Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1136241 in Books
• Published on: 1985-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 277 pages

Customer Reviews

A Deluge of nonsense!
One of the central tenets of creationist "science" is flood geology, The idea that all fossils and sedimentary rock were deposited by Noah's flood, This would imply that Mr Gish, a geologist with a Phd in his subject would have us believe that the four kilometer thick layer of sandstone that covers most of SE Australia was deposited at the bottom of a 9km deep ocean (to cover the Himalayan mountains this is the depth required) less than 4000 years ago. Creation "scientists" bypass the awkward nature of where all this water (about four times the current volume of water found on the planet) came from and went by saying that when the flood happened, the himalaya's had not started to form. This would imply that Mr Gish and his fellow flim-flam artists want us to blindly accept that the largest mountain range in the world has been growing by a rate of over eight feet each year for the past four millenia and that none of the people who have lived in this region for most of this time noticed or thought that it was significant. Preposterous, as is the rest of this cultists manifesto.

The environmentalists should protest this misuse of paper.
Gish and the ICR have outdone themselves with this piece of diatribe. It is no wonder that no one at the ICR to include Gish or Morris have been able to get an article published in any scientific journal of any repute. What Gish now tries to do is pass off mis-information, and out and out misrepresentations as science. One should read James Randi, or obtain the tapes of the debates between Randi and the representatives of the ICR that are available through "Skeptic" magazine, if interested in seeing these pseudo-intellectuals put firmly in their place. This book as with virtually all of the writings by Gish and those like him, displays the depth of fear and total distain they have for science and the scientific community. Gish is an insult to education, literature and the intelligence of anyone with any science knowledge at all. Unfortunately, his "works" or more accurately his "frauds" are presented to the youth of this country as "creationite science" (a true oxymoron) before the young have developed the ability to think critically and in a logical manner (skills that Gish obviously never developed). This is, in my opinion, as form of child abuse that will damage and harm the youth and the scientific development within the populations which promote this diatribe.

Total ignorance of Science and Humanity.
To lump Duane Gish and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) with the lunatic fringe is an insult the lunatic fringe, who (the lunatic fringe, that is) are for the most part, generally harmless and endlessly entertaining. Without them we would never enjoy the laughs at the supermarket checkout line about "I Had an Alien's Baby", "Werewolves Ate My Cows" and "Scientist Confirm - Angels Pilot UFO". That last one I did not make up! The ludicrous drivel in "Evolution: The Fossils Still Says I Don't Know What the Hell I'm Talking About" would be funny if it's grotesque, superstitious nonsense wasn't presented as Science. I am astounded at Gish's near-complete lack of knowledge of the fundamentals of Genetics, Systematics, Chemistry, Molecular Biology, Paleontology, Anthropology, Physics ... oh, the list just goes on and on. This is the same tired old creationist self-adulation, which pulls disconnected bits and pieces from legitimate Science and tacks them onto unsubstantiated fundamentalist dogma. Abracadabra, you have a simplistic explanation of creation that is in equal parts demeaning to both the spirit of Science and the spirit of Humanity. According to Gish and his ICR ilk, we all live in a universe devoid of understandable physical laws. Forget logic, forget reason, and forget common-sense. We exist on a battleground, where an eternal war wages ever on, between a maniacal deity with an insatiable ego, who demands constant worship from insignificant creatures, and an supremely evil entity whose powers of chaos and destruction are as merciless as they are unstoppable. Where the physical laws can be usurped at will, our senses cannot be trusted, and any attempt to see ourselves as struggling to be noble and good is waved off as prideful and the residue of Original Sin. How curious, that those who embrace science and evolution are always labeled as godless. Yet whether we are amateur naturalists, weekend fossil hunters, armchair explorers or professional scientists and researchers, it has always been that sense of wonder and beauty we find in nature that spurs us on. From the farthest galaxies, to the oldest dinosaurs, to deepest ocean trenches, or the smallest subatomic particle, we scientists, amateur and professional alike, always strive for the next level of understanding, instead of sticking our superstitious heads in the sand and reveling in our ignorance as if that ignorance were something to be proud. Sorry, but it isn't the amateur and professional scientists who destroy the awe and mystery of the universe. Rather, the hard-line dogmatists, religious fundamentalists and bull-headed canonists who see humankind as a miserable, sinful species whose only salvation is to renounce their reason, natural curiosity and unique intelligence and embrace the irrational dicta of self-appointed apostles while awaiting the apocalypse. The 11th Century has come and gone. The only hobgoblins, devils, demons, incubi and boogie men cavorting and gibbering in the moonlight are bigotry, hunger, ignorance, unreason, and fear.