Today’s brand new card – Duane Gish
August 14th, 2008 Posted in Game CardsDuane Gish is a prominent Creationist and former director of the Institute for Creation Research. He’s an avuncular figure; the sort of relative you would choose to have, if you could actually choose relatives, and if you didn’t mind that he was a certifiable nutjob.
You see, Gish is of the opinion that the Earth is only six thousand years old, and that therefore almost everything we have discovered in the last two centuries is false.
Gish is rare in the world of young-earth creationism in that he actually has an education worthy of recognition. He holds a real PhD (not a joke one, like many others including Kent Hovind), and it’s in a relevant subject – biochemistry – from a real university – UC Berkeley. Some of this might make you question why I gave him an 8/10 for stupidity, as he is clearly well educated. Well, I think the answer to that is fairly obvious: many people have an excuse of ignorance to explain their beliefs in young earth creationism, but Gish does not. He should know better. But yet he totally fails to keep up to date with modern knowledge. It’s like he found a nugget of gold twenty years ago: a theory that he wanted to believe so badly that he froze his brain and ceased all contact with rational thought from that date onwards.
Gish is not an evil man, he’s just deluded. He doesn’t get rich from his crazy beliefs, and he isn’t causing a great deal of harm; unless you consider the damage he is attempting to do to the American educational system. The reason he gets a card, except from the fact that he is such a prominent figure in the creationist movement, is simply because he is a sad example of what a delusional belief system can do to a bright mind when left to fester for decades.
Duane Gish
