This is not an April fool story

I was going to write an April fool story, but the day came, and I cannot remember what I was going to write. This phenomenon is known as Craft disease, or creeping senility. My wife, alas, cannot even remember my telling her, admittedly a couple of months ago, that I was going to write what I was going to write.

But cheer up! All is not lost. Danny Faulkner comes to the rescue. Dr. Danny R. Faulkner is the chief astronomer at Answers in Genesis. If you wanted to be catty, you could say he was Ken Ham’s court astronomer.

Dr. Faulkner posted an article last week and verified that the redshifts of galaxies and quasars are “cosmological” in origin. This fact will come as no surprise to most readers of The Panda’s Thumb, but Dr. Faulkner’s intention seems to have been to convince young-earth creationists (whom he calls recent creationists) of this well-known fact.

Having established that redshifts are “real,” Dr. Faulkner then admonishes his fellow “recent” creationists that they must accept that fact and find some cogent explanation within a recent-creation framework. To my mind, that is a bit like saying that we must accept the evidence that the Earth is approximately spherical and find some cogent explanation within a flat-Earth framework.

I can think of several possible explanations for this odd behavior (though I think commenters will come up with many more). I reject the possibility that Dr. Faulkner does it only for the vast sums of money he is paid by Mr. Ham. Further, it seems unlikely to me that he is a mole sent in by the Center for Inquiry or even Michael Shermer to undermine belief in a “recent” creation, though it seems to me his article should do precisely that.

No, ever the optimist, I think that Dr. Faulkner is on the brink of having an epiphany and rejecting young-Earth creationism in favor of some vastly more sensible religious belief.

We can only hope.