The Real Dr. Snelling Stands Up

Back in the early 1990s, the creation ministry in Australia was under ferocious attacks from a group called The Australian Skeptics, led by several university and other prominent academics. This was due to the ministry’s high public profile because of regular ministry in public schools and on university campuses.

The Accusation

One such attack on me personally was in an article published in 1991 in the magazine The Skeptic by Dr. Alex Ritchie, at the time a senior paleontologist at The Australian Museum in Sydney. The article was titled “Will the Real Dr Snelling Please Stand Up?”

In this article, Dr. Ritchie went to great lengths to quote copiously from creationist literature to demonstrate conclusively that I am unashamedly a young-earth creationist geologist. No big deal about that!

However, Dr. Ritchie then proceeded to quote (selectively) from a technical paper I had written on the Koongarra uranium deposits for a volume on The Geology of the Mineral Deposits of Australia and Papua New Guinea published in 1990 by the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. The quotations referred to details of the geological history of the rocks hosting the uranium deposits as cited in the conventional literature. Because I thus mentioned the millions of years dates claimed for these rocks, Dr. Ritchie accused me of dishonesty by being two-faced or being a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Hence his challenging question “Will the real Dr. Snelling please stand up?”

This accusation has been around for 30 years and has been answered numerous times, often only in emails. The original perpetrator (Alex Ritchie) has now met his Creator who he claimed didn’t exist. Yet anti-creationist websites have reposted Dr. Ritchie’s article in order to continue the attack on my integrity. So a public response is in order.

The Response

In my teens as a young Christian, I investigated the issues concerning creation and the flood biblically and scientifically. I became convinced of a literal six-day creation and a literal global flood cataclysm based on the authority of God’s Word and the confirming scientific evidence. I have since always been a young-earth creationist.

When I did my PhD research at a public (secular) university and worked for several mining companies, I was bound to work according to the conventional model. In any case, you don’t need the rocks to be millions of years old to go and explore to find new ore deposits. You use mapping, rock and soil sampling, geochemistry, and geophysics (both airborne and ground) to explore prospective rocks to find targets that can then be drilled. The rocks may be labeled as Precambrian and claimed to be millions of years old, but that is irrelevant.

However, in my PhD thesis and later in this paper on the Koongarra uranium deposits, I was duty bound to use the conventional terminology, even as I still do. After all, other creationist geologists and I still refer to Precambrian layers in creationist geology papers without claiming to accept the millions of years. Otherwise, people wouldn’t know which layers we were referring to. So, for example, in a paper I am currently writing on the rocks in the crystalline basement of the Inner Gorges of the Grand Canyon that will be eventually published in AiG’s Answers Research Journal, a creationist publication, this is what I say:

The east-west trending Grand Canyon presents spectacular exposures for 200 km of the Lower Proterozoic (Paleoproterozoic) rocks of the crystalline basement beneath the Colorado Plateau (Karlstrom et al. 2003).

However, the work of Hawkins et al. (1996), Ilg et al. (1996), and Karlstrom et al. (2003) permits a stratigraphic interpretation in which the metasedimentary rocks within the Canyon’s inner gorges are broadly of similar rock type and age (1.73-1.75 Ga).

I am making it clear that this is what is said in the conventional literature about these rocks. I am not claiming that’s what I believe.

Notice I still use terms such as Lower Proterozoic and refer to ages of 1.73–1.75 Ga (Giga annum = billions of years). However, notice that I also reference the sources of that claim, sources in the conventional literature. So I am making it clear that this is what is said in the conventional literature about these rocks. I am not claiming that’s what I believe.

By 1990 when the paper on the Koongarra uranium deposits was published by the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, I was a known creationist. The editor, Frank Hughes, of the proposed volume on The Geology of the Mineral Deposits of Australia and Papua New Guinea asked the company who at that time owned those uranium deposits for a paper on them. So, as my PhD was on those deposits and I had for a time worked for that company, I was asked to contribute the paper on the Koongarra uranium deposits.

Knowing I was a creationist, the editor insisted I use the conventional terminology. However, in doing so, I always referenced that terminology with conventional sources and made sure I never said I believed the millions of years. It was always “according to Joe Bloggs these schists are dated at 1.8 Ga.” There was no dishonesty involved because I never said I had dated the rocks accordingly.

Now notice how the skeptic Dr. Ritchie quoted my paper:

“The Archaean basement consists of domes of granitoids and granitic gneisses (the Nanambu Complex), the nearest outcrop being 5 km to the north. Some of the lowermost overlying Proterozoic metasediments were accreted to these domes during amphibolite grade regional metamorphism (5 to 8 kb and 550° to 630° C) at 1870 to 1800 Myr. Multiple isoclinal recumbent folding accompanied metamorphism.”1

For the benefit of lay readers, Dr. Ritchie then purported to summarize and simplify that statement:

“The oldest rocks in the Koongarra area, domes of granitoids and granitic gneiss, are of Archaean age (ie to geologists this means they are older than 2500 million years). The Archaean rocks are mantled by Lower Proterozoic (younger than 2500 million years) metasediments: all were later buried deeply, heavily folded and, between 1870 and 1800 million years ago, were subjected to regional metamorphism at considerable temperatures and pressures.”2

However, what did Dr. Ritchie leave out? I prefaced the above comments with:

“The regional geology has been described in detail by Needham and Stuart-Smith (1908) and by Needham (1984).”

In other words, he deliberately left out the context so he could then accuse me of being dishonest by supposedly promoting the millions of years while publicly being a creationist. However, he was the one being deceitful because those reading his article accusing me of dishonesty would have no access to my paper to check the context for themselves.

So, in this paper on the Koongarra uranium deposits, I never said I believed the millions of years. The context shows that I very purposefully and clearly prefaced the description of the rocks hosting the uranium deposits with the sources in the conventional literature written by conventional geologists. There was no dishonesty at all. I was simply following the mandated protocol that everyone uses. Context is everything.

Conclusion

If critics cannot attack our science, they attack the scientists personally to undermine their integrity.

As I said above, if critics cannot attack our science, they attack the scientists personally to undermine their integrity. And context is everything. This skeptic Dr. Ritchie who attacked me deliberately failed to tell his readers the context, which was an inconvenient truth. He instead constructed a straw man that he could deceitfully use to smear me.

Since this response is now public with the full details that expose Dr. Ritchie’s deceitful accusation, I challenge those anti-creationists who continue to post and use Dr. Ritchie’s fallacious article to take it down. Otherwise, they, too, are being deceitful.