Rather than a retrospective on 2021, let's look forward to this year. What is the state of young-earth creationism right now? What events will or could transpire in the coming year that will impact the future acceptance or rejection of young-earth creationism as an interpretative framework for understanding earth's geological and biology history? In this... Continue Reading →
The Amazon basin isn’t all a lush tropical forest. In large portions of western Amazonian wet seasonally flooded grasslands--not trees--are the norm. The upper branches of the Amazon River wind themselves across massive flood plains like snakes writhing across a sandy surface. One feature of these nearly featureless flat plains that has long puzzled... Continue Reading →
Young-earth creationists have been wrangling for decades over how to identify where the Flood/post-Flood boundary is to be found. I described the most popular hypotheses put forward by YECs in a recent post, Where is Noah's Flood in the Geological Column? I have also recorded a YouTube video based on this article. https://www.youtube.com/embed/7gEwLe6c3Wg There is... Continue Reading →
Ken Ham recently tweeted about a baby born with a "tail." I agree with his assessment that these are not cases of bony tails, homologous to tails in almost all vertebrate species, but then I wondered, can young-earth creationists be sure that Adam and Eve did not have true bony tails as adults? After all,... Continue Reading →
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?
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... Continue Reading →
What is going on in young-earth creationism these days? In the previous three parts of this series on creationism in 2021 I hypothesized that there is an informal but growing movement within young-earth creationism I referred to as "The New Creationists." In part I of the series I identified some of the prominent members of... Continue Reading →
Two individuals I have never heard of* but have a YouTube channel, Standing for Truth, went on a 3 hour 45-minute live rant about my views of YEC hyperspeciation last night. They went line-by-line, well sort of, through a talk I (and Gregg Davidson my coauthor) gave at the American Scientific Affiliation’s annual meeting a... Continue Reading →
What is this New Creationism being preached by The New Creationists? What are its distinguishing characteristics? What I am identifying as The New Creationists (TNCs) are not necessarily an intentional or organized distinction. I think it has happened organically and those whom I am calling The New Creationists may have never even thought of themselves... Continue Reading →
Pick up a copy of The New Answers Book Volumes 1-4 from the young-earth apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis and you could be forgiven for thinking that young-earth creationists have the definitive answers to every question: If the world is young and its surface was completely worked over less than 4500 years ago, how would... Continue Reading →
In 2017 the film documentary Is Genesis History? marked a significant moment in the history of creationism evangelism. A professional-quality production defending the young-earth interpretation of Scripture and overview of the state-of-the-art in creation science—the attempt to conform the physical evidence of creation into the Young-Earth biblical framework. Upon its release, I wrote several reviews... Continue Reading →
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 →
There are many organizations that have built an apologetics ministry around a young-earth interpretation of Genesis. If you are familiar with young-earth creationism at all you are probably aware of Answers in Genesis (AiG) and its founder, Ken Ham. AiG wasn't the first young-earth ministry but it has undoubtedly become the largest and most influential... Continue Reading →
My post-doctoral research from 1995 to 1999 included searching for, sequencing and characterizing genes of chloroplast genomes of holoparasitic plants (plants that cannot obtain energy from the sun and must steal it from other plants). I am preparing to give a seminar tomorrow on the topic of parasitic plants. So much has been learned since... Continue Reading →
I follow a number of apologists who play secondary roles in the young-earth (literal-day) creation universe. These are individuals with ministries that rely on repackaging and reselling ideas generated by the primary young-earth organizations like Answers in Genesis and Institute for Creation Research. One of those is David Rives. One of his many websites under... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 