Exploring the Intersection of Science and Faith in the Spirit of John Ray
How many animals did Noah preserve on the Ark? I often see critics of young-earth creationists (YECs) challenge Noah’s Ark with the question, how could Noah have fit all two million species on the ark? When I see this challenge posed on Facebook or Twitter it is invariably coming from an individual that knows very […]
A volcano slides into the sea causing an 800 foot wave to crash onto into an adjacent island. As that wave crashes onto land it picks up 700-ton boulders and throws them uphill leaving them stranded far above their source. It sounds like a plot from a Hollywood movie but this is real. It happened in the Cape Verde Islands off of the west coast of Africa long ago.
A committed young-earth creationist, Dr. Todd Wood, and an equally committed evolutionary creationist, Dr. Darrel Falk, spend time with each other. At first both are suspicious of the other’s Christian credentials. One feels like he is thought to be a fool the other is concerned that he is looked down upon as a heretic. Through […]
Have you ever wanted to get inside the head of a young-earth creationist or an evolutionary creationist and hear what they are thinking about each other? What about their fears and concerns, what makes them hold on so strongly to what they believe, what do they think about conflict and can they find any common […]
You can learn a lot from a series of unfortunate events. Collapsed caves can leave entry holes on the surface that become hazards to local fauna. The image below is from inside a famous natural pitfall trap in Wyoming. The surface above is rather flat and prey running from a predator sometimes fall into this hole […]
In 2013 a remarkable DNA sequence was reported by geneticists studying ancient DNA. It was a nearly complete genome extracted and decoded from the remains of a tooth of a horse preserved in permafrost sediments in Alaska. This partially-fossilized horse was dated to more than 500,000 years old and is the most complete sequence of […]
Thus far in this series about horses we have we have explored some of the interpretations of the fossil record of horses and demonstrated the difficulty of defining the boundaries of species of modern horses. We have observed that evolutionary theory and most modern young earth creationists propose that the domestic horse, the donkey […]
Are modern horse species descendants of a small dog-sized common ancestor or do all fossil horse-like species represent unique creations? For many, this dichotomous choice may sound like a setup to test if a person is an atheist evolutionist or a bible believing Christian. However, we previously noted that this is a question that literal […]
In our last installment of this series, When is a Horse a Horse? we recognized that the living species of equines (horses, zebras, donkeys etc..) represent groups of genetically divergent individuals that naturally do not interbreed on a regular basis. Each of these lineages of equines is behaving as a species as defined by the biological species concept. This raises the […]
In my introduction to the origin of horses I suggested that a horse is a horse of course, unless of course it isn’t a horse. But that begs the question, how do we know what the boundaries are of what constitutes a horse? Although I suggested that young-earth creationists (YECs) have diverse views of what […]
“A horse is a horse, of course, of course, and no one can talk to a horse, of course, unless, of course, the horse, of course, is the famous Mr. Ed!” From the introduction to the 1960s TV show “Mr Ed” No one disputes that Mr. Ed was a horse but what about the plains […]
They say diamonds are forever, but for geologists this saying doesn’t make much sense. They would agree that diamonds are for a long time—hundreds of millions if not billions of years—but not forever. Many lines of evidence reveal that one must go deep (more than 150 km) into the mantle of the Earth to find […]
We are currently in the midst of an extinction crisis. Species are disappearing at an ever-accelerating pace. It is striking that not long ago the idea that any species could go extinct was unthinkable. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788) was one of the first to suggest that extinction was a possibility. But during Leclerc’s […]
I have said before that reading young-earth literature or attending one of their seminars can be a confusing experience. Many times they present internally inconsistent arguments seemingly unaware of how one thing they say contradicts something another creationist has said or even what they have said themselves. For example, on the November 29th edition of […]
YEC, GT, AoA, OEC, ID, PC, EC, TE? These acronyms refer to theistic models of earth’s biological and physical history. Do you know which models each of these letter combinations refer to? If so, do you know which one best characterizes your view? If you don’t—or if you don’t know, or are not sure, into […]
