A Catholic creationist in Lincoln

A Catholic creationist in Lincoln
On Saturday Feb 3, 2007 I had in interesting introduction to Catholic young Earth creationism. I attended a talk The Judgement of Modern Science on the Theory of Evolution by Dr. Joseph Strada, PhD - Aerospace Engineering, at the Blessed JohnXXIII Diocesan Center in Lincoln. Strada's talk was sponsored by the Denton Knights of Columbus. He's associated with the Kolbe Center (and apparently other conservative Catholic organizations.) The moderator (English accent) made much of Strada's credentials which seem oriented to flight rather than design. Strada was apparently at one time an advisor to Vice-President Cheney.

The talk was sparsely attended (~30). About half the attendees were students and at least the 3 sitting directly behind me were home schooled. The talk itself was apologetics in the style of Answers in Genesis. AIG was recommended as a source at the end of the talk. Notable were his use of the 2nd law argument and the Paluxy footprints which AIG warns against. The influence of Darwin on Stalin and Hitler was mentioned several times. Strada suggested that hybrid sterility (e.g. lions and tigers) was a strong argument against evolution (should be interfertile if one evolved from the other) and he suggested that this was consistent with them being of the same "kind". He seemed unaware that the argument was parallel for "kinds" and species. Later on he talked of the difficulties of giraffe evolution, but ignored the fact that okapis are likely "of the same kind". He presented standard and superfical arguments concerning sedimentation and fossilization. He stated that mutations were always detrimental and that they couldn't create information.

Strada spent time on Michael Behe's arguments and held up Richard Sternberg as a creationist hero and martyr. He emphasized that evolution was probabilistically "impossible" and backed this up with quotes from respected scientists. Plausibility of models was not discussed. He seemed to think little of the Pontifical Acadamy of Sciences which is "80% non-Catholic" and the remaining 20% of Catholics are "all evolutionists". He suggested that John Paul II's statement "evolution is more than a hypothesis" was mistranslated and more properly reads "evolution is more than one hypothesis".

Les Lane