Thursday, August 20, 2015

#1440: Donald Calbreath


There are, in fact, creationists with real credentials. Donald Calbreath, for instance, seems to have an education in chemistry and served as a professor in the Department of Chemistry, Whitworth College (a small Presbyterian liberal arts college) until retiring some years ago. No, he doesn’t have relevant credentials, but what did you expect? He isn’t a scientist, either (at least we are unable to locate any scientific research record), but he is a signatory to the Discovery Institute-instigated petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.

He is currently a research team member at Science and the Spirit: Pentecostal Perspectives on the Science/Religion Dialogue at Calvin College, which is not a research team – Calbreath himself, for instance, specializes in defending non-materialist neuroscience through the standard fallacies and by demonstrating complete ignorance of and failure to engage with the literature on consciousness. He also has a record of tracts and screeds on stem cell research, abortion, “miracles of healing”, the relationship between Pentecostalism and science (particularly notable is the paper “7 Serotonin and Spirit: Can There Be a Holistic Pentecostal Approach to Mental Illness”), creationism, and zeh gays. He has also been a critic of public education, claiming – in American Laboratory – that schools are indoctrinating students with truth and reason, and complaining that students risk getting lower grades just because they get the wrong answers to questions on tests.

Diagnosis: Fundamentalist who hates truth, reason and freedom but desperately tries to convince himself otherwise. One of many, and we are reluctant to say that his influence is negligible.

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