The False Hope of a Mature Creation

Strike up a conversation about the age of the earth with nearly any group of evangelicals and you are sure to get a lively discussion.   There may be a young earth defender who will pull out some Ken Ham top-10 proofs of a young creation, some will claim to be agnostic on the topic while... Continue Reading →

The Toba Super-Eruption: A Global Catastrophe that Young-Earth Creationists Ignore

Sudden catastrophic events are not unknown in earth’s history.  Large craters are evidence of past cosmic impacts and widespread layers of volcanic ash are a testimony to massive volcanic eruptions.  But when did these catastrophes occur and could they have influenced human history? Standard geological models place the largest catastrophic events far in the past. ... Continue Reading →

Ignoring the Plank: A Young-Earth Apologist Inadvertently Writes a Brilliant Critique of Young-Earth Creationism

How should a movement dedicated to science denial warn its adherents against the evils of science denial? Young-earth creationism finds itself faced with just this problem as some of its followers slip toward the flat-earth fringe. Answers in Genesis, the leading young-earth apologetics ministry, has responded by critiquing the flat-earth movement in a series of... Continue Reading →

The Appearance of Age and the Origin of the Hawaiian Islands

What is the origin of the Hawaiian Islands?  The exploration of that question consumed my attention for several years.  At that time—way back in the 1990s—I was a post-doctoral researcher at Southern Illinois University sequencing chloroplast genes from holoparasitic plants. At the same time I discovered list-serve discussion groups, I was given creation science literature... Continue Reading →

Stranger Things–Creationist’ Views of Speciation and Natural Selection in the 1980s

Today, young-earth creationists are actively promoting a new model of the origin of the diversity of life on Earth.  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, though not all,... Continue Reading →

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