#1614: Tom Flannery

Misology is an important part of wingnuttery, especially religiously motivated wingnuttery, and a fine example is the WND, which publishes the works of professional hater of knowledge, science and reason Tom Flannery. Flannery stands up to what he sees as “brain-dead intellectuals”, and has a superpower that will help him do so: citing Bible verses.

Flannery is, of course, a creationist, and appears to think that Aquinas’s arguments refuted Hume’s skepticism and therefore contemporary Darwinists are fools. Ok, he’s got some other arguments as well (you may have heard them before), for instance the following ones, reported in his review of the Ham-Nye debate for the WND where he declared Ken Ham the obvious winner (mostly due to arguments Flannery decided to add that Ham didn’t in fact use):

-       Scienstists are dishonest since they mix up what creationists distinguish as observational and historical science, a distinction that makes no sense whatsoever if you understand, you know, the basics of scientific thinking.

-       Evolution is racist, which is proven by the fact that Darwin himself refers to “the preservation of the favoured races”. (Oh, no – Flannery has never so much as read any Darwin. Why would he?)

-       There are no “missing links”, and the relatively few “big discoveries” have all “eventually been reclassified or exposed as hoaxes”.

-       And for the grand finale: “It’s no wonder that later in his life Darwin dismissed his theories about molecules-to-man evolution as ‘the unformed ideas of my youth.’” Even Answers in Genesis thinks creationists should avoid using that one to avoid obviously looking like the uninformed clowns they are.

So that gives you an idea about the quality of Flannery’s writings. The conclusion? Biology, geology and astronomy are pseudoscience invented to challenge the Bible; “[t]rue science contradicts Darwinian evolution across the board,” writes Flannery in a review of the Broadway play “Grace”, which he didn’t like. Truth, reason and accuracy are just tenets of intellectual snobbery, after all.

His arguments for why the United States is a Christian Nation would perhaps have made even David Barton blush. Did you for instance know that “Christopher Columbus, after all, became convinced that the world was round after reading a verse of Scripture from the book of Isaiah,” the relevance of which would be unclear even if it were true, which of course it isn’t? But according to Flannery, the Founding Fathers were as influenced by religion as Columbus and himself; indeed, according to Flannery, John Adams understood that without divine intervention from the God of the Bible there would have been no America (nope, he did not claim that) and that his rallying cry during the revolutionary war was “No king but King Jesus” (absolute nonsense), that the Declaration of Independence specifically discusses “Biblical violations”, that “Washington and Alexander Hamilton said they based the idea for America’s separation of powers upon the Bible verse Jeremiah 17:9” (nope, they didn’t), and so on. It’s all discussed here. Lying for Jesus never was more dishonest than this.