That's Dr. Andrew Snelling.
Creationist geologist sues U.S. park service after it rejects request to collect samples in Grand Canyon | Science | AAASLast week, Snelling sued park administrators and the Department of Interior, which administers the national parks program, because they would not grant him a permit to collect 50 to 60 fist-sized rocks. All research in the national park is restricted, especially if it requires removing material. But the Grand Canyon does host 80 research projects a year, ranging from archaeology digs to trout tracking.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group that filed the lawsuit on behalf of Snelling, alleged discrimination by the park. National Park Service: Research in Grand Canyon okay for geologists but not Christian ones, read the headline on their press release. (Interior department and NPS spokespeople declined to comment because of the pending litigation.)
He did some work on the Koongarra uranium deposit in Australia's Northern Territory. After that,In the suit filed earlier this month, the Australian geologist, Andrew Snelling, says that religious discrimination was behind the National Park Service's (NRS's) decision to deny him a permit to gather samples from four locations in the park. Snelling had hoped to gather the rocks to support the creationist belief that a global flood about 4,300 years ago was responsible for rock layers and fossil deposits around the world.
NPS's actions "demonstrate animus towards the religious viewpoints of Dr. Snelling," the complaint alleges, "and violate Dr. Snelling's free exercise rights by imposing inappropriate and unnecessary religious tests to his access to the park."
But there is a very interesting fact about Dr. Snelling. Will the Real Dr Snelling Please Stand Up? Paleontologist Alex Ritchie argues that there seems to be two Drs. Andrew Snelling. They have the same educational qualifications and the same mailing addresses, but they have very different beliefs about the Earth's history, and they seldom or never cite each other's work.From 1998 to 2007, Snelling was a geology expert at the Creation Science Foundation and has since worked for Kentucky-based Answers in Genesis, an organization that investigates geology "from a Biblical perspective."
He's also been an interpreter on more than 30 river trips in the Grand Canyon, which has been a central area of study for creationist geologists.
Snelling #1 is a young-earth creationist and a believer in Flood Geology. He believes that Noah's Flood did some major reshaping of the Earth's surface.
Snelling #2 is a mainstream geologist who has published on uranium mineralization in some Proterozoic and older Australian rock formations. He seems to believe that the Earth's surface has been continually reshaped over its history, over a much longer time than Snelling #1 believes that Earth to have existed.
Andrew A. Snelling lists publications by both Snellings, and I've found publications by Snelling #2 in Google Scholar.So it seems that Snelling #1 ought to have asked Snelling #2 about what mainstream geologists would consider a good proposal for sampling the Grand Canyon.
He has responded in Andrew Snelling answers Alex Ritchie
The problem is that these hard-line evolutionists are so blinkered that they can't see how a person like myself in such a situation is forced to use their evolutionary terminology whether we like it or not. In other words, even though I could have appealed to the editor of the monograph it would have been to no avail, because the reviewers would have also insisted on the conventional terminology, particularly as one of the reviewers was one of the researchers having done the standard work on the regional geology of that area. It is ludicrous to suggest any hypocrisy or two-facedness.
