WHAT should a scientific society do when creationists want to participate in its conferences? This question faces many scientific organisations in the US. At meetings of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in 2009 and 2010, young-Earth creationists, who think Noah’s flood was a historical event and the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, presented posters, gave talks and led field trips.

I attended a number of these events, and I can attest that the creationists were careful to give mainstream presentations using standard geologic methods. They referred to the geologic timeline of millions and billions of years. Nowhere did the words “Noah’s flood” appear. Nothing in their presentations revealed that they thought the Grand Canyon’s upper rocks were deposited in a year and that dinosaurs and humans once lived together.

It’s not surprising that they were able to do so: the presenters had received decent geology educations from legitimate institutions. Geologically, they could talk the talk and walk the walk. But why? What is the point of giving a talk on marine strata in the late Cretaceous, as Marcus Ross of Liberty University, a Christian college in Lynchburg, Virginia, did, when you actually think the Earth is only a few thousand years old?

The point is to be able to claim legitimacy. Creationists have used their participation in conferences to argue that their ideas are taken seriously by real scientists. After the 2009 GSA meeting, for example, Steve Austin of the Institute for Creation Research in Dallas, Texas, proclaimed that creationists had been influential at the meeting. “There are many within the GSA that take seriously the creation and flood narrative text of the Bible,” he claimed. After the 2010 meeting, a press release from the fundamentalist Cedarville University in Ohio crowed: “Cedarville leaders talked about alternative views for how the rocks formed, emphasizing short time spans and catastrophic formation… rather than slow formation over millions of years.”


Geologists are understandably fuming. After I wrote about attending a creationist-led field trip at the 2010 GSA meeting for the American Geological Institute’s magazine Earth, a number of GSA members expressed their outrage. Many proposed that presentations by creationists be banned outright. Scientific conferences, they said, have no obligation to include non-scientific ideas; astronomy conferences do not welcome astrology talks, so why does the GSA tolerate young-Earth creationists who reject the foundational principles of geology? Some cited the GSA’s position statement: “Creationism is not science because it invokes supernatural phenomena that cannot be tested.”

Astronomy conferences don’t welcome astrology talks so why do geologists tolerate creationism?

My view, though, is that a blanket ban on presentations by creationists would be a mistake as it would hand them a PR coup.

Science is a process. The methods of science are much more important than any particular result. Indeed, the self-correcting process of science has on rare occasions resulted in big shifts in thinking. Within living memory, geologists dismissed the idea that the crust of the planet could move as crazy. Now we know that plate tectonics has radically reshaped our planet.

Most outlandish ideas turn out to be wrong, of course, but conferences can be a place for them to be scrutinised by the gimlet eyes of science. As long as research conforms to the standards of the discipline, and involves real data collected by standard methods, then it merits more than summary rejection.

I am not suggesting that the ideas of young-Earth creationism will ever be accepted by mainstream geology. But if scientific societies impose bans, then the creationists win an important victory: they will be able to make a plausible claim of censorship and discrimination.

Creationists have already shown themselves to be ready and willing to take advantage of such claims. In the US they are especially litigious. The California Science Center in Los Angeles recently paid out $110,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the creationist-sympathising American Freedom Alliance after the centre cancelled a private AFA screening of the intelligent design film Darwin’s Dilemma. AFA claimed that the decision violated its right to free speech.

While the exclusion of creationists can pose problems, their inclusion at conferences does little harm. The reputations of scientific organisations are largely unaffected, as few people even notice. Creationists will use their participation to claim acceptance, but most scientists understand that a 15-minute talk or a poster presentation does not carry the same weight as a paper in Nature or Science. A few posters hardly challenge an entire scientific discipline.

The GSA is not the only organisation facing this issue: the Society for Developmental Biology, the Entomological Society of America and the American Society for Cell Biology have all encountered similar problems. And it’s not just at these relatively informal meetings that creationists have surfaced. Peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as the Journal of Paleontology and Geology, have published – almost certainly without being aware of the authors’ true views and motivations – papers by creationists arguing minor details of what they imagine occurred during Noah’s flood.

Scientific organisations will continue to experience creationist infiltration; this week’s GSA meeting will include several presentations by creationists. But it is important for scientists not to overreact and to remember that science is far stronger than any creationist attempts to undermine it.