Elsevier is a commercial publishing house that publishes scientific journals. Lat year there was a scandal when it was revealed that it had allowed the drug company Merck to fund a new and phony journal titled Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine under its name that essentially pushed Merck drugs to unsuspecting physicians by quoting the ‘journal’ in support of the claims for their drugs’ efficacy.

Now comes another story (via Jerry Coyne) that a real Elsevier journal called the International Journal of Cardiology has published an article that claims that the Koran and the Hadith were prescient in their knowledge of how the heart works. Reviews of the article were scathing. The article consists of taking parts of the religious texts and interpreting them as metaphors that are congruent with modern understandings of the heart. While this may be of interest to a journal of religion or religious textual analysis, it is not science.

But what caught my eye was that the article was received by the journal on May 7, 2009 and accepted just five days later, on May 12, 2009. This is highly unusual. The review process for scientific articles takes many months and can stretch to more than a year as the manuscripts are sent out to reviewers who send them back with comments which then go to the authors for revisions, then back to the reviewers, etc. before the journal editor finally makes a decision. What happened here is that the editor must have bypassed any outside review and summarily accepted it. But given the obviously controversial nature of the claims, you would have thought that such a paper would have merited more careful scrutiny, not less.

So why did the editor of the journal and Elsevier go out on a limb by publishing this pseudoscience?

Maybe I am getting old and cranky but I must say that my patience is wearing thin with religious fundamentalists and the shifty way they argue.

Recently I had an extended email exchange with someone (let’s call him Henry) from Sri Lanka whom I did not know before but who had heard about my switch to atheism from an old friend of mine. My friend is a religious fundamentalist member of a charismatic church with a sweet and gentle nature of whom I am very fond. For her sake, I showed more patience and spent more time responding to Henry than I would with a total stranger.

Henry clearly wanted to try and persuade me to change my mind and show me that his belief in god was based on science and reason. He wanted to argue that so-called ‘intelligent design’ (ID) and its associated ‘specified complexity’ were arguments for the existence of god. I have, of course, heard all these arguments before and they are nothing but the tired old ‘god of the gaps’, where people look for things that science has not explained yet or things that seem highly improbable, and insert god as an ad hoc solution. It is Paley’s watch repeated yet again. It seems like this same argument gets resurrected repeatedly, the only ‘new’ features being that they keep looking for new gaps as the old gaps get explained by science. It is quite extraordinary how believers can never come up with actual evidence but are very imaginative when it comes to inventing new metaphors to say the same old thing.
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