Robert Schadewald

Robert J. (Bob) Schadewald (February 19, 1943 in Rogers, MN – March 12, 2000) was an author, researcher, and former president of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). An internationally recognized expert on pseudoscience, Schadewald penned numerous articles on creationism, perpetual motion, flat earthism, and other pseudoscience for such magazines as Science 80, Technology Illustrated, Smithsonian, and Science Digest.

He wrote one book, a computer guide titled The dBASE (II) Guide for Small Business, and contributed chapters to six others, including the reference text The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, edited by Gary B. Ferngren. Much of his published work deals with unorthodoxies of science and scholarship.

Studying unorthodox ideas and people
Schadewald studied and wrote about unorthodox ideas and the people who promote them. He attended at least a dozen national creationism conferences, interviewed Immanuel Velikovsky, investigated perpetual motion machines, and got thrown out of the International Flat Earth Research Society for his "spherical" tendencies.

Schadewald was the last person to interview Immanuel Velikovsky, the interview occurred six days before Velikovsky's death in 1979. Schadewald was preparing an article on Velikovsky to be published on the 30 year anniversary of the publication of Velikovsky's best seller Worlds in Collision (The MacMillan Company, New York, 1950). The interview can be accessed in the original article in FATE magazine, or in the collection of Schadewald's writings Worlds of Their Own (Xlibris, Philadelphia, 2008).

Schadewald also investigated several perpetual motion schemes and reported on them from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Some of the contemporary perpetual motionists that Schadewald studied were: Arnold Burke, Tom Ogle, Howard Johnson, Dr. Keith Kenyon, Rory C. Johnson and Joseph Westley Newman.

Schadewald's search for works advocating unorthodox science or scholarship took him to dozens of major research libraries in United States and the United Kingdom. Along the way, he also accumulated an extensive personal library. It consisted of about a thousand volumes advocating various unorthodox ideas: hollow-earth, geocentricity, creationism, Velikovskyism, perpetual motion, racism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, flying saucers, bizarre religions, and so forth, as well as the world's most extensive collection of 19th and 20th century flat-earth literature. Much of this collection is now housed at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the Special Collections library as the Robert Schadewald Collection on Pseudo-Science.

Creationism, perpetual motion, flat Earth
Schadewald was a nationally recognized expert on creationism, perpetual motion, and flat Earth belief. As an authority on pseudoscience, he appeared on radio talk shows in Minneapolis, Des Moines, Chicago, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia and on the "Pittsburgh Today" television talk show. He also gave guest lectures on writing and various aspects of pseudoscience at numerous colleges and universities.

One of Schadewald's main strategies in exposing Creationism as pseudoscience was to compare it with flat Earthism and examine the parallels between the two beliefs. Schadewald contended, they concur on a number of issues, including the authority of the scriptures as a scientific guide to the natural world, the limitations of a theory-led approach, the duplicity of conventional scientists, and the impossibility of reconciling orthodox science with the Bible.

"Robert Schadewald befriended Johnson (Charles Johnson, President of the International Flat Earth Research Society ca. 1971 until his death in 2001) and his wife Marjory, writing several articles on the movement that illustrated the intellectual history and themes linking the creationist movement with both flat-earth and geocentrist belief (see, for examples, Schadewald's "Looking for lighthouses" in Creation/Evolution 1992; 12 [2]: 1-4 and his "The evolution of Bible-science" in Scientists Confront Creationism, ed. Laurie Godfrey, New York: WW Norton, 1983, 283-99)."

Opposition to creation science (intelligent design)
At the time of his death, Schadewald had been active for almost 20 years in the effort to keep "creation science," which he considered a thinly disguised religious doctrine, out of public school science classrooms. In 1983 he began attending creationist conferences, attending six major conferences in addition to the 1986, 1990, 1994 and 1998 International Conference on Creationism. He reported on these with articles in the Skeptical Inquirer and Reports of the National Center for Science Education. From 1986 to 1992, he served on the board of directors of the National Center for Science Education, including two years as president.