I’m really worried that Dana Hunter is going to explode. Or at least her liver might.

Dana, you may recall, is an earth science specialist, and she’s going through the ACE Earth Science PACEs one at a time and dissecting their lessons. Well, she was. Then she hit Science 1086 and sent me this email:

Subject: ZOMG I hate these idiots Message: I just finished days of fact-checking and debunking Science 1086. I didn’t actually count the stuff they got right, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t need to use both hands. This is educational malpractice. It shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t know if the US will ever extract its head from its ass long enough to outlaw this crap, but I hope we get there. Britain should be burning this stuff. I can’t believe you survived several years of this with a functioning mind….

I’m not sure I did finish several years of it with a functioning mind, but my mind is functioning now, which allows me to appreciate Dana’s annihilation of the PACEs. Apart from her constant exasperation (expressed largely in the form of GIFs), I found these highly educational. I knew the creationism was dodgy, but I hadn’t realised just how shaky ACE’s grip on more mundane aspects of science can be. Here are the parts you should check out…

In this installment, ACE gets things about the ocean wrong.

At the present rate of sedimentation (the settling of sediment), about four thousand years would be required to deposit the amount of sediment found today on the ocean’s floor. This means that sediment began to be deposited onto a clean ocean floor just after the Flood and has been building up ever since.

Ha ha ha ha no.

No, Mr. Hwē‘ lər, it has not. In fact, let’s have a look at what we really discovered when actual scientists drilled into the ocean floor in the Guatemala Basin, about where this book places its fictional pseudoscientists. Hmmm. Ocean crust formed 11-13 million years ago at the Galapagos hotspot… 446 meters of pelagic sediment on to of the crust, which dates from the late Miocene to the Pleistocene, which is only about, oh, from 11 million to 2 million years ago. Never mind there’s no uniform rate of sedimentation across the entire ocean: the data in this location alone leaves them dead in the water.

This post also contains the following picture, which is kind of the TL;DR summary of my entire blog:

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We have arrived at the section of Science PACE 1086 wherein someone who knows bugger-all about rocks will proceed to explain rock types. There is so much wrong we’ll have to split it into groups, and even then, I’m not sure the posts will be short enough to prevent acute creationist crap poisoning. I do know I just spent the better part of five hours dealing with just the errors in the opening paragraphs.

I recommend padding all hard spaces within a 12-block radius before we begin.

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I’m boggled. I have no idea how they manage to get so much wrong. It doesn’t even make sense – I mean, there are several creationist canards, and I know why those are there, but they fail at facts that even Answers in Genesis gets right. It’s like they got their information about rocks from a source translated from French, which was translated from Tagalog, which was translated from a paper written in Pig Latin by someone who’d never seen a rock in their life, but heard something about them once.

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You’d think something as basic as the three basic rock types would be hard to screw up. But if there’s one thing the authors of ACE excel at, it’s abject failure to get anything right. I mean, a stray fact here or there sneaks in, but the poor lonely things are isolated, surrounded by vast tracts of utter wrongness. One wonders what they’re doing there.

[This is my favourite part]

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I doubt whether anyone sympathetic to ACE will take note of Dana because she’s so belligerent about this, but they should. ACE mangles science that has no bearing on creationism. This should matter to everyone.

She hasn’t even covered my favourite faux pas in Science 1086 yet:

[M]any-layered fossils have also been found in Germany, France, the British Isles, and California. Scientists have found a fossilized whale extending through many rock layers near Santa Barbara, California. Such many-layered fossils give evidence that strata did not form in an orderly manner over long periods of time. Rather, these fossils give evidence that the layers formed quickly, as layers could have during a large flood, such as the Genesis Flood. As always, ACE gives no reference for its information, which is why fact-checking PACEs is so time-consuming. Often, they don’t even give enough detail to make fact-checking possible; you’re just left with a sense that they’ve probably not told you everything. In this case, they give a location, which means it’s possible to Google it. Turns out, they’re almost certainly talking about this. Creationists usually give more detail, and claim the fossil was buried vertically, which it wasn’t. It was found at a 40-50º angle, and geologists observed that it had been buried on the sea floor, and plate tectonics and folding had tilted it. As Talk Origins summarises the discussion: It appears the creationists repeating this whale-of-a-tale, (including the editors of Creation Ex Nihilo) either failed to check their facts or didn’t want a good story to be ruined by the facts. In either case, none of these people apparently took the time and trouble to find out what the facts were before putting pen to paper. What they claim to be God’s truth is nothing more than an urban folktale used to validate personal religious beliefs. Perfect for a PACE, then. Related posts: Evolution is a conspiracy

Top 5 lies taught by Accelerated Christian Education

I quit