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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Ark Encounter theme park in Kentucky is literally built on trillions of dead things. This fact would seem to support Ken Ham’s popular response to what we would expect had the world been subject to a global flood: “Billions of dead things in rock layers…” But the fossils that form the foundation of his Ark park […]
Life is incredibly diverse. Millions of species fill the seas, land and skies of our planetary home. It seems as if there is no end to the discovery of new animals, plants and other life forms. As a biologist who teaches a class about plant diversity, I can always count on discovering a new group of plants […]
Every day dozens of articles are published that contain evidence that runs contrary to the young-earth creationist’ (YEC) view of earth’s history. The young-earth view proposes that much or most of the thousands of feet of fossil bearing rocks—and the fossils themselves—that make up the world’s land masses were deposited during a single catastrophic world-wide […]
The sedimentary rocks of the Earth hold vast quantities of fossils. Hundreds of years of careful observations have shown that fossils are far from random in their distribution but rather they appear in the geological column in a distinct pattern or order referred to as fossil succession. How can we explain the observed distribution of fossils in the […]
Peat bogs are a repository of the passage of time. They record changes in the earth’s atmosphere and unique events such as ash falls from volcanic eruptions. Through careful analysis of bogs we can reconstruct the past just like we can reconstruct a crime from a crime scene. Peat bogs in Europe give us a unique window into the effects of human industry and landscape shift due to deforestation and agriculture and even longer term shifts in climate patterns.
Evidence that some features of earth’s landscape are the product of processes acting over longer periods of time can be found everywhere we look. Some of this evidence, such as that from the Grand Canyon, may be familiar to us but other evidence is far less familiar but tells the same story. For example, high […]
Can human footprints made in wet sand dunes be preserved as fossils? The discovery of up to thirty-five human (1) footprints on the roof of a small coastal cave says “yes.” Footprints on the roof of a cave? How does that happen? I wondered that too when I first heard about this remarkable discovery. The […]
The accidental discovery of a wealth of bones and plant remains preserved in ancient sediments of a high mountain lake in Colorado has opened a window into a past world. These remains add to the already abundant evidence from across North America that not long ago the climate and animals that populated the continent were […]
Mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, giant bison and giant sloths roaming the mountainsides of the Rocky Mountains may seem like something that only Hollywood could dream up but there is abundant evidence that North America was once home to a thriving community of animals that today we might associate with the African Serengeti. Previously (The Snowmastodon […]
Near the top of a 9000-foot-high mountain ridge lies a small reservoir dug out of an alpine meadow. Today, the Ziegler Reservoir acts as a water source for the ski village of Snowmass, Colorado, but long before this site was an alpine meadow, it was an ancient lake around whose shores lived mastodons, mammoths, camels—yes […]
