Here is the second part - your news reader should show this _after_ the first part, which I posted this morning.

Answers in Genesis and Jonathan Sarfati: Part 2 of 2

I apologise for the length of this post and the preceding one. However they illustrate three significant points.

(a) The excessive number of words required to adequately reply to and refute even a short creationist piece of writing;

(b) The fact that creationists are usually much more vitriolic when speaking or writing to sympathetic audiences than they are in open forums where they can be challenged;

(c) The fact that for some reason fundamentalist Christians seem to be much more opposed to Christians with whom they disagree than with the great bulk of non-Christians. I am not the only one to have come across this phenomenon. Ronald Numbers in "The Dilemma of Evangelical Scientists", chapter 12 in the book edited by George Marsden "Evangelism in Modern America", mentions some more cases. In his chapter on Ghandi in "Soul Survivor" Philip Yancey has written that following an article he wrote for the conservative Christian magazine "Christianity Today": "Although I have received plenty of venomous letters over the years, I was not prepared for the volume of hate mail the article generated". In the chapter on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the same book Yancey writes: "In my own experience, those who strive the hardest and believe the most fervently are sometimes the least attractive persons. Like the Pharisees of Jesus' day, they get caught up in competition and end up self-righteous rather than righteous. Politicians tell me their nastiest letters come from people who quote the Bible and claim to speak for God - which I can easily believe since my mailbox shows the same pattern."

In the first part I went into some of the historical background, and included parts of a number of posts dating from 1998 to 2003.

Now to get down to events this year (2005, for the archives).

On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 18:18:28 +1100 Rowland posted an item in this thread which contained the line

Ken Smith, where are you when we need you?

I responded the next morning with the following, where lines irrelevant for the purpose of this post have been removed:

Ken Smith, where are you when we need you?

I made a response earlier today - last week was Orientation Week here at UQ and I didn't get much time to respond then.

Another bit of history for people. A number of people in Australia have become so concerned about the errors being propagated by Answers in Genesis that John Stear set up a site http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/default.htm with the title "No Answers in Genesis". Many people, particularly Australians, have contributed to this site.

But if people really want to get a religious response to creationism there are a number of items on http://www.talkorigins.org for you to look at - as well as a comprehensive collection of items refuting nearly all of the claims creationists make in the area of science.

I produced an annotated list of books on science and religion available in libraries at the University of Queensland a few years ago. I'll have to check the library catalogue again and update it, but the current version has a link to it on my home page in the Maths Department here: http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~kgs

And there are a number of books written by evangelical Christians, mainly scientists, which aren't in libraries here - if anyone would like a list of authors/titles/dates just respond and I'll make up a list - come to think of it, I should do that and post it to a.r.c anyway, even though creationism is one topic we try to avoid here.

Rowland put a slightly abbreviated version of this post on his widely visited John Mark Ministries site as

http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/14602.htm

Don Batten from Answers in Genesis (commonly known as AiG) was unhappy that Rowland's site should inform people about the existence of NAiG (the common abbreviation for No Answers in Genesis). He made some other criticisms of me which aren't relevant to this post, but interested people can read his whole posting at

http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/14671.htm

and suggested that people should look at the article Jonathan Sarfati, also from AiG, had written criticising NAiG, and provided the URL:

http://www.trueorigin.org/noaig.asp

However Sarfati had also posted a version of this to the NAiG guestbook:

http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/sarfatisignsnagguestbook.htm

In this version some, but not all, of the rather vitriolic _ad hominem_ comments of the posting on the creationist site were removed.

One wonders, as a starting point, why the full version of Sarfati's article is found on the True Origins site (another creationist site)

rather than on the much more widely read AiG site, but I'll leave that for others to discuss.

I had looked at this earlier, but decided that the two responses on NAiG

http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/barry'sreplytosarfati.htm

and

http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/myreplytosarfati.htm

were adequate. However since there was the likelihood of further postings to a.r.c I looked again, and since my wife was mentioned showed her a copy and, to put it mildly, she was not amused. She has made her own response - she is of age and can speak for herself (I am sure that creationists would like me to follow the precedent set in John 9:21), as she has been doing since before we were married in 1955 - and you can read what she wrote on

http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/sarfati_helen's_response.htm

Let me just say that Helen's immediate reaction was that Sarfati seems not to be capable of accurately reporting activities within Christian circles, and this simply reinforced her ideas about the lack of reliability one can place on creationist claims. I should mention that she has no scientific credentials apart from what she has picked up listening to discussions among various groups of Christian scientists (note the lower case "s" on "scientists") over many years.

If you want to read all of what Sarfati posted you'll have to go to the sites given above. However I'll quote here the paragraph specifically referring to me. First, here is what is found on the True Origins site. It is part of a list of other scientists, and the section is headed:

Profiles of some other Australian Skeptics and others who feature on John Stear's site

Deleting all the others we come to his paragraph about me, and here it is, in full:

Ken Smith A retired mathematician, who attends a Baptist church, and former joint Skeptic of the Year for a book he co-edited attacking creation and mocking the Bible. Hardly a peep from him when his professed religion is attacked in the Skeptic, but he hardly ever misses the chance to write some inflammatory ridicule about those who actually believe the Bible. For example, Plimer (remember, a former Australian Humanist of the Year), in p. 10 of Telling Lies for God, gave "special acknowledgement" to Smith among others, and Smith later praised this Bible-mocking book to the skies. But one would think that a retired mathematician would have realised that pi is an irrational number rather than terminating after five decimal places as Plimer claimed. But then, if Smith had pointed out this schoolboy-level mistake by Plimer, then one of Plimer's favourite Bible-mocking arguments would collapse, and Smith never seems to want to undermine a skeptical attack on the Bible! (for answers to this argument, see Does the Bible say pi equals 3.0?)

The final part of this is actually a link to an article by Russell Grigg with the URL

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/494.asp

The version which Sarfati modified, presumably to make it more acceptable to the average non-creationist reader, and posted on the NAiG guestbook reads:

Ken Smith A retired mathematician, who attends a Baptist church, and former joint Skeptic of the Year for a book he co-edited attacking creation and mocking the Bible. Hardly a peep from him when his professed religion is attacked in the Skeptic, but he hardly ever misses the chance to write some inflammatory ridicule about those who actually believe the Bible.

Note that approximately two-thirds of the content of the posting to the creationist site, the part which was all about the value of pi (the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle), has now disappeared. If I made such an egregious error about pi, surely Sarfati would have wanted this trumpeted to the skies, especially among the anti-creationists who regularly refer to NAiG! I suspect, though it would be somewhat difficult to obtain definite evidence for my suspicions, that the rant about the value of pi would have given people a good laugh at Sarfati's expense, and so was deleted.

In the interests of completeness, the comments which follow are about the full list of his statements about me.

For a start, I'm not sure why he describes me as someone "who attends a Baptist church". I have been a member of a Baptist Church, in NSW or Queensland, since 1949. Perhaps Sarfati wishes to draw some subtle distinction between simply attending a church, and being a member, with the few privileges and the many responsibilities that membership brings.

In the next part of the first sentence Sarfati immediately attempts to muddy the waters by failing to quote the title of the book. It was "Creationism: An Australian Perspective". The subject was creationism, not creation. Creationism is the idea that the universe was created only about 10,000 years ago, in six days of 24 hours each, and that virtually all the geological strata, with their fossils, were formed in a single year-long deluge, commonly known as Noah's Flood, but sometimes referred to by creationists as "a global hydraulic cataclysm" in an attempt to hide its religious origins. Martin Bridgstock and I spelt this out quite clearly in the Introduction in the book. Creation, as either a theological or scientific term, is quite different. And the word "creationism" as used in theological discourse is also very different from what is commonly termed "creationism" these days. I don't know whether the AiG library has a copy of "The Macquarie Dictionary", but the theological meaning of "creationism" is given first, then the other meaning. The only thing the compilers of the dictionary missed was the emphasis creationists place on the date and duration of creation.

There are two main uses of the word "creation" to be found in science. The first is as a word with no attached adjective, when it refers to the origin of the universe. In this sense it can be found in many books, technical as well as popular, about cosmology: this is meaning 3 in "The Macquarie Dictionary". The other is in the phrase "special creation", which refers to the idea that each of the living organisms we see around us was "specially created", usually by a supernatural being of some sort, rather than having evolved from earlier living forms. I found this listed in "The Penguin Dictionary of Botany" (1984) where the entry reads, in full, "See creationism". This idea held some sway at earlier times, but was abandoned by scientists and many religious people early in the 19th century, and finally laid to rest, as a viable scientific concept, by Charles Darwin. (There are some minor other uses, such as creation operators in quantum mechanics, but these are irrelevant to the present discussion.)

As for his claim about the book "mocking the Bible", people should read the book for themselves (it is out of print, but with a slightly revised Introduction it is available on a CD from the Australian Skeptics). If Sarfati wishes to continue stating that the book "mocks the Bible", he is expected to quote relevant extracts from it in support of his claims. However, given the deafening silence from creationists when they have been challenged to provide concrete evidence in support of other claims, I'm not holding my breath in anticipation.

Sarfati seems to have difficulty with the concept of freedom of belief. In the book there is the standard disclaimer that the views of the authors are not necessarily those of the Australian Skeptics, nor are the views of the Australian Skeptics necessarily those of the authors. And he clearly doesn't read "the Skeptic" regularly, or he would be aware of the disagreements, sometimes strong, expressed by writers on various matters, who nevertheless remains good personal friends. We are familiar with "guilt by association", most famously espoused by Senator McCarthy in USA, and more recently about Muslims, but one would have expected a modicum of Christian charity from members of an organisation such as AiG.

In the next sentence Sarfati writes "... he hardly ever misses the chance to write some inflammatory ridicule about those who actually believe the Bible." Sarfati provides one example which might, by a very large stretch of a very fertile imagination, be construed in this way, which I will take up later, but fails to provide even one example of this "inflammatory ridicule" from the pages of "the Skeptic" or other places. Can he provide, say, half a dozen examples, so that I can make an appropriate response?

The one example he does give is taken from Professor Ian Plimer's book "Telling Lies for God". Sarfati starts by mentioning the "special acknowledgement" Professor Plimer gave to various people who had provided him with information. I am listed, with many others, but Sarfati has omitted the context, a technique well-known to those who check on creationist writings. Professor Plimer actually writes "Although the views expressed in this book are my own, special acknowledgment is due to ..." and he lists 28 names, and mentions some who prefer to remain anonymous. Sarfati seems to be ignorant of the canons of scholarly writing. The standard practice is to thank all those who have contributed in any significant way to the formation of the author's ideas, but only in rare cases have any of these read any portion of the book before publication. Those who have perused earlier versions of the text receive special mention for this help in the Acknowledgments.

The remainder of Sarfati's item is devoted to a comment about a review I wrote of the book, and criticisms, at some length, that I overlooked a mathematical error Professor Plimer had made. In fact, I read these pages particularly carefully, and was pleased to note that Professor Plimer had obtained at least some of his information about pi from a limerick widely known and appreciated in scientific circles:

'Tis a favourite project of mine, A new value of pi to assign, I would set it at 3, For it's simpler, you see, Than 3 point 14159.

I suspect that creationists are not accustomed to reading limericks, or they would have come across this one (as well as various limericks about relativity) in W. S. Baring-Gould's classic collection "The Lure of the Limerick". It was composed by Harvey Carter, Professor of History at Colorado College, specifically to help students remember a good approximation to the value of pi. Professor Plimer is only one of many scientists who have memorised and used this. Sarfati made the ill-informed criticism that Professor Plimer stated that the value of pi was exactly 3.14159. Judging by the length of this part of his article, Sarfati seems to think that because Professor Plimer didn't use the word "approximate" in these pages of the book, and I didn't criticise him for this omission, then we are both guilty of some heinous sin. In fact Professor Plimer was writing about creationists' insistence that the Bible is "inerrant", and the problems this brings, and simply gave one of the commonly used values for pi. I am very well aware that pi is a transcendental number, not just an irrational one, as Sarfati implies. But I have also read widely in the history of mathematics, about which Sarfati seems to be rather ignorant. If the context is read in chapter 7 of the First Book of Kings, it seems quite clear that the writer had access to various records, since his descriptions of the furnishings of Solomon's Temple seem to be taken from what we would describe today as a collection of plans and specifications. These were drawn up around 950 BC. And what was the widely accepted value of pi in those days? Mathematical texts are extant from Egypt and Babylonia, and those for the relevant periods both use 3 as the value of pi. Had the architect employed to design the temple and its furnishings used any other value he would doubtless have been dismissed as ignorant and incompetent.

Anyone other than those fixated on an "inerrant" Bible will have no difficulties here. Ever since I first learned a bit of the history of calculations involving pi, at school many years ago, I have been puzzled that so many conservative Christians want to abandon this evidence for the historical nature of the book of Kings, and try to make it into a modern record. So if Sarfati wants evidence that the Bible quotes its sources fairly accurately, he will accept that the value used is both approximate (after all, it's good to better than 5%: and while browsing through my grand-daughter's Grade 10 mathematics textbook I came across the sentence "If we take pi as about 3 ...") and appropriate. Sarfati cited an article by another creationist Grigg (see the URL given above). Those who are interested in such things might like to have a look there for some of the convoluted reasoning adopted by people who insist that the Bible is "inerrant", in trying to make an ancient piece of religious writing into a modern scientific record. Might I suggest that it would be wise if Sarfati, and other creationists such as Grigg, who also seems to think that pi is simply irrational and makes no mention of its transcendental character, ignored all those attempts which have been made, by well-meaning but historically challenged people, to bring this ancient value of pi into line with more accurately known modern values.

Finally I will make just one comment on Sarfati's second paragraph, allegedly about me but in fact more about my wife. Barry Williams in

http://home.austarnet.com/stear/barry'sreplytosarfati.htm

has made a response to this paragraph, and my wife has made her own response, as I mentioned above. Repeating the URL for convenience:

http://home.austarnet.com.au/stear/sarfati_helen's_response.htm

John Stear has added an introductory paragraph to Helen's response pointing out that in this paragraph, also, Sarfati's words on the creationist site are much more extensive than on his item sent to NAiG.

Sarfati seems unaware of what the Baptist Union of Queensland actually believes. He concludes this paragraph with the sentence:

Presumably they [delegates to the Quarterly Assembly of the Baptist Union of Queensland] were astute enough to realise that such a close connection to the predominately atheistic Skeptics was not a good thing for a president of the Baptist Union which officially believes in biblical inerrancy!

If he takes the trouble to actually look at the Declaration of Principle of the Union, the official doctrinal statement, he won't find any reference to "biblical inerrancy". It simply states that we believe in "The Divine inspiration and supreme authority of the Old and New Testaments". The precise interpretation given to these words is a matter of liberty of conscience, one of the most fiercely defended beliefs of those who call themselves Baptists. Baptists do not have any equivalent of the Pope, to provide them with some "inerrant" set of doctrines, or an "inerrant" interpretation of the Bible, despite the efforts of some to insist that the only "Christian" interpretation of Genesis is the one they have adopted from Mrs Ellen G. White. But that's another story.

Oh, and incidentally, for your amusement I'll add one further item. I prepared a version of this posting initially using StarOffice 6.0 Running a spell check to see why there was a wavy red line under the word "inerrant" StarOffice offered me two suggested corrections for the word it didn't recognise: 1 "inert", and 2 "ignorant". I decided not to add "inerrant" to the local dictionary file, since either of these alternatives seem appropriate as a description of creationist ideas. And every time I use StarOffice to write something using the word "inerrant" I'll have a good chuckle when the wavy red line appears.

Salaam Ken Smith

-- Dr Ken Smith - Christian, husband, unpaid mathematician, skeptic, ... "I also have no desire to insult, denigrate, or argue against anyone's religious beliefs, as long as they do not use scientific data incorrectly to support these beliefs." Philip Plait in "Bad Astronomy"