Reading and understanding original research publications can be difficult when the content is outside your field of expertise. Sometimes reading that original research is just avoided and popular summaries are used to inform us of the importance of new research. The latter appears to be the case when Ken Ham writes about his love of... Continue Reading →
Kind of Confusing – Young-earth Creationist’ Classification of the Bombardier Beetle
Young-earth creationists in the twenty-first century take a broadly inclusive view of the relationship of existing and extinct species as they relate to the kinds of organisms that God created one days four, five, and six of the creation week. For example, the image below is from a new display of the origin of the... Continue Reading →
The Polar Bear Test—An Identification Key of Christian Views of Origins
YEC, GT, AoA, OEC, ID, PC, EC, TE? These acronyms refer to theistic models of earth’s biological and physical history.  Do you know which models each of these letter combinations refer to? If so, do you know which one best characterizes your view? If you don’t—or if you don’t know, or are not sure, into... Continue Reading →
God’s Knitting Needles Revealed in the Creation of Mike Trout?
The satire site, The Babylon Bee, published a fiction piece earlier this year in which Ken Ham claimed that Mike Trout's amazing baseball abilities are the best evidence we have of intelligent design. The Bee’s clever satire got me thinking about the nature of God’s contingent actions in the world which have traditionally been identified... Continue Reading →
The Amazing Killdeer: Designed for Deception, a Good Creation, or Both?
Birds, like all organisms, employ many strategies to ensure that their offspring will survive, thereby allowing the continued existence of the species. Some birds produce elaborate nests high in trees, on rocky ledges or even inside caves to protect them from ground-dwelling predators. Others, like penguins and many shorebirds, nest together, overwhelming predators by sheer... Continue Reading →
The Universal Design Intuition—Undeniable or Unreliable? Reviewing ‘Undeniable’ by Douglas AxeÂ
Last year I was invited to write an essay reflection on Douglas Axe’s book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life is Designed for the periodical Sapientia (Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding an outreach of TEDS --Trinity Evangelical Divinity School). That essay, Undeniably Limited: Designing a Box in Which to Find the... Continue Reading →
On the Origin of Thorns: The Prelapsarian Acacia and the Good Creation
Thorns, prickles, spines and needles provide an effective means of protection for plants against many herbivores which would otherwise find them to be a source of nourishment.  A common perception of the Genesis account of creation is that God created plants with no form of natural protection against herbivores because God pronounced that  (Gen.... Continue Reading →
Progressive Creationism: A Whale of an Inference
I think it is safe to say that the average person has little appreciation for the diversity (eg. number of species) and the total numbers of whales in the world. What most people hear about whales is that there are some that are hunted to near extinction. This tends to create the impression that whales are rare animals. Yes, there are many rare and endangered species of whales but there there are many that are very abundant.