Such things are sent to try us

The magazine of our professional association, Chemistry in Australia, has just published an article by a creationist chemist, John Ashton. Perhaps this is an experiment to see how many people are actually reading the magazine. Well before the magazine appeared in my pigeonhole I was being cc'ed messages from fellow chemists who rightly saw this as a very dumb thing for Chemistry in Australia to do. The perilous aspect of this is not that we should be publishing unscientific articles that aren't at all about chemistry (though that bugs me) or that some chemists are silly (though hardly any, of course), but that getting non-refereed articles into publications with scientific-sounding names is apparently a favourite creationist tactic.

I am peeved by John Ashton's attempt to drag Francis Collins into the fray as a supporter. In an entirely sensible address on science and faith, the Christian director of the National Genome Project has this to say about creationist views:

'If the tenets of young-earth creationism were true, basically all the sciences of geology, cosmology, and biology would utterly collapse. It would be the same as saying 2 plus 2 is actually 5. The tragedy of young-earth creationism is that it takes a relatively recent and extreme view of Genesis, applies to it an unjustified scientific gloss, and then asks sincere and well-meaning seekers to swallow this whole, despite the massive discordance with decades of scientific evidence from multiple disciplines. Is it any wonder that many sadly turn away from faith concluding that they cannot believe in a God who calls for an abandonment of logic and reason?'