John Mackay and Answers in Genesis

The link regarding information about John Mackay wasn't working when I first posted information about the split between Answers in Genesis and Creation Ministries International, but it can now be seen here. This links to a set of web pages which makes some devastating charges about the circumstances under which Mackay left the Australian organization in 1987.

Creation Ministries International is composed of all of the non-U.S. groups which were formerly part of Answers in Genesis, based in the countries of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada; the U.S. group is the only one which continues to use the name Answers in Genesis.

The Creation Science Foundation came into existence in 1980 as the merger between Dr. Carl Wieland's Creation Science Association (which had a magazine called Ex Nihilo) and Ken Ham's Creation Science Supplies and Creation Science Educational Media Services. Ken Ham ran the CSF, and John Mackay became editor of its magazine, then called Creation Ex Nihilo.

In 1987, Mackay left the CSF and started another creationist organization called Creation Research, and Wieland took a leadership role as Ken Ham began spending more time in the United States. This history is recounted in the CreationWiki article on the Creation Science Foundation.

According to the information assembled on the CMI webpage, which was originally assembled in 1986-87:

The pack was originally prepared in response to the aftermath of a horrific attack (February, 1986) on our ministry (then called Creation Science Foundation) by Mr Mackay. The mechanism of attack involved a monstrous series of allegations without evidence—the basis was alleged ‘spiritual discernment’, involving ‘black cats’ and similar. These slanderous allegations concerned Margaret Buchanan, at the time a well-regarded Christian widow working for the ministry as Ken Ham’s personal secretary. John said she had been ‘specially sent by Satan’ to undermine him and the ministry, involved in covens, attending séances, etc.—never was there any eyewitness testimony or other evidence, merely ‘discernment’.

When his attempt to sack her and take over the ministry failed, due to the Board’s refusal to violate biblical principle, Mr Mackay resigned. This was followed by a campaign of widespread innuendo and slander, involving actual fabrications which if accepted would tend to bolster his claim of ‘demonic infiltration’ of our ministry and thus would tend to undermine public confidence in our ministry. This included the bizarre and incredibly offensive claim that Margaret had claimed to have had intercourse with the corpse of her late husband (!).

Sadly, these horrific sins have never been repented of, nor forgiveness sought, nor restitution offered—despite a Baptist church excommunicating Mr Mackay and urging people to respect this decision in the Lord. When Ken Ham left ICR in about 1996, the rumour mill from this source again swung into action; the story this time was that Margaret was to blame for this ‘split’, somehow using demonic ‘powers’ to damage another creation ministry. Again, the real ‘target’ of the rumours was clearly public confidence in our ministry; if it could be undermined, it would be more likely to leave the Australian ‘creation public’ diverting the support in other directions. It might also be seen as a ‘vindication’ of the original offensive actions.

Currently, the issue has surfaced again in the context of the recent tensions between the Australian ministry and AiG-USA, with John Mackay’s newsletter suddenly urging supporters to pray for the ‘attack’ the US ministry is allegedly under.

In fact, it appears that new alliances are being forged, and talk of ‘reconciliation’ is being used to rehabilitate Mr Mackay in creationist circles—again the aim appears to be to undermine the Australian ministry, only from a different angle. Reconciliation is a wonderful and most desirable thing, but can never occur except on a biblical basis; the original slander must be withdrawn, and there must be a repentance and forgiveness sought from the main victim, Margaret, for a start.

No one likes to keep things alive that are best forgotten, but to cover up serious sin or attempt to sweep it under the carpet can never earn God’s approval. There is a cost to taking a strong stand in defence of truth and integrity, not the least being that it can easily be misrepresented.

However, we will quietly but persistently maintain our stand, especially as the ugly stain of these rumours is encouraged to resurface to once again undermine the ministry—until and unless these seriously sinful actions are dealt with under the cross, not whitewashed for ‘political’ convenience or excused on the basis of any ‘personalities’ involved. Anything less would not only dishonour God, it would ultimately be running away from our responsibility of Christian love to the perpetrator himself.

The web page with this text contains two documents--one with the text of an account of these attacks titled Salem Revisited (PDF, 59 pp.), by Margaret Buchanan, and the other additional supporting documentation (PDF, 63 pp.).

Buchanan, who was a widow at the time, is now the wife of CMI managing director Carl Wieland.

Mackay's charges seem a lot like the fabricated charges of Laurel Willson, a deeply disturbed woman better known as Lauren Stratford (pseudonym), author of Satan's Underground. Her account of being a victim of Satanic ritual abuse was debunked by Gretchen and Bob Passantino and Jon Trott, who were also instrumental in exposing the fake claims of "Satanist turned Christian comedian" Mike Warnke.

UPDATE (June 10, 2007): CMI's main point about Mackay is that (a) he made these charges and never apologized for them, (b) Ken Ham agreed that Mackay was in the wrong, and that he shouldn't be associated with until he retracted these charges, but (c) Ken Ham and AiG-US have been associating with Mackay despite his failure to retract, in order to use him as a conduit to supporters in Australia.

The CMI position on (c) is supported by the fact that when Mackay sent out the AiG "spiritual attack" email to his supporters, he left attached this email from Ken Ham:

From: Ken Ham Sent: Saturday, 2 June 2007 1:13 PM
To: John Mackay
Subject: Letter: AiG under Spiritual Attac


John-the attachment is the letter you are free to send to your entire
mailing list and anyone else you want to send it to. Also send to
pastors etc.

Ken

Tech Liberation Front brings on a Discovery Institute representative

The Technology Liberation Front is a blog I've been reading for a few months for its quality contributions on issues involving technology, regulation, copyright, digital rights management (DRM), network neutrality, and so on. It covers a lot of the same topics as Ed Felten's excellent Freedom-to-Tinker blog, with a strong libertarian bent.

What a disappointment it was to see that the newest contributor, Hance Haney, comes from the Technology & Democracy Project at the Discovery Institute. While Haney is in Washington D.C. and is not affiliated with the intelligent design wing (the Center for Science and Culture), crackpot George Gilder is a senior fellow of the TDP.

I commented to this effect at the Technology Liberation Front, which prompted a response from Lewis Baumstark:

As I have no previous knowledge of Hance or the Discovery Institute, I prefer to allow him to live or die here on the merits of his debate and analysis, not on his link to a pro-ID institution.

Lewis should remedy his ignorance of the Discovery Institute before coming to a conclusion about whether such an association taints Hance's reputation and credibility--surely he would not have said the same if Hance was a representative of the (in some ways more honest) Institute for Creation Research or International Flat Earth Society. As readers of this blog know well, the Discovery Institute has a long history of dishonest and deceptive public statements and attempts to influence public opinion, public policy, and educational standards. Do a Google search for "Discovery Institute site:lippard.blogspot.com" or "Dembski site:lippard.blogspot.com" for numerous examples at this blog; many more can be found at scienceblogs.com (especially Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Pharyngula) or The Panda's Thumb.

Jim Harper of TLF responded to Lewis's comment by writing "And the winner is . . . Lewis Baumstark! Curious. Courteous. Way to go, Lewis!" How odd that he would declare Lewis the "winner" when Lewis claimed ignorance of the Discovery Institute, or call him "curious" when his comment betrayed no interest in rectifying that ignorance. "Courteous," I'll grant.

I agree with the comment at TLF from Cog (of the Abstract Factory blog):

The Discovery Institute ought to be shunned by all right-thinking people, simply as punishment for so shamelessly polluting our public discourse about science. Everybody associated with the Discovery Institute should know, and never be permitted to forget, that their affiliation with that institution tars their name and calls their integrity into question.

This isn't to say that we should pre-emptively dismiss everything Hance says, but that he should never forget the cost that this affiliation will have for his professional reputation and all the views that he professes to hold. The suspicion of Lippard and others (myself included) is entirely rational, and promotes the proper working of the information ecosystem, just an investor's skepticism about former Enron executives would be rational and promote the proper working of the market.

Precisely so--it's not that Hance can't make valid or useful contributions, it's that anything he says needs to be given extra scrutiny because he willingly associates with and is employed by an organization with an established and continuing record for deception and dishonesty. "Guilt by association" is fallacious for evaluating the validity of an argument, but the company you keep is often a good indicator of your character and can create prima facie evidence about your reliability that your own words and actions may then confirm or refute.

I've experienced this myself--I'm employed by a company with a financial scandal in its past (Global Crossing). I continue to work there because I believe that the scandals are in the past and those responsible for them are no longer associated with the company, though my resume will likely always be somewhat tainted by the association and give me an extra hurdle to overcome. I consider myself fortunate that not only has the company cleaned up its act (the financial filings under the current CFO have been praised by former critics of the company for their completeness and transparency) but that my area of employment was quite distant from the scandal and has received public praise.

UPDATE August 28, 2006: Julian Sanchez comments on this subject here. Adam Thierer has responded to the controversy at the Technology Liberation Front, but he does not even attempt to address the issue raised by the Discovery Institute's regular practice of deception and dishonesty.

UPDATE August 30, 2006: Tim Lee has responded to the controversy head on at TLF.

Answers in Genesis schism: U.S. group goes solo

Answers in Genesis had been an international organization, with the U.S. branch under Ken Ham based in Kentucky, and an Australian branch under Carl Wieland in Queensland (which was formerly known as the Creation Science Foundation). Now the Australian group (along with ministries in Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa) has changed its name to Creation Ministries International, explaining in a recent brochure that the U.S. group did not want to be "subject to an international representative system of checks/balances/peer review involving all the other offices bearing the same 'brand name'."

This explains why an article critical of bad creationist arguments (and specifically Kent Hovind) disappeared from the Answers in Genesis site, but is found on the new Creation Ministries International site. (UPDATE (March 6, 2006): This statement was not quite accurate, but the linked-to page gets it right. The article listing arguments not to use is still present on the Answers in Genesis site, but it no longer links to the separate "maintaining creationist integrity" page and response to Kent Hovind which is present on the Creation Ministries International site.)

Wieland's group has made a point of publishing material critical of bad creationist arguments, on its website and in its technical journal. Ken Ham, on the other hand, has made a point of publishing and presenting bad creationist arguments.

The U.S. group, known for spending millions on a creationist museum, has interesting Form 990s filed with the IRS. Some highlights from 2003 and 2004:

Revenue: $9,016,228 (2003), $10,423,222 (2004).
Expenses: $6,894,456 (2003), $8,320,926 (2004).
Assets: $10,778,086 (2003), $17,368,759 (2004).
Liabilities: $1,693,035 (2003), $6,086,610 (2004).

Officer/Director compensation: $313,960 (2003), $926,837 (2004).
Other salaries/wages: $2,938,288 (2003), $2,852,351 (2004).
Pension plan contributions: $87,819 (2003), $0 (2004).
Other employee benefits: $317,802 (2003), $399,482 (2004).
Payroll taxes: $223,636 (2003), $307,267 (2004).

Employees with salaries over $50,000:
Kevin Markesbery, Construction Manager, $87,000 plus $8,778 to benefit plans/deferred income and $1,375 expense account (2003). $88,678 plus $6,850 to benefit plans, $4,076 expense account (2004).
John Pence, Dir. of Planned Giving/Legal Counsel, $87,539 plus $7,728 to benefit plans/deferred income (2003). (Became a director in 2004, see below).
Patrick Marsh, Director, $73,713 plus $5,202 to benefit plans (2004).
James Hatton, Controller, $70,763 plus $8,609 to benefit plans/deferred income.
Kathy Ellis, Dir. Administration, $68,519 plus $7,078 to benefit plans/deferred income.
Mark Looy, VP Ministry Relations, $68,417 plus $8,460 to benefit plans/deferred income and $2,232 expense account. (Became a director in 2004, see below.)
Tony Ramsek, Systems Mgr., $62,720 plus $6,821 to benefit plans (2004).
Dan Zordel, Director, $57,724 plus $6,816 to benefit plans and $839 expense account (2004).
Charles Tilton, Director, $56,828 plus $3,109 to benefit plans and $112 expense account (2004).

Directors:
Carl Wieland, Board Member, $0 (2003).
Ken Ham, President, $125,739 salary, $11,033 benefits, $44,478 expenses (2003). $121,764 salary, $6,887 benefits, $63,808 expenses (2004).
Bill Wise, CFO, $121,418 salary, $8,845 benefits, $2,535 expenses (2003).
John Pence, General Counsel, $93,115 salary, $3,148 benefits (2004).
Kathy Ellis, Vice President, $86,068 salary, $5,261 benefits (2004).
Mark Looy, Vice President, $85,615 salary, $6,820 benefits, $3,518 expenses (2004).
James Hatton, CFO, $81,000 salary, $6,831 benefits (2004).
Mike Zovath, VP, $74,798 salary, $8,707 benefits, $2,267 expenses (2003). $90,201 salary, $6,830 benefits, $1,115 expenses (2004).
Brandon Vallorani, $74,432 salary, $8,313 benefits, $1,368 expenses (2003). COO, $90,344 salary, $6,223 benefits, $2,316 expenses (2004).
Don Landis, Chairman, $0 (2003). $0 (2004).
Dan Chin, Board Member, $0 (2003). $0 (2004).
Mark Jackson, Board Member, $0 (2003). $0 (2004).
Carl Kerby, Board Member, $6,538 salary (20hrs/week), $1,650 benefits, $22,462 expenses (2003). Vice President, $65,112 salary, $4,225 benefits, $27,240 expenses (2004).
Dan Manthei, Board Member, $0 (2003). $0 (2004).
Peter Strong, Board Member, $0 (2003).
Greg Peacock, Board Member, $0 (2003). $0 (2004).
Paul Salmon, Board Member, $0 (2003).
David Denner, Board Member, $0 (2004).
Dale Mason, Vice President, $115,621 salary, $4,828 benefits (2004).
John Thallon, Board Member, $0 (2004).
Tim Dudley, Board Member, $0 (2004).

They paid their top building contractors in 2003:
plumbing and HVAC: $829,979
concrete: $310,252
steel erection: $279,428
building electric: $249,450
concrete foundations: $195,872

In 2003 they sold or gave away several old computers, and gave a 2002 Toyota Camry to CFO Bill Wise (who also got a free Compaq laptop).

The full AiG 2004 Form 990 may be found here (PDF).

Ken Ham earns a pretty good salary for someone who spouts misrepresentations of and about evolution for a living and resides in a state where the median household income in 2002-2003 was $37,270.

Answers in Genesis of Kentucky's unwillingness to undergo even the peer review of fellow creationist organizations indicates to me a lack of ethics and integrity.

UPDATE: I didn't explicitly note above that this schism must have actually taken place back in 2005, since Carl Wieland and the other Australians (Greg Peacock and Paul Salmon) disappeared from the AiG Kentucky board in the 2004 Form 990 (signed on August 10, 2005, apparently an update since the original was due by May 15). Also of note is that John Thallon, an Australian who helped lose the Creation Science Foundation thousands of dollars in a bogus investment (he was also a victim, not a party to the fraud--see the "Loss of Funds" section of my article "How Not To Argue With Creationists"), has moved to Kentucky and is on the board as of 2004.

One other thing worthy of note is that as Answers in Genesis of Kentucky has grown, it has pulled support away from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), which Henry Morris' son John Morris has never really had his heart in running. The ICR's 2004 revenue was $4,341,000, with expenses of $4,231,885. They had assets of $5,628,352 and liabilities of $537,283--so they're not exactly hurting, but they're not doing AiG-sized business, either. (2004 Form 990 for the ICR is here (PDF).) It wouldn't surprise me if AiG ultimately completely displaced (or perhaps acquired) the ICR.

Eugenie Scott gives the Robert S. Dietz memorial lecture

Genie Scott of the NCSE gave a talk on "Creationism and Evolution: Current Perspectives" to a standing-room-only audience of several hundred at the ASU Physical Sciences building. This crowd came out to see her despite the fact that Jared Diamond was speaking at ASU at the same time, about his book Collapse.

The lecture began with a few words about Bob Dietz, who was a strong supporter of evolution and critic of creationism, and showed a few slides of him and his book, Creation/Evolution Satiricon: Creationism Bashed.

Genie gave an overview of creation science, comparing and contrasting it with evolution. She pointed out the logical flaw of the "two model approach" in assuming that evolution and creation are the only two possibilities and that falsifying evolution is all that's needed to prove creationism.

There followed a discussion of the Paluxy river mantracks, and how Glen Kuban's work led even the Institute for Creation Research to stop using them as evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived together. She talked briefly about some problems with the ark story and the misidentification of geological features as fossilized arks (another example which creationists themselves have refuted).

Genie described the NCSE Grand Canyon raft trips, pointing out how they teach both the evolution and creationist sides of the story, while the ICR raft trip only teaches the creationist version. She put up a photo of Steve Austin and his book Grand Canyon, Monument to Catastrophe, along with a photo of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, pointing out that they should not be confused, even though the creationist Steve Austin does work on cold stone. (This reference worked well with the young audience--my expectation was for a comparison photo of Lee Majors as the "Six Million Dollar Man" as the joke.) She spent some time describing how the Grand Canyon is composed of thousands of layers of sediment which the creationists claim to have been laid down through repeated walls of water and sediment precipitation. This set the stage for Austin's claims about the canyons around Mt. St. Helens, where a 30' deep ditch was cut by water in seven days--thirty feet of unconsolidated ash and loose sediment doesn't compare to four thousand feet of individual layers of shales, limestones, sandstones, etc.

Since the event was at ASU, home of the Institute of Human Origins, she mentioned Donald Johanson tiring of correcting bogus creationist claims about Lucy's knee joint.

She then turned to intelligent design, or "creationism light," which she described as consisting of only a single philosophical claim--that you can detect the evidence of things that are designed and are the products of intelligence, and in particular the product of a divine designer. ID has proposed two concepts for identifying design, Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's design inference. She described the Discovery Institute and the Wedge Document, and pointed out that there are many criticisms of Behe's irreducible complexity and Dembski's complex specified information on the web. The structure of the ID arguments, she argued, is the same as that of creation science--that evolution can't do it, therefore it must be intelligent design. Michael Behe's favored example of the bacterial flagellum was shown in an animated slide, and Genie pointed out that they like to use examples of complex systems where we haven't yet developed full explanations, but they ignore other examples of apparently "irreducibly complex" systems where we do have full explanations, like the evolution of the mammalian ear (which she proceeded to illustrate).

She gave a history of the intelligent design movement and its roots in creationism--covering the 1981 McLean v. Arkansas decision, Jon Buell's formation of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, and the publications of Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen's Mystery of Life's Origin and Of Pandas and People. She described the science of the latter as awful, giving as an example its treatment of genetic distances between organisms based on cytochrome c, a demonstration that the authors don't understand evolution (a topic discussed in the Dover case).

Wesley Elsberry's work on word counts of "creationis[t/m]" vs. "intelligent design" in the sequence of manuscripts that became Of Pandas and People was graphically depicted, showing the former dropping to zero and the latter increasing to the level of the former in 1987, after the creationists lost at the U.S. Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard.

She briefly commented on William Dembski's draft of version three of Of Pandas and People, which used "sudden emergence" instead of "intelligent design," and about the Discovery Institute's move to a "teach the controversy" position which it has held for a few years, and its model policy for school boards to teach the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution adopted by the Grantsburg, Wisconsin school board in December 2004.

She listed seven states that have introduced anti-evolution legislation this year (Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah), promoting books critical of intelligent design and creationism (including Young and Edis' Why Intelligent Design Fails, Pennock's Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, Forrest and Gross's Creationism's Trojan Horse, Miller's Finding Darwin's God, Shanks' God, the Devil, and Darwin, Isaak's Counter-Creationism Handbook, and her own Evolution vs. Creationism, which she was pleased to announce had just been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. She showed a screen shot of Amazon.com listing her book with a sales rank of #284, though she noted this is an hour-by-hour rank and she had to wait until late on Sunday night to get the shot.

In closing, Genie noted that Bob Dietz was a real scientific iconoclast who advocated views that were outside of the mainstream when he initiated them--that seafloor spreading occurs and is evidence of continental drift, that moon craters are asteroid impacts not volcanoes, that shatter cones are evidence of meteoritic impacts. He didn't respond to criticism by starting a policy institute, hiring a PR firm, and lobbying to have his theories taught in public schools--he responded by doing scientific work, by doing research, by writing and presenting papers. That's the work that needs to be done to get things taught in public school science classes.

Afterward, there was a small reception outside the auditorium, and Genie was swamped with people asking questions for quite some time. I was surprised that there were no obvious creationists or intelligent design advocates--those who were present (I'm sure there were some there) kept their views to themselves.