Andrew Snelling is a creationist geologist. Yes, sounds like an oxymoron, but he apparently uses his degree to promote christian stuff
But there seems to be a problem
One would guess that he intends on finding evidence within those rock samples to “prove” that the Grand Canyon was carved out by Noah’s flood.
So why is the park service reluctant to let a PhD geologist pick some rocks?
So, where do we draw the line? Very few people are officially allowed to disturb or remove things from national parks. They are a bit like big museums that can actually be fun to hang out in (if you like that sort of fun). They present the scientific/naturalist view of our semi-wild lands. Is this an infringement on religious freedom?
(Note that a key element in religion is faith, which is not a thing that you can prove. Ultimately, Snellings goal, if it is what one would guess, would seem to be fundamentally misguided, making it a genuine waste of an irreplaceable natural resource.)
Doesn’t look like we have access to the application. But not needing park rocks, as indicated in the linked article, or just writing a bad proposal are plenty good reasons. I’m curious how often removal is allowed, and why.
I don’t see how having aPhD is relevant. I have one too; that doesn’t grant me access to all and everything related to my field.
Snelling is free to espouse whatever religious beliefs he wishes. But the administration of public property should not be based on religious beliefs.
The government didn’t just decide to “present the scientific/naturalist view” rather than the young Earth creationist view or some other religious view. The government is following the evidence and the evidence says the Earth is four billion years old.
Any scientific expeditions that are conducted in public land should be ones that are evidence based. Snelling and other YEC investigators will be entitled to equal access to public lands when they have accumulated an equal amount of evidence to support their ideas.
I don’t see why the government didn’t simply grant his request. The canyon is big enough that nobody could possibly tell the difference if 5,000 rocks were removed.
It is perhaps of note that the research he did in the peer review and the research he did for creationist sites are of slightly different quality. And conclusion.
But the really strange thing about this is that the views of these two Drs Snelling, on matters such as the age of the earth and its geological strata, are diametrically opposed. This article, the result of my extensive searches through the literature, highlights this remarkable coincidence and poses some serious questions of credibility for the Creation Science Foundation and for either or both of the Drs Andrew A Snelling.
For convenience I refer to them below as follows:
(a) Dr A A Snelling 1 - creationist geologist, a director of CSF and regular contributor to, and sometime editor of, the CSF's quarterly magazine, Ex Nihilo (now CREATION ex nihilo).
(b) Dr A A Snelling 2 - consulting geologist who works on uranium mineralisation and publishes in refereed scientific journals.
Snelling 1 seldom, if ever, cites articles written by Snelling 2 and Snelling 2 never cites articles written by Snelling 1.
This might be a good question if the line wasn’t so clearly ten miles via car to the nearest airport, then 1000 miles via plane directly up Andrew Snelling’s asshole. And I put about as much thought into that metaphor as this guy put into his entire field of research. More, even - I had the self-awareness to notice halfway through writing it that it was was fuckin’ stupid.
If you say, “I am a young earth creationist research scientist”, the correct response is, “Yeah, and I’m a vegan cannibal.” There’s clearly an intense disconnect between those two descriptors. YECs are not real scientists. They aren’t aiming for real science. They don’t practice the scientific method. If they did, they wouldn’t be YECs. Instead, their goal is to obfuscate, fudge, deny, and lie as long as they can get away with it, to attempt to give their bronze-age superstition the veneer of respectability. These people shouldn’t get any assistance from the government, because their goals are fundamentally opposed to what is good for society. Society benefits from a good understanding of science; the entire purpose of YEC “science” is to mislead the public.
Nah. People have the right to be wrong about all kinds of things; they don’t have the right to force the government to respect their wrongness in the government’s actions. Science is not “another religion”, regardless of what AiG wants to have us believe.
Got it in one.
Because it’s an irreplaceable waste of a resource on making the world a worse place? Because we can’t just let anyone take shit from our national parks? Because there are probably researchers who deserve it, and aren’t dishonest, lying shills for a denialist industry?
I suspect that he knew his grant would be rejected and the plan all along was to sue, either to gain attention and bolster his reputation among other YECs, or as an attempt to eventually get a ruling (perhaps by SCOTUS) further increasing the strength and scope of the RFRA, specifically as it relates to issues of science education and government grants.
But the canyon is very old. It’ll outlast you and everyone you know (Trump willing). It’s a tragedy of the commons thing : if every so often one guy comes along to take some rocks (on top of the ones the tourists are undoubtedly nicking), the next generation has less, and so on. The whole point of national parks is to preserve nature as pristine as possible for everybody to enjoy - not just today, but in a thousand years too. Which is why y’alls don’t let any yahoo with a “research project” take rocks, cut petrified redwoods, hack a teeny tiny bit off Washington’s nose on Mt. Rushmore and so on.
I think of the underlying issue as being one of establishing boundaries. A YEC could argue that the government supports demon science (from their point of view), which compromises their religious freedom (in the sense that it makes it harder for them to spread their gospel and expand their numbers – apparently a crucial element to religion – by denigrating their beliefs), so they deserve equal footing to fight this.
But do they? To what extent should government tolerate religious eccentricities? I mean, no state in the US recognizes plural marriage, which the Mormon and Islamic faiths, amongst others, support. Yet, the abuses that the church of Scientology apparently engage in are ignored. There seems to be some question as to where the lines should be drawn.
I think it is a ridiculous suit, which ought to be laughed out of court. But the current administration does not seem inclined to duly protect public lands, so this kind of thing could possibly gain more traction than it should. And that worries me a little.
Completely spurious case, more about PR than anything else.
Any geologist wanting to remove rocks from a national park rightly has to jump through a lot of hoops (if they just let anyone who claimed to remove rocks do so they would be incredibly negligent).
They treated his application seriously (you could argue too seriously) and they found very good scientific reasons to deny it.
I’m a PhD hydrologist who works in multiple high-profile parks (not Grand Canyon, but I’ve had research permits from Yosemite and Death Valley). They’re reluctant to let anybody, regardless of their qualifications, “pick some rocks.” A big part of their reluctance comes from the mission of the National Park Service: “preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the national park system for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.” Removing material from the natural setting is clearly at odds with unimpaired preservation.
They’ll allow it when it’s necessary, but it’s always a difficult thing to justify, and science - even science requested and funded by the Park Service itself - often takes a back seat to preservation. It’s never been any trouble to get a permit to take photos, even in places that don’t allow public access. There are a few more hoops to jump through when you’re talking about using instruments to measure things on-site: is it in designated wilderness? Is there a risk of contamination? How much disturbance is involved in taking this measurement? All those things can be worked out if you’re a little flexible and willing to go back and forth in good faith with the park research coordinator, but they take time and trust to get done.
Removing material is another story altogether. In 8 projects I’ve done on DOI facilities (national parks and wildlife refuges), I’ve only ever been permitted to remove material on one. The research coordinator for that park is someone I’ve worked with for the better part of a decade, a coauthor of multiple papers, and a friend. It took months for us to agree on the sampling protocols and permit conditions that would result in a sample that (a) I could use and (b) they would allow. It’s by no means a given that you’ll be able to take samples just because they’re “for science.”
I expect it’s especially tough if your idea of “science” differs from the park research coordinator.
The canyon is bigger than the park itself. Upstream from the park is Grand Staircase National Monument; downstream is Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument. It’s the same geologic formation, but National Monuments are specifically designated because of (among other things) scientific interest, and the Park Service is far more willing to grant sampling permits there than in the parks themselves. If I were looking for samples from the Grand Canyon, I wouldn’t even think of asking to take them from the park.
Religion is kind of like Rule 34 on the internet – if you can think of it, someone out there has a dogmatic belief in it, and would like government support or protection for it. So, do we “draw the line” at unpopular religions only? Or are there other criteria we should consider?
It oughtn’t matter whether the religion is unpopular or not, no religion should get special consideration that causes it to ignore rules or be above the law.
…Which is easy to say, but damned if they still aren’t all cheerfully avoiding taxes for no clear reason.
But Enginerd has an interesting take. It makes sense that the parks would generally turn down destructive testing when it’s just for the sake of testing. Unless there is some need to save* the park in some way, or there is a health/safety issue for the visitors, I can see why the answer would be “NO”.
*I don’t mean “save” in the Christian sense of saving one’s soul
Well, you know, he could go to Wyoming. Drive over the passes in the Bighorns, or down through Wind River Gorge: all along there, you see signs that identify the rock type that you are driving past and tell you how old the formation is. There are lots of rocks they say are thousands of millions of years old. He can stop by the roadside and chip off a piece here and there and prove those signs wrong. His hard-on for the Big Ditch could easily be satisfied in any number of other places.
