 1981. Patterson is used to being misquoted by creationists, of course, and his reaction to it is found here. Boys also attributes this quote to Patterson:
Patterson also said: "We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet."
But then 2 sentences later, he attributes the same quote to someone entirely different:
Harold Urey: "We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet."
Standard creationist tactics, of course. Find a dead scientist, take a single line out of something they might have said, distort it if it doesn't say quite what you want it to, then present it as though they spoke for everyone and were revealing some hidden truth that you aren't supposed to know. I could type all day detailing all of the fake or out of context and distorted quotations I've heard from creationists. More baffling is the constant attempt by creationists to paint evolution as a religion and then attack religion as nonsense, given that they are religious themselves. It's all quite bizarre.
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