Exploring the Intersection of Science and Faith in the Spirit of John Ray
Please welcome Lars Cade* as a guest blogger on Naturalis Historia. I am a Christian currently studying to become a paleontologist. While I still have much more that I need to learn before I could properly consider myself one, I know enough of the discipline to know when it is being misrepresented. Unfortunately, the young-earth […]
We use present day observations to infer past events every day. I look out and see the patio is wet and a large dark cloud has just passed overhead. From this I derive a very reasonable hypothesis despite not being an eyewitness to the history: my wet patio was caused by a rain shower. I […]
Previously we saw that Young-earth creationists (YECs) are at odds with each other about whether a large collection of fossils found deep in a South African cave should be categorized as humans or apes. But what about other hominin fossils that the scientific community have generally considered the remains of distant relatives of humans? What […]
Thousands of bone fragments have now been reported from chambers deep in the same cave system in South Africa. They belong to what has been described as a new hominid species; Homo naledi. When the first set of bones and the context in which they were recovered were revealed, young-earth creationists (YECs) scrambled to set the […]
The question posed in the title of the documentary-style film “Is Genesis History?” sounds provocative, but the answer was never in doubt in the mind of the filmmakers—or the primary audience. The producers surely hoped that non-Christians and Christians alike with questions about origins/natural history/science would be drawn in by the title query and subtitle […]
The documentary-style film, Is Genesis History, (IGH) lays out clearly and concisely the implications of a literal-six-day and global flood interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis. While providing only a bare-bones defense of the biblical case for a literal-day interpretation, the film uses most of the screen time to explore how young earth and global […]
A central tenet of young earth creationism is the belief that the entire world before Adam’s transgression experienced no animal death. What would such a world have looked like? To see YEC depictions of Eden you would think that the animals looked like those alive today except that all extinct things, eg. dinosaurs, were also […]
So how long can DNA or even cells survive in the environment once an organism dies? This has been a topic of considerable debate in the scientific literature since the advent of high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques. This growing field of scientific inquiry is fascinating to me and promises to shed new light on old questions. I have […]
A remarkable trace fossil has given us a glimpse into the environmental conditions of a Jurassic seafloor. Ammonite fossils are common in Jurassic rocks but one particular ammonite is more unusual than most. In the horizontal layer of rock where it was found a 28 foot-long line of shallow grooves was found leading right up to the […]
News is starting to leak out about what appears to be the imminent announcement of new discoveries and analyses of the perplexing bones found deep in a cave in South Africa. In addition to providing a much younger date for the fossils than expected and the revelation that there is a second chamber with additional specimens, […]
Thousands of footprints preserved in a windswept eroded rock surface deep in an isolated desert region of the Arabian peninsula tell the story of an ancient herd of elephants walking across an ancient muddy landscape. These are possibly the longest continuous set of footprints in the world and have been described in an article in the journal, […]
Animal tracks preserved in stone are found in great abundance in many parts of the geological column. You might be asking yourself, aren’t the chances incredibly small that any individual track made in mud would be preserved over long periods of time? You would be right. The vast majority of footprints won’t survive the ravages of […]
Billions of footprints are preserved in the rock record. While bones get all the attention, fossil footprints likely outnumber bones. How can we make sense of this observation? Surely, preserving a bone must be far more likely than preserving a footprint? I have written about how paleontologists use information from footprints and bones to reconstruct […]
Dinosaur tracks and eggshells are found in great abundance in the geological column. Many paleontologists have devoted their careers to finding, characterizing and interpreting these remains of these extinct organisms. But is all their work to put these fossils into a historical context simply a fantasy? If the young-earth view of earth’s history is correct, […]
Mars once had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on its surface. Nearly every month data from satellites and multiple ground-based systems provide new evidence confirming what was once speculation about the watery past of Mars. But how much water and how long ago did this water exist? A large amount of water still exists on Mars […]
