What happens when a speaker gives a talk about dinosaurs but doesn't have any training in geology or paleontology? You could get a string of distortions of both of these fields of inquiry and even problems keeping facts straight. A few weeks ago I witnessed just such a talk when I attended an Answers in Genesis... Continue Reading →
The difference between what young earth creationists like to term "operational" or "observational" science and historical science doesn't have the sharp distinction they like to project to their audience. I was reminded of this recently when I had an opportunity to hear Tommy Mitchell speak at a local Answers in Genesis conference a few weeks ago. One particular talk was... Continue Reading →
John Ray, one of England's greatest 17th century natural theologians, spent much time pondering the meaning of fossils or "formed stones" as they were called then. I have shared some of his thoughts about fossils and Earth's history before (See: John Ray on Flood Geology: Words that Still Apply Today). In a correspondence with... Continue Reading →
The Ark Encounter in Kentucky is built on a foundation of trillions of fossils but when they built a new activity to allow visitors to find their own fossils they opted to give them assorted fossils from other places in the world. This was a missed educational opportunity. When I wrote about my visit to the... Continue Reading →
Young earth creationists greatly underestimate the fossil record when they tell their audiences that there are "billions of dead things buried in rock layers." The point, that there are huge numbers of fossils, is correct but billions is such an underwhelming number compared to the reality of the fossil record. The vastness of the fossil record was driven... Continue Reading →
Take a tour of the Ark Encounter with a geologist, paleontologist and myself in this YouTube presentation. In July I visited the Ark Encounter with geologist Dr. Kent Ratajeski from The University of Kentucky. After that trip Kent, myself and Dan Phelps (President of the Kentucky Paleontological Society) worked together - my contribution was rather... Continue Reading →
Our perceptions of the age of a subject are frequently based on our common experience with similar subjects. Most people have some ability to guess the age of children with seemingly very little prior information. We might call this ability to guess age our intuition but this "intuition" is the scientific method working automatically in our minds. Our... Continue Reading →
If you have followed my blog for the past six months you know that I have been discussing the feasibility of the young-earth creationist’ (YEC) rapid-speciation model which proposes that hundreds of thousands of species of plants and animals have been formed by natural selection in just the past couple thousand years (YEC Hyper-evolution article archive). More... Continue Reading →
Young earth creationists (YECs) are the most vocal skeptics of evolutionary theory, however, they recognize organisms do change over time. But how much? Everyone agrees that organisms have the capacity to adapt to their environments. This adaptive ability can lead to the formation of isolated genetic lineages we identify as species. Evolutionary theory posits that continued... Continue Reading →
Just 10 days after the grand opening of the Ark Encounter on July 7th, I traveled down to Kentucky to pay a visit to Ken Ham's latest evangelistic outreach endeavor. It was a Friday and I arrived less than one hour after opening and spent the better part of six hours on the Ark Encounter premises. ... Continue Reading →
Just how many animals where on Noah's Ark according to 6-day creationists? That answer has varied considerably over the past century. With the completion of the Ark Encounter, the most visible attempt to show the feasibility of preserving all land animal diversity from a global flood, more people are being exposed to a modern answer to... Continue Reading →
Do places on Earth exist where annual records have been stored for tens of thousands of years and can be accessed today? Ice-cores and tree rings can preserve long records of yearly events but some of the best records come from layers of sediment underlying some lakes which, if formed under the right conditions, can be read like the annual rings of... Continue Reading →
What does it mean to evolve? What is natural selection? Where did the genetic variation come from that allows evolution to happen? Why are there so many species of animals today? What can mutations do? These are some of the questions that Answers in Genesis speaker Bryan Osborne addressed at public talks given at the young-earth... Continue Reading →
Guests at the Ark Encounter will observe many descriptions and artistic impressions of what happened before, during and just after Noah's Flood. One set of images was especially interesting to me because it visualized different stages of the Flood. One panel which explains how the Flood waters prevailed over the highest mountains was particularly perplexing because of... Continue Reading →
Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter presents it visitors with exhibits with odd-looking creatures and explains that just 4350 years ago these were the common ancestors of animal species we know today. How and when did this transformation of "kinds" into thousands of species happen? At present, the consensus among young-earth creationists is that Noah's Ark contained far... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 