A scientist has filed a lawsuit against the California State University, Northridge saying he was terminated from his job due to his religious views after he discovered soft tissue on a triceratops fossil which supported his creationist view.

Creationism is not a religious world view any more than believing in a flat earth is a religious world view. NASA is unlikely to hire a flat earther or a geocentricist. Mark was hired specifically to operate an electron microscope and do science and to make the 4000 year old claim on this soft tissue is frankly astoundingly bad science.

Armitage believes that these bones are 4000 years old at the most and allegedly give credence to the notion that these dinosaurs were around humans until relatively recently. The scientist’s findings, which indicate that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past rather than going extinct 60 million years ago, were published in July 2013 in a peer-reviewed scientific journal but don’t mention his personal views.

This is like me producing a pile of research and then claiming that since my research is valid that my completely invalid personal beliefs also hold true. All Mark Armitage has discovered is soft tissue. It does not support his 6000 year old universe where we all came from two separate incidents of colossal incest and genetic bottle necks that are normally fatal (Adam and Eve/ Noah). Nor does it square with the tonnes of archeological evidence for a human society older than 4000 BC or the evidence for 2.6 billion years of life.

This is not the termination of an employee because of his religious views but the termination of an employee who literally believes in fairy tales and who is utilising actual research in an intellectually dishonest manner. This is not a silencing of scientific speech but the literal claim that Triceratops lived alongside human beings. If this were true, Mark Armitage would be in line for a Nobel Prize.

And it shows, Mark’s planning to sue for his termination. I disagree. Mark took a normal paper that he wrote and spun it to his creationist friends and is utilising actual science with additions to spread nonsense. To point out how ridiculous this is? We also found soft tissue from a T-Rex that made the news a while back. So according to Mark (who seems to have forgotten that this isn’t the first discovery of soft tissue from a dinosaur) both T-Rex and Triceratops coexisted 4000 years ago.

Yet we see absolutely no evidence of any such bones being kept with pride. Considering we mount deer heads with grandiose horns and the skulls of elephants on our walls with equal pride? Considering neandrathal art was quite explicit in their hunting of mammoth but not of any triceratops. It puzzles me that humans with our fascination for trophies from hunts and our pride and value in the remains of large predators… would not seek to prove ourselves by hunting a T-Rex. We see plenty of lions and tigers and bears and deer and buffalo and elephant but not one triceratops or stegosaurus or diplodocus or t-rex brought down by skill and artifice of mankind. Not one skeleton marked by the blades of our fore fathers. And yet Mark here is willing to claim that the mere existence of soft tissue is indicative of a triceratops surviving the Cretaceous and living in North America alongside other Dinosaurs and humanity.

This is not science but a fantastic leap of applied religion. See the bones date back to the cretaceous but the soft tissue flies in the face of everything we know. So you have two logical steps. Either the bones are 4000 years old or so. Or there is a process to preserve soft tissue. The fact is the discovery of the first soft tissue evidence was a happy coincidence and told us where to look for more. However the bones are still 70 to 80 million years old. There is no rational reason to think they are 4000 years old and think that there is simply a whopping great big gap between these handful of outliers and the bulk of dinosaurs.

Unless you think that all dinosaurs lived 4000 years ago and were all vegetarians.