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... Continue Reading →
One year ago witnessed the publication of what Ken Ham and others at the young-earth ministry, Answer in Genesis (AiG), clearly hoped would provide a comprehensive, alternative approach to explaining the origin of species and, more generally, biological diversity within a 6000-year time-frame. As the bold title, “Replacing Darwin: The New Origin of Species,” proclaims,... Continue Reading →
It is said that beauty is only skin deep and that you can’t judge a book by its cover. These sayings seek to communicate our understanding that the exterior of an object often presents a false picture of the true nature of what is inside. If we were to ask how might we measure the... Continue Reading →
If a global Flood destroyed all humans except Noah and his family just 4350 years ago, why don’t we find human fossils in the same layers of rock believed to be set down by Noah’s Flood? This is a perfectly natural and appropriate question for a young-earth creationist (YEC) to ask. After all, according to... Continue Reading →
Since its inception, one of the Creation Museum’s most provocative exhibits has been one that places dinosaurs and man side by side. Likewise, the Noah's Ark attraction, The Ark Encounter, depicts a scene from the pre-Flood world in which dinosaurs are fighting men and women in an roman-like arena. While these scenes are anachronistic to... Continue Reading →
Young life creationists, or baraminologists as they prefer to be called, have experienced a paradigm shift over the past three decades. During that time they have increasingly embracing a model of common ancestry and accelerated evolution as they seek to explain the origins of the vast diversity of life on Earth. This accelerated or hyper-evolution... Continue Reading →
In 2016 fossilized remains of feathers attached to a bony tail preserved in a 99 million year old amber fossil captured international attention. This wasn't the first time that feathers have been found in amber but earlier feather discoveries were of feathers by themselves. This time unmistakable feathers were found attached to a structure which... Continue Reading →
Can scientists bring back an extinct dinosaur? Way back in 1990, a novel by Michael Crichton and subsequent movie by the same name, Jurassic Park, in 1993 used futuristic genomic biology to suggest how we might de-extinct the dinosaurs. Could we really retrieve dinosaur DNA from preserved dinosaur blood sucked up by an ancient mosquito and... Continue Reading →
Question: What kind of bird is flightless, waddles standing upright on the ground, is an excellent swimmer, breeds in colonies on rocky shores, lives on a diet of fish and has a white belly and black back, and most importantly is not a penguin? The answer: The extinct great auk. You can think of the... Continue Reading →
Ostriches are curious creatures. They are very large birds that, although they have large wings, are incapable of flight. They make themselves at home in some of the most inhospitable places. They lay their eggs in simple dirt nests and behave in ways that have perplexed our ancestors since they first laid eyes on them. ... Continue Reading →
What was the ecological state at the beginning of creation? Were perfectly suited plants and animals created for a perfect world, did these plants and animals adapt to a fallen world, or were they all created in a way that anticipated a fallen world? Put another way, did animals physically adapt to a postlapsarian (after... Continue Reading →
A few weeks ago I criticized Ken Ham and several of his Answers in Genesis' colleagues for stating that some living birds have teeth like those of fossil birds. I pointed out that none of the 10,000 living bird species produce true teeth. However, there were some birds that lived alongside dinosaurs during the Cretaceous... Continue Reading →
Not long ago I wrote this post criticizing Ken Ham and his research team for their outright errors and misinformed understanding of ancient fossil birds. Subsequently, Ken Ham, with help from his research team, penned a second blog post entitled, “The Duck-Relative That’s Just a Duck.” In that article Ken Ham doesn’t correct his erroneous comparison of... Continue Reading →
Young-earth creationists (YECs) are actively promoting a radical new model of the origin of the diversity of life on Earth. (1) This speculative view borrows a number of elements found in any typical evolutionary biology textbook. For example, modern YECs claim that most and possibly all species alive today—except humans—are related to numerous other species... Continue Reading →
Errors repeated often enough take on the appearance of truth. This is what makes fake news so effective. It can drown out informed opinion and accurate information. At the root of many fake new stories are pieces of information that are either outright false but possibly surrounded with true statements or the facts they report... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 