Claims and Criticism
Gentry has had strong disagreements with other creationists over some details of flood geology. A number of creationists, including fellow Seventh-day Adventists, have criticised his work.
In the late 1970s, Gentry challenged the scientific community to synthesize "a hand-sized specimen of a typical biotite-bearing granite" as a test of his claims. The scientific response was dismissive, with geologist G. Brent Dalrymple stating: "As far as I am concerned, Gentry's challenge is silly. … He has proposed an absurd and inconclusive experiment to test a perfectly ridiculous and unscientific hypothesis that ignores virtually the entire body of geological knowledge."
In 1981 Gentry was a defense witness in the McLean v. Arkansas case over the constitutional validity of Act 590 that mandated that "creation science" be given equal time in public schools with evolution. The defense lost and Act 590 was ruled to be unconstitutional (a verdict that was influential on, and upheld by, the Supreme Court in Edwards v. Aguillard).
Gentry has devised his own creationist cosmology and filed a lawsuit in 2001 against Los Alamos National Laboratory and Cornell University after personnel deleted ten of his papers about his cosmology from the public preprint server arXiv. On 23 March 2004, Gentry's lawsuit against arXiv was dismissed by a Tennessee court on the grounds that it lacked territorial jurisdiction, as neither defendant in the case was considered to have a significant presence in the state of Tennessee.
His self-published book Creation's Tiny Mystery was reviewed by geologist Gregg Wilkerson, who said that it has several logical flaws and concluded that "the book is a source of much misinformation about current geologic thinking and confuses fact with interpretation." He also noted that the book contains considerable autobiographical material and he observed that "n general I don't think educators will find its worth their time to tread through this creationist's whining." This criticism of Gentry's "frequent whining about discrimination" has also been made by fellow creationists, who concluded that "his scientific snubs resulted more from his own abrasive style than from his peculiar ideas", according to Ronald L. Numbers, a prominent historian of science.
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