Allen Magnuson is a young-earth creationist affiliated with the worldwideflood project (“Mission: To define a feasible design range for Noah’s Ark”), and thus with the flood geology movement. Magnuson does have a PhD in Theoretical & Applied Mechanics, which is unrelated to the fields in which he conducts his pseudoscience, but credentials are deeply cherished by pseudoscientists, and Magnuson is himself for instance a signatory to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism. Magnuson himself is not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, however. According to Magnuson, he used to consider “the book of Genesis to be an allegory or legend. While I was preparing [a Sunday school] lesson, I realized that the Ark’s dimensions and proportions as given in Genesis 6:15 were those of a modern cargo ship. It became clear to me at that point that God designed the Ark as a seagoing ship with the animals as the cargo.” This is not how data work.
The other people involved in the worldwideflood project are:
- Jim Lovett, who is currently working for Answers in Genesis at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, designing the exhibits for their Ark Park.
- Jim King, who “led discussions on the effect of hull form on the seakeeping of Noah’s Ark for the AiG Creation Museum.”
Diagnosis: Pseudoscience hardly comes more obviously pseudoscientific than the delusional nonsense Magnuson is engaged in. Probably relatively harmless, though.