Jonathan Sarfati: Scientist?
Posted by Brian on Tue 14-Oct-2008 at 9:28 pm
Dr Jonathan Sarfati is a leading writer and speaker for the Queensland-based Creation Ministries International (CMI) and helps edit two of its journals. He holds a PhD in physical chemistry from a recognised university and has published half a dozen papers in peer-reviewed science journals. He claims that CMI’s Journal of Creation is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, but the ‘peers’ are all Young Earth Creationists. He doesn’t seem to have undertaken any serious scientific work since 1996 when he joined CMI in Brisbane. During the last 12 years, therefore, he has been fully occupied in promoting the YEC religious position on a variety of fronts, very few of which have anything to do with his scientific speciality of infrared spectroscopy.
If Sarfati wants to continue referring to himself as a ’scientist’, he should in all honesty add the qualifiers ‘ex-’ or ‘former’. Like other religious and political enthusiasts - not all of them Christian by any means - he tries to impose a wholly stultifying straitjacket on the theory and practice of science. The question of whether a scientific hypothesis is or is not ‘biblically possible’ should be a non-issue, but Sarfati accords it central importance in his scheme of things. A ’science’ which lurches down that path is not worthy of the name.