title:  God Created Our Hands? These Scientists Said He Did
text: We all know that there is no way to be a scientist and a creationist at the same time. Science deals in facts, creationism deals in fantasy. So when the peer-reviewed, scientific journal PLOS ONE recently published a paper that claimed God designed our hands, the backlash was swift and loud.The paper was written by a team of scientists from China and Worcester, Massachusetts in order to better understand hand coordination. The abstract states, It is not understood which biomechanical characteristics are responsible for hand coordination and what specific effect each biomechanical characteristic has.  But the abstract also contained something that made PLOS readers (and, at least, one editor) so angry the journal eventually retracted the paper, it said:The explicit functional link indicates that the biomechanical characteristic of tendinous connective architecture between muscles and articulations is the proper design by the Creator to perform a multitude of daily tasks in a comfortable way.The body of the paper mentions  the Creator  two more times, and the conclusion said:In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years.WOW. Pretty outrageous right? How in the world did a scientific journal allow that to slip by them? Well, that s exactly what PLOS  readers wanted to know. According to Vox:On the PLOS website, many angry readers called for the retraction of the article or an amendment of the line. Many of PLOS s own editors were fuming. One wrote in a comment,  The article should be retracted and the handling editor should be dismissed. As an Editor for this journal, I am appalled. However, the Chinese scientists who wrote the paper said it was all just a big misunderstanding. They claimed that a language barrier is really to blame and they didn t mean to imply that God is to thank for creating our hands. Ming-Jin Liu, the leader author of the study said that the team actually meant  nature.  She explained, Our study has no relationship with creationism. English is not our native language. Our understanding of the word Creator was not actually as a native English speaker expected We will change the Creator to nature in the revised manuscript. I can understand how that could happen, but that doesn t excuse PLOS ONE s editors for publishing something with such a glaring error. That absolutely should have been caught before it went up on the site and it really hurts the journal s credibility. We should be able to go to this site and know that we aren t going to come across any papers that imply creationism is legitimate. It s not, no matter how much the Christian-right fights to make it so.Featured image via Facebook