Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Carl Baugh. This “Creation Scientist” (a term found in the oxymoron dictionary between “American culture” and “Microsoft Works”) is so spectacularly full of bull that even other Creationists have tried to distance themselves. Seriously, even Answers in Genesis wants nothing to do with him.

So you may feel I’m attacking a straw man. And, well, if I were, it would still be a fun straw man to attack.

Actually, there are a couple of serious reasons to discuss Baugh. For one, he was brought to wider fame by my childhood hero Kenneth Copeland. I watched the two week TV series they made together as a child in the mid-90s, and I believed every word of it. VHS copies are still out there. I think I saw it still for sale on Copeland’s website earlier this year, but it’s not there now.

The other reason this is relevant is that it seems Carl Baugh had some influence on the Creationism taught in Accelerated Christian Education. Admittedly, I never saw the most barking of these claims in my PACEs, but Baugh was mentioned by name. Several of the claims that he makes which are denied by other Creationists show up in the PACEs. It’s not surprising; Baugh’s Creation Evidences Museum is just 69 miles from ACE’s Texas HQ. Both Baugh and ACE are at the loonier end of the already unhinged Creationist spectrum. They are the only Creationist groups I know of who still support the Paluxy tracks idea, for example.

So, here are some outstanding claims Baugh makes in his Evidences for Creation series, with Kenneth Copeland.

5. Rocks Can Talk

“And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.”

Luke 19:40

If you’re someone who claims the Bible is literally true, even allegorical verses like this take on supreme importance. Here’s Baugh’s attempt to prove that Jesus was not using a metaphor:

“Jesus said these rocks would cry out. Now, they do. Do you know that every time you speak in the presence of a rock, the vibrations of your voice cause a molecular shift on the surface so that rock actually records what you’ve said?”

4. The Sky Is Pink

Sometimes when people say parents have the right to teach children according to their own beliefs, I say, “Well, what if they think the sky is pink?” I am not being satirical. Baugh literally claims that, when God made the Earth, the sky was pink. It stayed pink until Noah’s flood, when it turned blue.

Baugh claims that the pre-Flood Earth was surrounded by a hydrogen canopy, and this provided a pink tint to the sky. Baugh maintains hydrogen, when put under “cryogenic conditions”, pressurised, and with “added energy”, bonded into a crystalline lattice, a crystalline metal, transparent apart from a fine grains of opaque superconductors.

“That canopy above the Earth, and charged hydrogen in that canopy, would glow pink. Thus we have a gentle, pinkish glow, but it permits the full spectrum of light to come in.”

3. Stars and Planets Make Audible Music

“…the morning stars sang together…” Job 38:7

Again, the Bible is the literal truth of God! So, obviously, the stars sing. Baugh’s explanation of this is long-winded, to say the least. Here are the crucial bits:

“The cellular structure of our bodies responds to galactic vibrations, not as Astrologers would indicate, but for the benefit of man so he’s free to make a decision to respond to God… The stars are now in chaos, but the stars originally, all the star bodies were programmed… so that man, in the antenna of the DNA in each cell of his body could respond to harmony… “Originally there were ten planets, not nine, in this solar system… The planets have a proportional mean by which one expands in its orbit beyond the preceding one, that same proportion extends to the next one, giving us the musical scale. What this actually does, as they vibrate in their orbits, in their cycle, together they give us the musical scale, so that innately times and seasons are programmed and felt. “Now notice that all of the scale, E flat, E, B, D, B, G, uh, C sharp, E flat, F… all of the scale is represented except the musical note A… A is missing. A would have been represented by that planet which is called Phaeton by the astronomers. It is a phantom planet. It is not in existence today, but where it should have been is the asteroid belt, and there’s a lot of debris filling all of this. So originally in the design, that was represented, so you had a perfect musical harmony sensed and felt. “In Job 38:7 the Scripture states that the morning stars sang together. They are singing. The physicist from Italy recording the stellar vibrations in radio signals… Those were picked up, and she actually found that there’s a harmony and melody flow in the music she was able to synthesise from those vibrations. However what we’re picking up today has been distorted [by sin]… “Before the time of Noah’s flood, when we had that firmament in place, remember I stated it was crystalline in nature, had an electromagnetic field. I’m sure as a young lad you built radio crystal receiver sets… A crystal, an electromagnetic field, and an antenna… That’s all it takes to pick up the local radio station. Here we have essentially the same context… When the Scriptures says the stars sang together, for years I said that’s figurative, allegorical passage meaning God blended the harmony of the universe… Before the flood, you actually had a receiver set so at least innately, and probably to some degree audibly, you could hear the beautiful harmony early in the morning because the energy line was charged at a greater level… For probably an hour early in the morning, you were serenaded audibly, and certainly innately, by the vibrations of the stars.“

Too Long Didn’t Read: Baugh claims that the afore-mentioned hydrogen canopy on the earth acted as a crystal radio receiver to pick up musical signals sent by the stars.

No, I have no idea how Baugh can claim the entire musical scale would have been represented by ten planets (8 + Pluto and Phaeton), when there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale (which is a human construct anyway).

2. Fire Breathing Dragons Are Real

The Book of Job, chapter 41, has a strong claim to being the coolest passage in the Bible. It describes Leviathan, a sea monster which can breathe fire:

“Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.”

Of course, the Biblical infallibilist Baugh maintains that every letter of Scripture is absolute Word of God, so he needs to explain how a fire breathing dragon came about (he oddly decided not to tackle Unicorns, however).

First of all, Baugh discusses the bombardier beetle as evidence of living creatures creating fire. While he’s about it, he claims that this is an example of irreducible complexity.

Next he pulls out a fossil from China which he claims is proof of a monster that could breathe fire, giving credence to the old Chinese legend. I haven’t been able to find this fossil by googling, but what he says sounds like “Unaneesis.”

Then we get this explanation of how breathing fire is absolutely plausible for the creature described in Job, as all the conditions for controlled fire are present:

“You’ll find that Job speaks in three verses of seals, indicating airtight chambers (controlled humidity). Then it speaks of the fact that when he wheezes, his eyes begin to glow (indicators of friction and electricity). Oxygen – he breathes fire in the atmosphere. When he churned the sea, it smelled like ointment. Early ointment was sulfur-based. All that’s needed is phosphorous. The Bible describes the water glowing at night. So he could breathe fire.”

Too Long Didn’t Read: Carl Baugh says that dragons exist because of a fossil and the Bible.

1. T-Rex was a Vegetarian

If you believe that all animals were made in a literal week of Creation, and that there was no death before Adam’s Fall, you have to believe that every creature in history was a vegetarian to begin with. So never mind that a carnivore’s digestive tract is too short to process cellulose, or that their teeth aren’t adapted to chewing vegetation. Sabre tooth cats, modern bears, T-Rex, badgers, hedgehogs, and humans – they all co-existed in the garden of Eden, and they all ate vegetables and Linda McCartney sausages.

So then…

Well, adults can believe what they want. But foisting this stuff onto children is not on. Of these claims, only number 1 is taught directly by ACE (in Science 1108), but they also push the canopy theory of pre-Flood earth. As TalkOrigins helpfully points out, this means “we find Noah et al living in a 13,000 psi boiler. Is this credible?”

Accelerated Christian Education’s final biology workbook (Science 1108), says, “Dr. Carl Baugh [is] a noted Creation scientist.” It goes on to talk approvingly about his work.

I’m going to have to say it again: This is in a curriculum that a UK government agency has approved.

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“Some researchers have concluded that due to the pre-Flood atmospheric conditions which had greater amounts of oxygen, man could have run up to two hundred miles without suffering fatigue. It has been discovered in hyperbaric medical chamber experiments that under these circumstances, an open wound would heal overnight. It is therefore understandable how man could have lived to be several hundred years old, even after the fall, in this pre-Flood world, Heavier air pressure and more oxygen in the atmosphere were conducive to longer life.”