Young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”
This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”
I posted that material about Schweitzer a while back, and the response was basically that she was suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome that prevents her from realizing the meaning of her own work. Once again we have this paradox where someone defies the Temple of Darwin enough to do what you’d think would be a forbidden experiment, yet so in thrall that she cannot understand her own results. Once again we see creationists rushing to embrace a fragment of scientific result while simultaneously sneering at the rest of the field. On this one tiny point, Schweitzer is a genius; about everything else, she’s a fool.