Andy McIntosh
Friday 13th May 2005, Andy McIntosh: "Why Creation is Important"
This was more an impassioned sermon than a lecture. The speaker's voice rose to its highest pitch when he declared that The Bible is Always True. Genesis is history not poetry. The world was created in 7 actual days, 6000 years ago. The most revealing point to me was an illustration of the Garden of Eden built on a charnel house of bones, to show that the Creation could not have been the result of prior evolution, since it was idyllic. It was only after "the fall" that death entered the world and animals became "red in tooth and claw". Precisely how this surprising effect of Adam and Eve eating the apple came about was not made clear. It was maintained that the express purpose of evolutionists is to undermine the Bible, because they are first of all atheists and secular humanists. - Report by George Jellis on the Leicester Creation Conference
Andy McIntosh is probably the best known of the creationists in British academia. He is a Professor of Thermodynamics (basically chemical engineering) at the University of Leeds. McIntosh is also an uncompromising young earth creationist (YEC) whose work appears on the website of the YEC organisation Answers in Genesis (US) at http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/origin-of-attack-defense-structures
The BCSE is not in the position of criticising people for their religious opinions. People who are or have been involved in the BCSE include three ordained ministers and a wide variety of opinions and beliefs about religion across the spectrum. However, we are deeply concerned about the use of religion to promote pseudo-science in education and therefore provide some background on the professor's publicly stated religious opinions. These are here.
McIntosh is also a highly activist creationist. He was spokesman for and signatory to the 2002 letter to Estelle Morris (1). He is a regular speaker on the creationist circuit in the UK and is actively associated with the Biblical Creation Society and Answers in Genesis. According to this web page Andy McIntosh is, or was, Vice President of the Creation Science Movement.
He is head of Truth in Science and is author of numerous creationist articles and books on creationism. See this article on Mcintosh's view of the second law of thermodynamics.
He is author of the book "Genesis for Today" (foreword by Ken Ham, head of Answers in Genesis). He is one of the 50 names providing their personal creationist testimonies in the book "In Six Days". He co-authored with Stuart Burgess the creationist book “Creationism Expounded”. McIntosh has also written a preface to Stuart Burgess’s book "Hallmarks of Design: Evidence of Design in the Natural World". Indeed, McIntosh has also worked with Stephen Taylor on hocus-pocus geology (see "Genesis and catastrophe The Flood as the major biblical cataclysm" at http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v14/i1/catastrophe.asp.)
The Times Higher Education Supplement reported on 23rd June 2006 that the university where he works plans to introduce two lectures on creationism and intelligent design from Christmas 2006. They will be compulsory for undergraduate students studying zoology and genetics. The university has informed the BCSE that these lectures are an indirect response to creationist organisations and the aim is to provide the students with confidence to engage in an issue which is being increasingly encountered outside the university, including in the press.
According to the Times Higher Education Supplement, "lecturers intend to present the controversial theories as fallacies irreconcilable with scientific evidence." The Supplement also quotes David Read, vice-president of the prestigious Royal Society, as saying that "It would be undesirable for universities to have to spend a lot of precious resources teaching students that creationism and intelligent design are not based on scientific evidence. It is pretty basic stuff."
The Royal Society is deeply concerned about the rise of "creationist science" and its insidious effects on mainstream science and the teaching of the subject.
Nobody gets to be a professor at a Russell League university in the UK without an extremely good track record. That cannot be denied of McIntosh. He was a contemporary of the author of this report at Cranfield Institute of Technology (now Cranfield University); Cranfield is not all that well known because it is almost enirely a post-graduate institution. However, it has a very high reputation in management and engineering, its two main areas of specialisation. By all accounts McIntosh was a seriously bright scholar amongst the engineers there at the time. He had a first class honours degree in mathematics (and that, no doubt, would have involved a lot of physics) from Bangor University and by virtue of this would have entered the university far better qualified than many of his contemporaries.
McIntosh, according to one YEC organisation, "is one of the highest-ranking intellectuals in Britain and is committed to the [young earth creationist] belief that God created the world in 6 days". (http://www.lisburn.com/churches/church-news-2006/mission-real-lives.htm). Given that McIntosh has been involved in Truth in Science, may we remind the reader that anybody who believes in evolution (and the old age of the earth) is, according to McIntosh, a charlatan.
McIntosh, without qualifications in biology and/or geology-related subjects, has stated in public, and without supporting evidence, that "Evolutionary thinking is teetering as a way of looking at the evidence, not because of some isolated problems here and there, but because the whole structure is scientifically wrong." Like all the creationists he fails to put forward an alternative scientific theory of creationism. (See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,59-1625988,00.html.)
He is on record as saying Christians can’t honestly believe in the Theory of Evolution, as if his own opinions on religion are anything but his personal opinions. Perhaps he is unaware of Professor Kenneth Miller (another charlatan, according to the arrogance of Truth in Science). Miller is a practising Catholic and a world-class authority on biology.
Worse still, after the New Humanist magazine published (in 2001) his joint article with Stuart Burgess, Creationism Expounded, and it went unchallenged for six months, Burgess claimed that humanists agreed with them. Not likely; they blew a fuse and pulled it to pieces, finding 15 serious errors of fact and logic. I’ve read both and all I can say is that McIntosh, again, looked damn silly.
(See http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/volume117issue2_comments.php?id=P272_0_13_0_C)
What is emerging slowly in the UK is essentially an off-shoot of the US culture wars in which the fundamentalists are claiming the humanists such as the Brights agree with them. They don’t. Burgess and McIntosh are way outside of mainstream science where the vast majority of practitioners simply do not accept their fundamentalist religious views. Nor do humanists. The British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society are opposed to McIntosh, Burgess and the AiG.
The Rev Michael Roberts, an Anglican vicar and a qualified geologist, also points out a connection between McIntosh and the Vardy schools. Roberts states that McIntosh wrote "Genesis for Today" (Day One Publications UK 1997/2001) arguing that Genesis must be taken literally. He has three appendices on "science" which are full of typical YEC howlers (or a non-literal interpretation of the ninth commandment) such as that radiometric dating is done only on igneous rocks and can't be done on sedimentary rocks, circular reasoning on geological dating from evolution."
Also McIntosh’s book is the main "science" book stocked by the Christian Institute in Newcastle, UK which "sponsors" Emmanuel College and the other Vardy schools whereby British taxpayers money is misused to pay for the teaching of YEC." (see Panda’s Thumb at http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/06/occams_hammer_c.html).
An example of the evidence which McIntosh claims can be used to refute evolution was aired by him at the February 2006 Darwin Day Festival: Bomby, the Bombardier Beetle. Bomby is an unusual beetle that has a form of swivelling jet nozzle that rapidly and repeatedly ejects a chemical mixture onto its attackers. The creationists believe that this is so complex that the beetle could not have evolved from other beetles which did not have it. In fact, evolutionary theory does not assume design and there are about 500 species of Bomby: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html
Let’s have a look at an organisation that McIntosh has been involved in – Truth in Science. This is what Truth in Science says it is about:
"Non-believers must be challenged in such a way that they can no longer hide behind the delusion that science has disproved the existence of God. TIS seeks to encourage scientists to present the truth fairly and to expose as charlatans those who deliberately mislead. Our aim is to compliment the work of existing Creation groups by targeting education in particular."
This is an authoritarian approach to science – those that McIntosh disagrees with are "charlatans" and are to be "exposed" as such. These are respected, decent and highly qualified academics and, indeed, decent members of the public that are to be exposed as charlatans – including academic staff and students.
Lets look a bit more about what Truth in Science has stated: "Do you share this vision? We believe that as children of the Lord Jesus Christ, bought at the price of His own shed blood, we cannot sit back and allow this situation to continue unchallenged. Do you wish to see our children being taught the truth rather than having their moral and spiritual lives undermined?"
Worse still Truth in Science has stated it has "ways and means in mind" of reaching its objectives without saying what these are. They have also stated their intention to complement existing creationist groups. So precisely what are the undisclosed strategy and tactics that these organisations have in mind?
The reader may also want to take a look at this report in the Times Education Supplement: http://www.tes.co.uk/section/story/?section=Archive%E2%8A%82_section=News+%26.... McIntosh is quoted in the TES as saying "education should be analytical not dogmatic, particularly when dealing with science."
"I am surprised that other scientists would only support teaching and learning of Darwinian evolution. My colleagues and I want schools to teach children how to think - not what to think.")
Thanks to the help of a number of people in the BCSE forum, including Drew Smith, we have some extra bits and pieces on Andy McIntosh and his associates. Apparently McIntosh is closely involved with the Tinshill Free Church in Leeds. It has a web site and Drew directed me to this page for its newsletter http://www.tinshill.f9.co.uk/223.pdf where McIntosh has said that the names involved in Truth in Science are Willis Metcalfe, Maurice Roberts, Stephen Layfield), John Perfect and McIntosh himself. Whilst dated September 2004, the McIntosh article states that Truth in Science was "really taking shape".
McIntosh seems to suggest that within the church there is a Creation Ministry. Tinshill seems to be very involved with developing countries.
We still can’t trace who John Perfect is, although Drew has identified that he owns the domain name http://www.truthinscience.org.uk. This is the website of the organisation but is not open to outsiders. It appears that Perfect has written for the Evangelical Times and was (and maybe still is) based in Northallerton in Yorkshire.
Willis Metcalfe is believed to be a Yorkshire farmer. We did a search on him and he appears to be anti-Catholic. Whilst Layfield is best known as head of science at Emmanuel College, during the 1990s he was a science teacher at a Roman Catholic School, St Bede’s Grammar School, in Bradford, in Yorkshire.
However, the Tinshill newsletter throws up another interesting gem of information – Andy McIntosh’s engagements diary, in particular for 20th September 2004. It appears that McIntosh is trying to get to the undergraduates in the first week of their first term at his university (for American’s this is called Freshers week).
According to the diary, McIntosh gave a lunchtime speech to the students on the subject of "Does God exist, has science contradicted the bible?".
One of the BCSE researchers has added the following notes after skimming through back-issues of the Tinshill Free Church magazine. Those from September 2005 (233) to July/August 2006 (242) are available on their web site as pdfs.
At first, they seemed pretty innocuous, mainstream stuff. 236 was broken, and then 237 (February 2006) opened with a bang: a tirade against Dawkins which in passing accused the 'Our Dynamic Earth' exhibition in Edinburgh of harming children's understandings of origins, of life and of spiritual life.
The following issue (238) has a grumble about David Attenborough and his BBC web site which the pastor found overly evolutionary. In addition, Andy McIntosh is listed as preaching on the evening of 2/4/06.
Issue 240 (May 2006) grumbles on about the secularisation of society along with an anti-evolutionary dig. It says that were it not for the Muslim presence, matters of faith 'would be entirely frowned upon' - so much for the '70% Christian' myth!
The newsletters show the presence and influence of Andy McIntosh. Also, the pastor regularly takes part in the ASDA chaplaincy.
Furthermore, McIntosh is involved in Answers in Genesis, whose head, Ken Ham, is on record as stating that mainstream science and theology, contradicting a literal interpretation of the bible (as interpreted by Ken Ham) is wrong. He is also involved with Truth in Science, stating publicly that those who disagree with young earth creationism are charlatans and display a dogmatic approach to science. Here is a 2004 article by Andy McIntosh in which his uncompromising religious opinions are detailed: http://www.evangelical-times.org///articles/jan04/jan04a04.htm
Finally, Mark Edon has written about McIntosh's presentation to a Christian Union group at the University of York in October 2007. The presentation destroys the myth perpetuated by Truth in Science that it is not a young-earth creationist organisation and that the "Intelligent Designer" is not God, as has been admitted too by William Dembski.
