Exploring the Intersection of Science and Faith in the Spirit of John Ray
Please welcome Lars Cade* as a guest blogger on Naturalis Historia. I am a Christian currently studying to become a paleontologist. While I still have much more that I need to learn before I could properly consider myself one, I know enough of the discipline to know when it is being misrepresented. Unfortunately, the young-earth […]
Animal tracks preserved in stone are found in great abundance in many parts of the geological column. You might be asking yourself, aren’t the chances incredibly small that any individual track made in mud would be preserved over long periods of time? You would be right. The vast majority of footprints won’t survive the ravages of […]
Billions of footprints are preserved in the rock record. While bones get all the attention, fossil footprints likely outnumber bones. How can we make sense of this observation? Surely, preserving a bone must be far more likely than preserving a footprint? I have written about how paleontologists use information from footprints and bones to reconstruct […]
Mars once had a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on its surface. Nearly every month data from satellites and multiple ground-based systems provide new evidence confirming what was once speculation about the watery past of Mars. But how much water and how long ago did this water exist? A large amount of water still exists on Mars […]
In my reflections on the recent film “Is Genesis History?” which appeared on the Biologos website yesterday I made the following observation: “Recently I found myself in a theater taking in scenes of God’s creation through the documentary Is Genesis History? hosted by Del Tackett. This beautifully produced film transported myself and the rest of a clearly […]
Can the act of breathing in a cave cause it to grow larger? Limestone caves are usually formed by dissolution of limestone as the result of the interaction of carbon dioxide dissolved in water seeping through cracks in bedrock. Typically this begins deep underground and as voids expand and reach the surface animals may enter […]
Nine hundred feet below a Mexican desert hundreds of giant white crystals, some more than 90 feet long and 13 feet wide, fill a hot (137 F) and humid cavern. Pictures of people exploring this crystal palace look as if Rick Moranis had shrunk them down to the size of an ant and then put them into […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
At the bottom of an ancient lake in southwest Wyoming thousands of fish, plant leaves, and other animals were preserved with amazing detail. These fossils represent very different organisms than those found in other parts of Wyoming such as the fossil sites that we found this summer north-central Wyoming (Hiking through the Jurassic Period in Wyoming […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The sedimentary rocks of the Earth hold vast quantities of fossils. Hundreds of years of observations have shown that these 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 geological […]
