Young-earth creationists have a geological column problem that 50 years of research has yet to solve: where is the boundary between Flood deposits and post-Flood deposits?
Multituberculates and the YEC Flood/post-Flood Boundary Problem
July 21, 2021 by
Yes, multituberculates have something to say about the ongoing division among YECs about where to locate the Flood/post-Flood boundary in the geological column. Is that boundary to be found in the Quaternary, at the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary or way down in the Pennsylvanian Period? These are the three primary models that YECs have proposed. The problem […]
The False Hope of a Mature Creation
April 5, 2021 by
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 […]
A Tale of Taphonomy: Clam Shrimp Fossils and the Age of the Earth
November 18, 2019 by
One of the great privileges of my job is that I get to participate on graduate student committees. Many times this allows me to get up close and personal with data sub-disciplines extend far from those of my particular expertise. You know that I have a fondness for fossils and the stories they tell. So […]
The Toba Super Eruption, Polar Ice Cores, and Climate Change
November 8, 2019 by
I recently discussed how the catastrophic Toba super-eruption in Indonesia is a serious challenge to the young-earth model of earth’s history (The Toba Super Eruption: A Global Catastrophe that Creationists Ignore). Briefly, I explained that the Toba volcano caldera produced the largest eruption in the past 100,000 years releasing an estimated 2800 cubic kilometers of […]
The Toba Super-Eruption: A Global Catastrophe that Young-Earth Creationists Ignore
November 5, 2019 by
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. […]
A Walk on the Beach Preserved in Stone–How Fossilized Turtle Tracks Refute Young-Earth Fossil Dogma
September 10, 2019 by
Baby sea turtles emerge from their sandy nest and quickly make their way down the beach and into the sea. As they do so they leave tiny footprints in the sand, but the tracks are short-lived. Blown away or destroyed by the next large wave, they are lost forever. Imagine the footprints you leave during […]
Ignoring the Plank: A Young-Earth Apologist Inadvertently Writes a Brilliant Critique of Young-Earth Creationism
August 9, 2019 by
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 […]
The Appearance of Age and the Origin of the Hawaiian Islands
August 3, 2019 by
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 […]
Stranger Things–Creationist’ Views of Speciation and Natural Selection in the 1980s
July 10, 2019 by
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, […]
Faith in Flood Geology? Dogmatic Assertions of Expertise
June 20, 2019 by
Everyone is an expert in something but they can’t be an expert in everything. At some point we all have to rely on the expertise of others to guide us through our lives. I am a biologist, however, the vastness of the field of biology leaves me in the position of deferring to the knowledge […]
Squeezing the Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt into the Young Earth Paradigm: An impossible* Task
June 4, 2019 by
In Egypt the Nile River Valley conceals a massive canyon that once was as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon in Arizona. We have explored the origins of this lost canyon in the previous posts. We found that geologists attribute the origins of this massive canyon to the great drying up of the Mediterranean […]
The Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt, Part III: A Brief Chronology of Events
June 2, 2019 by
A massive canyon lays hidden below the Nile Valley in Egypt. In Part II we looked as how this massive canyon was formed. Before we go on to look a bit deeper into this canyon and how it fits into Biblical chronology lets look at the chronological sequence of historical events—according to the consensus of geological experts—that must […]
The Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt, Part II: Origins of the Nile River Valley
May 31, 2019 by
A meandering river on a wide river plain running through Egypt is the source of one of the best-known ancient civilizations. But the Nile Valley has a deep secret. A huge canyon lies buried underneath the Nile Valley attesting to an ancient history of events that took place long before the Egyptians came to inhabit […]
Snakes Preserved in Dinosaur Nests – Another Problem for Creationist’ Flood Geology
May 30, 2019 by
An eleven-foot snake slithers among a cache of eggs and a sauropod dinosaur hatchling. Before it can grab the hatchling a landslide or windstorm buries the eggs, hatchling and snake. This is the scene preserved in Late Cretaceous deposits in India (Wilson et al. 2010). These same rocks have yielded thousands of sauropod eggs, hatchlings, […]
