Other Links: The Institute for Creation Research Visit the web site of the organization that Duane Gish represents. Creationism: Bad Science or Immoral Pseudoscience? Joyce Arthur, writing for Skeptic Magazine, examines the questionable methods used by Duane Gish and other prominent "scientific creationists." Creationism and Error Scientific creationism differs from conventional science in numerous and substantial ways. One obvious difference is the way scientists and creationists deal with error. Duane Gish and Creationism at Rutgers This exchange between Richard Trott and Duane Gish appeared in a student newspaper at Rutgers University.

ere is an exercise for anyone who wants to claim that creationists have any interest in giving honest information to people:

Call the ICR's publishing house (Master Books) at 619-448-1121. Order catalog item "CRESAM," a sampler of creationism pamphlets, for $2.95 (plus $3 s/h). Read "Have You Been Brainwashed?" -- you will receive four copies, so you can get three friends to participate and split the costs.

In it, you will note claims of human and dinosaur footprints together at the Paluxy River site. Also, note claims that the Precambrian is void of fossils. (See below for evidence that Gish, the author of the pamphlet and very influential in the ICR, knew the latter claim to be false as of 1985.)

Call a noted scientific publisher, say, Sinauer or W.H. Freeman. See if you can find a book that uses Piltdown or Nebraska man to build a case for human evolution. You will fail.

Now, tell me: based on the results of your exercise, which side cares about presenting "facts"? Which side is diligent about refusing to propagate misproven or misleading "information"? Why do you think this is so?

Below is a written transcript that I made from a videotape of the Gish/Plimer debate in 1988. Plimer obtained a copy of the same pamphlet, and hammered Gish for the inaccuracies in it.

These are from the video tape of the March 18, 1988 debate between Ian Plimer and Duane Gish. The debate took place in Australia; the video tape has been converted to American TV format and my own copy is an unknown-number-of-times removed from the original and is of mediocre quality (especially the sound).

When I am not sure of a word, it appears with a question mark following. Editorial remarks are in [square brackets]. All punctuation is my own invention, which I use in an attempt to convey the flow of the talk.

Note that Plimer, in my opinion, was overly aggressive and mean-spirited in this debate. I don't think that he conducted himself well during much of the debate. However, in my opinion he thrashed Gish mainly due to the same pamphlet which is discussed above.

Plimer's statement during his 45-minute debate speech

[I am not sure what Plimer means by "[using] the same principle." Either he is saying that he won't allow a "process of improving or correcting" either, or he is saying that he is using the same principle of investigating creationist claims as he had been using earlier in his talk.]

On the same diagram, he says the "earth's crust" is "void of fossils." That is a lie. Every fossil found on this planet is from the earth's crust. That is from his book, "Are You Being Brainwashed?" page 8. We also see on the same page, the Cambrian; a geological time period some time ago. And I quote, "The billions of fossils found are all of highly complex forms of life." That is a lie. There on one simple diagram we have three lies. That is their scientific publication. [The diagram appears to be unchanged in the current copy.]

We turn now to page 9. And we read, "not a single indisputable multicellular fossil has been found anywhere in the world in a rock supposedly older than Cambrian rocks." That is a lie. But what (?) we see is a repetition of these lies, all the time. "You don't find fossils in old rocks; you don't find fossils in old rocks; you don't find fossils in old rocks." And eventually someone believes them.

So we've read two or three (?) pages and we've got ourselves four lies. And we have an interesting situation here.

[Plimer digresses for a while about Australian creationist Andrew Snelling who claimed that precambrian rocks are rich in fossils. I omit that section because it is not relevant to the pamphlet, other than in showing that some creationists contradict Gish.]

Gish's response during his 10-minute rebuttal period

And at that time, according to Dr. Preston Cloud, one of the world's leading evolutionary geologists, there were no undoubted precambrian fossils. [crowd noise] That's what he said. [More crowd noise] And I quoted, many years ago, Dr. Cloud to that effect. Because he said, first of all, you would not know, you could not establish whether these rocks were precambrian or cambrian... some of these rocks [oops! -CS]. And furthermore there were many pseudo-fossils that had been discovered.

Now, since that time, as I described in my debate, there are many published reports of micro-fossils in precambrian rocks. And furthermore, the Ediacaran which I did describe in my talk, is supposed to be precambrian. I discussed all of them in my book, "Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record," which was published two years ago.

[Note here that Gish is saying that he knows now that there are precambrian fossils, and that he has known it for at least a couple of years.]

Plimer's response during his 10-minute rebuttal period

[And the ICR is still selling it without correction or disclaimer. Gish got hammered for distributing the pamphlet in 1988. He admitted that he knew no later than 1985 that some of the claims in it were false. Why is the ICR still selling it?]

Addendum

Wesley Elsberry received the following letter from Larry Sites on March 7, 1994:

This is, I believe, the file that includes the Gish-Pilmer debate about the lack of truthfullness in Gish's "Brainwashed" comic book. If you can easily contact the appropiate author above, let him know that the ICR has FINALLY updated this booklet. Apparently all the flack about it on the information superfreeway has had an effect. The copy I got at the ICR's 2-25-94 has clarified their position on pre-cambrian fossils and eliminated unambigious claims of dino with man footprints at Paluxy. The new version is undated as near as I can tell, but must have been created within the last 6 months or so as the copy I got at the ICR office then was dated 1986 and still included the claim, "fine clear tracks of dinosaurs and man".

We're making progress! Now if only they would do some science instead of just responding to it.