James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D., never disappoints. If haven’t come across him before, and can’t figure it out from the degrees included in his authorship credit, he is the ICR’s main source of bizarre legal analogies, although he has also taken to (usually viking-related) history at times. For his column in the August edition of ICR’s monthly newsletter Acts & Facts he has an article titled “One Bankruptcy, Many Adversaries“:
Theistic evolution is like a mega-bankruptcy case containing an almost countless number of adversaries and contests, like piecemeal mini-lawsuits that in aggregate address smaller conflicts within a large-scale mess. Within this big picture it’s important to keep in mind that every small-scale “contested matter” and every “adversary” conflict is an important opportunity to advocate for truth.
I bring this up not because I intend to go through it in any detail, but because it’s funny. I can’t quite tell whether his argument is that “theistic evolution” is under attack from all sides, or that it is important to attack it from every angle, or indeed that he just wanted to call it “bankrupt” – mega-bankrupt even – but then had to waffle on for a few paragraphs to justify publication this month.
It could well be the latter – he runs out of courtroom trivia mid-way, and has to turn to martial metaphors for aid:
A long war is composed of several strategically influential battles, connected to a network of contributory skirmishes. Likewise, countering the anti-Genesis teachings of theistic evolution involves a complex combination of small-scale opportunities to promote the Genesis record as part of the defense of the faith.
You get the idea – or rather, you don’t. Isn’t he wonderful?
Eye on the ICR 
“Theistic evolution, which fails to authoritatively embrace Genesis, is a mega-bankruptcy.”
[James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D. ]
Agreed.
We (in England) have our own (fictional) case:
Jarndyce v Jarndyce
“As of Jan 25, 2013, $755 million has been spent on dividing up the Nortel Networks estate worth an estimated 9 billion dollars with no resolution.”
[Wikipedia article on Jarndyce v Jarndyce]
That is my pension they are talking about.
A mega-bankruptcy is a large quantity of money with no legally established owner. The objective of lawyers is to divide that money up between themselves. James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D. more or less implies that this is the real agenda.
“…knowing that God’s truth ultimately stands at the close of the case.”
[James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D.]
If the case ever comes to close, I imagine that the faithful will have long departed the scene and the lawyers will be the only ones standing.
I rest my case.
ICR can’t handle the truth, and is out of order. What is consistently in order is the fossil record. I’d like to submit for the jury’s consideration a number of fossil specimens –exhibit #1 through several zillion.
http://www.icr.org/article/8330/
“If this comet was really a “primitive building block of the Solar System,” then it’s supposedly 4.5 billion years old. Why is it still around if it keeps getting smaller as it swings around the sun every six and a half years?”
Not THIS particular comet, wilful liar.
Ashley, I agree that Thomas falsely implied that the earlier quotation applied to all comets. Another problem is that he seems to assume that the comet started out at its present size, when it was probably much larger, and could have been orders of magnitude larger!
I didn’t read the whole of the ICR attachments with this,since Sorensen preferred to post propaganda rather than discuss the contents of the two Hebert articles in any detail:
http://www.piltdownsuperman.com/2014/08/dont-fear-ice-core-parts-1-and-2.html
Hello is all right. Your efforts to poison the well all over the Web are noted by me, but you are ignored by major sites. A possibility you overlook is that Sorensen preferred to post introductory comments and encourage to read the articles themselves.
I have never seen a Christian website – one that allows genuine open discussion (such as God of Evolution where Alexander Gordons turned up recently) – where anybody else has shown any inclination to take Mr him seriously. But since he generally behaves like an angry troll and offers nothing constructive that is hardly surprising.
Not long ago (19 July) Gordons made some totally false allegations against me and then suggested that it would be better if I was locked up or alternatively if I was dead. He is clearly a very nasty individual.
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4582953863643137208&postID=6659582233666016049
http://www.icr.org/article/8331/
http://www.icr.org/article/8039/
“Creatures change within the boundaries of their own “kinds” or fundamental forms, so Noah certainly did not need to take on board all “species,”a modern term that seems to bear as many definitions as there are researchers who use it.”
GARBAGE. This is what the Bible actually SAYS at Genesis 6: 19-20 (NIV):
“You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive.” NOTHING their about every ‘family’ or every ‘representative kind’ (frequently species within a large family with different genera won’t be able to interbreed).
Ashley, another huge problem with the ICR articles you linked to is their dubious calculations on the number of animals Noah needed to take on the ark, which considered only living animals. This absurd exercise, which originated with Henry Morris’s claims in The Genesis Flood (1961), fails to include even the many thousands of extinct species and genera already documented, let alone the countless thousands more that undoubtedly remain to be discovered (every year dozens of new ones are). Indeed, paleontologists estimate that less than 1% of the species that lived in the past are alive today. As you note,certainly at the family level, if not the genus, many animals cannot interbreed even under ideal conditions, let alone after riding on a boat for a year and then being let loose into a largely barren earth. Setting the latter problem aside, for ICR’s arguments to make any sense at all, they need to estimate a realistic number for both modern and extinct land genera. That number would obviously be immensely greater than ridiculously small figures they throw around in those articles. I think they know that, and just hope most readers won’t. But what else is new?
Sensuous Curmudgeon now has the Gungor-Ark-ICR etc topic too.
Yes – their problems would be less if they could make the Bible ‘say’ that Noah’s flood was an extinction event for lots of species.
Another problem YECs have is explaining how Australia and nearby islands ended up with so many marsupials and virtually no placental animals. Even if all the marsupials somehow held a meeting after the Ark landed and decided to all walk/hop to Australia together (without any placental friends), they’d have to slog thousands of miles without usual food or habitats, not to mention having to cross an ocean! YEC attempts at solutions have been weak at best. I recently drafted an article on this problem at http://paleo.cc/ce/marsupials.htm I welcome any comments or corrections. Thanks.
I can imagine Noah standing on Mount Ararat and asking for volunteers to build a boat and go and repopulate Australia – ‘And you will only need to take the marsupials!’
Alan, that’s a creative suggestion. I know you aren’t serious, but I don’t think YECs even claim Australia was originally dominated by marsupials. At any rate, the problem of finding food during any supposed journey plagues any of their supposed solutions (log rafts, land bridges, etc). Are we to assume, for example, that Koala’s found Eucalyptus trees all along the long route? As I note in the article, one YEC who faced the immensity of the problem proposed that maybe marsupials didn’t migrate to Australia, but were “placed there” after the Flood by God. Of course, whenever they start resorting to major ad hoc miracles to solve problems (as they did with the RATE project report), it undermines any “science” in “scientific creationism.”
Glen, I read your article on marsupial migration. The “anonymous” author of the Northwest Creation article, which hypothesizes that all of the hundreds of marsupial species in Australia convergently evolved from an alleged placental “twin” species, is almost certainly Robert Byers, the infamous commenter on all evolution websites. Same ignorant spelling errors, same ignorance of comparative anatomy.
Thanks. You’re probably right, but without clear verification I can’t safely attribute it to him. One thing we can be sure of is that whoever wrote The NW Creation article lacks even the most rudimentary understanding of the major anatomical and physiological differences between marsupial and placental animals, whatever their superficial similarities. It’s an example of a common problem in YEC writings. When faced with difficult problems, they seem to feel that proposing virtually any solution, no matter how far-fetched, does the trick, whereas in reality it often only reveals how unscientific “scientific creationism” is.
I’m glad the authorship issue was raised, because I’ve since been able to verify that the “anonymous” article was in fact written by Robert Byers, since the background HTML source code behind the article (which one can access in most browsers with a right mouse click while on the article) states “article by Robert Byers.” I also have since found a similar article on the NE Creation Network website that is explicitly attributed to Robert Byers. I’ve updated my article and reference list to reflect this. What is most astounding is that although Byers promotes YECism, his proposed solution for the dominance of marsupials in Australia is that they rapidly “evolved” from placental animals that migrated to Australia after the Flood–requiring more rapid and dramatic evolution than any “evolutionist” would allow. Among other odd and demonstrably erroneous claims he makes is the assertion that the reproductive differences between marsupial and placental creatures are “minor,”