YEC Chemist tells it like it isn't.

Most physical scientists really don't know hardly anything about biology. Chemists take physics and math, physicists take chemistry and math, but most of them, with the exception of biochemists, take no biology at all, and if they do take biology, it's always at the cellular-molecular level and from a reductionist perspective, so no surprise that few chemists know much about the synthetic parts of biology. Here's a couple of excerpts from an interview with a YEC (young Earth creationist) who's a chemist.
What about the contrary evidence from scientific dating methods?
"There are always assumptions behind dating methods. They're not infallible. They can be made to point to a young Earth, as well as an old Earth.
The evidence is not what people think. For example, people think that carbon 14 dating proves millions of years, but carbon 14 dating itself argues against millions of years."
Wow! Now remember, he's a chemist. First he makes "assumptions" sound like 18 impossible things you have to believe before breakfast, but the assumptions of radioactive dating methods can be and have been tested, i.e., rates of decay and their constancy under different environmental conditions. For a chemist to make that statement about carbon 14 dating they either have to be a really pathetic chemist or a bloody liar. Carbon 14 can only date relatively young things because of its rapid decay rate, so beyond 50,000 years carbon 14 dating just doesn't work, and no credible scientist would claim it did. You want to age charcoal from an archaeological site in North America? Fine. Age of the Earth? Millions of years? Ridiculous!
What do you believe are the chief flaws in the theory?
"First, the origin of first life, chemical evolution, makes no sense at all."
This reminds the Phactor of engaging a similar YEC chemist in a discussion/debate about 20 years ago, and he said almost the same thing, and to demonstrate his case, and what is meant by that sentence, he dumps a hand full of paper clips into a can, shakes it (to add energy), and then dumps out the contents, still just a bunch of paper clips, and declares, "No amount of time or energy can add order or information to these paper clips and it's just like that with chemistry. Elements don't combine at random to make something organized."
In response, the Phactor borrowed his demonstration, and asked him, "Are all atoms, all molecules the same shape and size?" "OK rhetorical question because everyone knows that they are different." "So let's say the basic paper clip is carbon." "Well, we know that life is also composed of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorous, different elements with different properties (an aside - It's on your periodic table.) but our chemist only started out with one element which isn't realistic chemistry at all." And after bending paper clips into different shapes, some at right angles, some straightened into an S, and so on to represent different elements, dumped them back into the can, gave it a few shakes, and out pours a tangle of paper clips. "Now there's some organization." "Nothing awesome but maybe useful in some way, to hang something or to wear as a bracelet." "Now imagine you have thousands of such entities, each a bit different, but now the most useful organizations will produce the most copies of themselves." "That's natural selection, Darwin's contribution to biology, and it's through generations of such reproductin, variation, and selection that more useful organizations appear." "Now the only question to ask our chemist is simple." "Is he really such a poor chemist that he doesn't understand this, or is he deliberately trying to deceive you." He left his demonstration and didn't stay around to answer questions at the end. Even the brief responses in this recent interview demonstrate that nothing at all has changed in the unscientific world of YEC chemists.
HT to Dispatches from the Creation wars.

Misused and abused chemical terms

Chemistry and biology broadly overlap at the molecular level, so chemists and biologists deal with some of the same terminological bugga-boos. Here are probably the most commonly misused and abused chemical terms, and the Phactor wouldn't argue with this list one little bit.
CHEMICAL - Ooo! That unwashed piece of fruit is probably covered in chemicals. Actually the whole damned thing is nothing but chemicals. What do you think stuff is made of?
PURE and IMPURE - Nothing is really pure. One of the chemically most pure common substances in your house is sugar, probably something like 99.99% sucrose, but it still has contaminants. So virtually everything is impure, including some of your thoughts. Therefore the connotation that pure is good and impure bad just doesn't hold water so to speak.
TOXIC - This is one of the Phactor's favorites. In teaching about poisonous plants, medicinal plants, stimulating plants, narcotic plants, and even hallucinogenic plants, the most useful concept is that they are all toxic, all produce intoxications, but the intoxications differ, some even being beneficial. Lots of toxic substances change categories with dosage, usually, but not always, producing more harmful intoxications with increasing dosages. Nothing like a glass of wine with dinner, but ethanol is a very toxic chemical. So toxic is not the same as poisonous, and here impure is good. Remember, what makes wine tasty are all those impurities because water and ethanol are both colorless, tasteless, odorless, totally miscible chemicals.
NATURAL and ARTIFICIAL - Natural is good; artificial is bad. Salicylic acid is natural and too rough on the stomach to be taken internally for aches and pains, although pounded up white willow leaves might make a good poultice on a sore elbow. Artificial acetosalicylic acid (aspirin) is much easier on the stomach. So everything that occurs in nature isn't necessarily good, and everything artificial isn't bad. This sort of gets confused with ORGANIC and INORGANIC, which would have been the Phactor's 4th pick rather than chemical. All food is organic, although we sometimes ingest some inorganic chemicals like salt. There is no such thing as inorganic food. And what gives with fertilizers? Plants don't care where the nitrates come from, they'll absorb them the same, and you can't tell the difference. At times you wonder if the grocery store will put a new sign "Inorganic produce"? If you really think this makes a lot of difference, go back to pure and impure, and start again. There are a lot of really unintuitive things about molecules, and the primary one is that they are so darned small even a tiny amount of something contains mind-boggling numbers of molecules (look up Avogadro's number sometime; we used to call it "avocado's number" and now there's a restaurant of that name.). If you were to carry a glass of water to Lake Michigan and throw it in, one glass full into the lake, and if you assume the molecules in the glass of water disperse evenly throughout the whole lake, what are your odds of dipping the glass back into the lake and recapturing one or more of the molecules you threw in? Just based on numbers, you're almost certainly going to get at least one water molecule back. How can that be true? So perk up your ears and listen for those improperly used terms.