SZ, I think your response is unwarranted. I see no reason to doubt Aggie's description of himself or his goals. And there is a genuine issue here: if you refuse even to consider new data because they contradict some previously established idea, then it becomes impossible to overturn existing beliefs in science. A good example of this is the data showing that H. pylori causes most ulcers: it was very had to get published, because everyone knew that it had to be wrong, even though they didn't know why. But it wasn't wrong, and that attitude hindered the advance of science and medicine. This kind of action also reinforces the creationist claim that the evidence for a young earth (or for an intelligent designer or against evolution) is being excluded because of censorship by those with a prior commitment to a worldview, not because creationists are doing bad science.
Nevertheless, had I been screening abstracts for the conference, I would have rejected the one in question. Aggie described the idea that each new claim or new batch of data in science is treated on its own merits, without prejudice, as "idealistic". I disagree. I think it's simply an inaccurate view of science. Scientists mostly don't publish data: we publish studies, studies that rely on an extensive context of established models of how the world works for motivation and interpretation. Any study that simply ignores the existing framework isn't doing science properly, and is almost certainly a waste of time. There are just too many ways of doing experiments wrong, of getting anomalous results, to treat every new experiment as a blank slate. That's why I would reject any abstract that suggested that C-14 dating showed that dinosaur fossils were only tens of thousands of years old. For the same reason, I would reject an abstract that reported, based on a simple biochemical assay, that mice engage in extensive photosynthesis, or one that reports a simple BLAST search showing recent admixture between northern European humans and rutabagas. The fact that there are organized, funded creationists out there who are going through the motions of science, but aren't actually engaged in science, would heighten my suspicion of the dinosaur study, but my underlying reason would be the same as for the photosynthetic mice.
This is not to say that results should be automatically rejected if they go against the prevailing paradigm. But studies attacking the paradigm have to be done in awareness of it; in formal terms, they should have a prior that's strongly weighted toward the paradigm-busting result being wrong somehow. That means, in the case of C-14 dating of dinosaurs, that your working hypothesis has got to be that your results do not reflect the age of the dinosaur, and that therefore your efforts are focused on finding sources of error or contamination. A reasonable model would be the particle physics experiment that reported evidence for faster-than-light neutrinos. They said, roughly, "we realize these results are probably wrong, but we can't see why, and we're inviting the community to assess them and figure out what might be causing them".
For me, preventing the creationists from even doing the work in the first place, by refusing to analyze their samples, raises different issues. That one I'd want to think about at more length.
