Exploring the Intersection of Science and Faith in the Spirit of John Ray
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
The Grand Canyon is one of the best-know geological formations on earth. Today I want to introduce you to another geological formation you have probably never heard of. I call this canyon the lost grand canyon of Egypt. Through a series of four posts I will introduce you to this amazing canyon and demonstrate that […]
One headline reads “Giant Prehistoric Toilet Found” another refers to the discovery of an ancient latrine. Don’t know how I missed those headlines when the first news was released. Surely had I seen that headline I would have had to clicked on it to find out what that was all about. The actual title, The […]
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 […]
