Perhaps if you’ve never studied high school geography you might have missed it, but Hovind’s questioning of how the Colorado River could have flowed uphill for millions of years to carve out the Grand Canyon demonstrates a profound (and wanton) ignorance of proven geological processes.

One of the first things you learn in high school about our home planet is that the Earth’s crust is always on the move.  The theory of plate tectonics—the notion that the Earth’s crust is made up of a number of individual plates that drift around and bump up against each other—was one of the triumphs of the geological sciences of the early 20th century.  Today, in this age of satellite monitoring, it is trivially easy to show that many parts of the world—most notably the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Andes—are rising as the tectonic plates they rest upon are being thrust upwards by the neighboring plates which are pushing underneath, like placing a lever below a large rock to lift it up.

This is almost certainly what happened to the Colorado Plateau before the formation of the Grand Canyon.  There is ample geological evidence to show that the Colorado River (or a predecessor) carved out the canyon as the landmass around it rose due to pressure being exerted from neighboring tectonic plates slipping below it.  Studies of canyon’s route across the plateau show that the river’s flow and direction was directly influenced by nature of the upthrust of the land going on around it.

Of course, it has taken many hundreds of person years of scientific research, and many thousands of published papers to build a good picture of how the Grand Canyon was formed, and even now some questions over the details remain.  But then Hovind comes along that dismisses all of that with a wave of the hand and cries “Inconceivable!” as he fobs people off with an argument from incredulity. 

If pressed, no doubt he will spout the usual unsupported and unresearched creationist claims about rapid deposition and erosion during the Great Flood, but that is no more than using a toothpick to attack the Himalaya-sized mountain range of scientific evidence arranged against him.  It’s worth remember that analogy when you next heard a creationist calling for an equal hearing in the science classroom.  The disparity in supporting scientific evidence between the two sides simply cannot be overstated.

Maybe it’s just me, but likening the Earth to the place where God rests his sweaty feet after a long, hard day of smiting isn’t exactly the best way to convey a sense of awe and wonder about the majesty of our home planet.

Now they’re back, in full whine mode, and with a law suit claiming that their academic freedom and their constitutional right to free speech have been violated.  Not surprisingly their press release is laughable, and full of lies and distortions.

Dr. Raymund Paredes, in his official capacity as Texas Commissioner of Higher Education, has assumed and officially favored his personal viewpoint that the Big Bang was an “astonishing event” that “was initiated some 14 billion years ago,” and imposed that personally-held belief on a private school. No eyewitness or forensic evidence was presented by Dr. Paredes last April to support his assumption; he relied only on his ardent belief in this theory that is professed by some scientists, but not all.

It’s just laughable that any scientist would even suggest that “eyewitness or forensic evidence” is required before a scientific theory can be considered to be more than an “assumption,” but it is an objection frequently raised by creationists in the form of the question “If you weren’t there to witness it, then how do you know?” often followed by “God was there, and told us exactly what happened.”  Naturally, this begs the return question: “So, were you there when God told us what happened?”

And, as it happens, we do have very good eyewitness and forensic evidence going all the way back to just after the Big Bang, from instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cosmic Background Explorer.  But, of course, the ICR conveniently rejects telescopic observations as reliable evidence, despite having failed hopelessly in their attempts to produce a coherent alternative that explains how we can see galaxies that are 13 billion light years away from Earth.

As a result, college-level science education in Texas is now muzzled by Texas governmental censorship, a situation that interferes with both academic freedom, the right of a school to teach any subject from its own institutional viewpoint; and interstate commerce, the right of a school outside Texas to recruit and teach Texas residents.

Nonsense.  Nobody is muzzling college-level science education.  The ICR is free to teach whatever they want as science—even the theory that the Sun and Moon are moved around by angels, or that hurricanes are God’s belches, if they want.  What they can’t do is teach their creationist nonsense in a science course and have it recognized by the State of Texas as an accredited Master of Science program.

Of course, the controversy is not unique to ICR’s graduate school. Scientists and professors who are Christians, and even non-Christian academics, continue to face persecution from science censors. Ben Stein’s Expelled documentary in 2008 clearly demonstrated that even highly-qualified scientists in secular institutions are facing various forms of expulsion simply because they question “recognized” Darwinian beliefs and the tenets of evolutionary science.

And we all know what a load of hyped up nonsense that movie turned out to be.

THECB Commissioner Raymund Paredes insists that the 27-year-old Master of Science program at ICRGS cannot possibly be “science” because its professors hold a biblical Christian viewpoint about the origin of the universe and the origin of life on earth. Call it something other than science, he and his board members suggested, and ICR can move its school to Texas.

Paredes is exactly right.  The ICR doesn’t practice science because it cannot accept any scientific finding that contradicts their literal interpretation of the Bible.  When you use the scientific method to make a discovery, you don’t do what the ICR does and go running to Bible to find out if you’re on the right track.  That is not science.

I still remember from my boyhood the days of racial segregation in America, and walking past public bathroom doors labeled “Men,” “Women,” and “Colored.” Discrimination was ugly then, and discrimination is just as ugly today.

Oh boy.  How unbelievably crass to compare their imagined affront with the century-long struggle of African Americans to acheive equal rights in this country.  Pathetic.

ICRGS is now the victim of academic (and religious) viewpoint discrimination in the Lone Star State. And because this government-mandated viewpoint ban is now enforced against the content of ICR’s school catalog within the state, this viewpoint discrimination includes censorship-stifling freedom of the press.

Again, their academic freedoms have not been discriminated against.  They are allowed to teach what they want, where they want, how they want, and they can call all of it science until they’re blue in the face.  What they can’t do is force the State of Texas to redefine science so that it matches the ICR’s definition, nor that they force the THECB to grant official recognition to a Master of Science program that doesn’t teach real science.

I predict that, even in a state as conservative as Texas, this law suit isn’t going anywhere, and for that, I will be thankful.