The Institute for Creation Research is apparently responsible for a number of Facebook fan pages for numerous scientists including: Louis Pasteur, Robert Boyle, Charles Bell, William Kirby, James Clerk Maxwell, and George Washington Carver. But it’s not the science the ICR seems to be interested in but the scientists themselves, particularly their creationist beliefs. Take this excerpt from the George Washington Carver page:
George Washington Carver was one of the great scientists who honored God as the Creator. Carver revolutionized agricultural science, and his studies of nature convinced him of the existence and benevolence of the Creator.
Carver’s actual achievements are totally irrelevant to the ICR. All they care about is that they get to exploit his good name and the fact that he happened to have been a creationist (because he lived before Darwin) in order to make the standard creationist argument from authority. In other words, they get to say, see evolutionists, even brilliant scientists accepted creationism. Of course, this is no more a valid argument than justifying slavery by pointing out that many of the great Founding Fathers of the U.S. owned slaves or justifying a heliocentric view of the universe because Archimedes might have held that view in his time. So what? That’s not a valid evidential argument for why we should still believe what people in less scientifically advanced times who happened to be brilliant in their own time believed. Then of course there’s still Project Steve, the NCSE’s genius response to creationist arguments from authority.
If this is the kind of argument they find convincing, they should know that Carver also didn’t believe in computers, the internet, television sets, vaccines, antibiotics, or automobiles either.
