Evolutionary Creationism | Other
Evolutionary Creationism
Reviews
to load big map
23.01.2022 Curious to know whether that scientist whose views you support really is world-class? Here’s an easy to follow guide on how to check.
22.01.2022 From the article: It is interesting to observe that the ideas of the immortality of the soul and of biological death as being the result of the fall both lack any conclusive biblical support. For example, the passage in Ecclesiastes 12:7 is used frequently as the basis for the immortality of the soul, but it is a difficult text to interpret; its valences are more eschatological than anthropological. As for eternal life and immortality, Scripture never mentions the subject in relation to the soul; rather, it associates eternal life with the human body and with resurrection (1 Cor. 15). In fact, the Bible never talks about immortality as being an intrinsic quality of humanity, even as related to the soul.
22.01.2022 From the article: "But beyond the biological elements, there are also numerous environmental factors that can reinforce or weaken anti-intellectual tendencies. The extent to which one's family embraces education and critical thinking, for example, will be a major factor for many. Also, and importantly, the existence of influential cultural institutions that promote anti-intellectualism may result in a population that, regardless of its raw intellectual abilities, will seem in... many ways ignorant. "To this last point, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out long ago in his Pulitzer-prize winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the correlation between fundamentalist religion and anti-intellectualism cannot be ignored. If strong religious beliefs reject well-established scientific facts that conflict with theological doctrine, intelligent scientific inquiry will not be valued. As Hofstadter argued half a century ago, this alone helps to explain much about American anti-intellectualism. Today, while religion is generally in decline in America, the country is still the most religious in the developed world, and its fundamentalist Christian institutions are particularly powerful."
21.01.2022 An old Naturalis Historia post but a good one. From the article: "YECs would have us believe that dinosaurs lived 4000 years ago and died and didn’t leave a single bone behind but woolly mammoths and mastodons lived at least that long ago and they have left millions of tusks and as many bones behind for us to see, touch and feel. The observational evidence is utterly lacking for dinosaurs. If dinosaurs couldn’t hack the deserts of Egypt and died there, their massive bones w...ould still be laying on the surface or just beneath the sands. Bones of camels, cows, canines, felines and even humans have been found in the deserts of Egypt that are thousands of years old. Instead of building an Ark, Ken Ham could be spending far less money to send out expeditions to find the remains of these recently deceased animals that he is sure must exist." See more
20.01.2022 In this excerpt from a forthcoming interview, evolutionary biologist Dennis Venema responds to an attack on evolutionary biology by apologist Frank Turek whose arguments reflect common Intelligent Design distortions of evolutionary biology. It also touches on the fascinating situation where many YECs now advocate a form of hyper-evolution of species in order to solve the problem of how to fit the millions of species both extant and extinct onto the Ark.
20.01.2022 Creationists are talking about a paper advancing Intelligent Design creationism in the prestigious Journal of Theoretical Biology. Has evolutionary biology been overturned? The answer of course is no.
17.01.2022 YECs argue that death and disease in the animal world was unknown prior to Adam’s sin. The fossil record, stretching back hundreds of millions of years before humans first appeared is one eloquent falsification of that dogma. A recent paper from Lancet Oncology has provided evidence of cancer in a dinosaur fossil. From the Phys.org article commenting on this: A collaboration led by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and McMaster University has led to the discovery and diagnosis ...of an aggressive malignant bone canceran osteosarcomafor the first time ever in a dinosaur. No malignant cancers (tumours that can spread throughout the body and have severe health implications) have ever been documented in dinosaurs previously. The paper was published August 3rd in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet Oncology. Full article at the link below:
15.01.2022 The journal Communications Biology reports the discovery of the burial site of newborn identical twins. Located in Austria, the burial site is dated around 31,000 years making this to date the oldest known identical twin burial site. Thirty-one thousand years is the blink of an eye in geological terms, but it is five times greater than the age of the universe according to YECs. Even those who grudgingly accept an ancient earth but insist that humans date back only six thousand years are faced with the problem this poses since it shows that humans were living and dying well before the appearance of Adam. The article is open access and is available at the link below.
15.01.2022 Special creationists once denied that evolutionary change above the species level was possible. Now, some special creationists are arguing not only for evolution within "kinds", a taxonomic group extending well beyond the species level, but for this evolutionary change to take place within a few hundred years. Special creationism as we once knew it is dead. In its place is what Joel Duff, Thomas Beatman, and David MacMillan call post-creationism. From the article: "Here we pr...ovide an introduction to a new-wave creationist viewpoint which has quietly spread through the insular world of young-earth creationism. We will demonstrate that the modern YEC approach to descent with modification and common ancestry has become in some ways more similar to the modern evolutionary synthesis than YECs wish to acknowledge, often without any awareness among the movement’s lay followers." This new form of creationism offers the advantage of explaining away one of their biggest problems - how to fit millions of species on the Ark - but it comes at the cost of embracing a form of creationism that increasingly looks like the thing they have long denied -large-scale evolutionary change. Full article follows at the link. https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com//s12052-020-0
13.01.2022 This discovery was announced earlier this year but I missed it, due to Covid-19 related dramas. In short, scientists have found in Israel evidence for human collection of shells to wear for ornamental purposes, dating back around 120,000 years. I've pointed out many times that the evidence for human antiquity - well beyond the 6000 years a fundamentalist (mis)interpretation of reality sets for human existence - is beyond reasonable doubt so posting articles such as this may be overkill. However, given the weed-like persistence of fundamentalism, it is worth posting such reminders of what reality shows. The open-access article is available at the link below.
11.01.2022 People can be very smart and still harbor bad ideas because of the collective intellectual space they occupy. More smarts will not fix that. In my experience, a life-changing, disorienting experience is often needed to help smart people see it.
10.01.2022 From the article: However it is a historical fact that a high proportion of those developing the Geological Column were Christian and not those only in name. Having read many of the writings of Sedgwick, Buckland, Whewell, Conybeare and Townsend, I found they were not time-serving clerics and their aim may be summed up in the memorial to Sedgwick at Dent Church in the Yorkshire Dales. Further there is no evidence that there was any atheistic and antichristian purpose beh...ind the development of geology. Even Hutton, who is often accused of this, was not anti-Christian but deist and had good relations with many Christian clergy like Playfair and Robertson, a Moderator of the Kirk. On this score the Geological Column is no more godly or ungodly than the Periodic Table, Newton’s Laws of motion or the structure of DNA. It is simply good science, which in the execution included the work of many Christians.
08.01.2022 No, Darwin wasn’t a hard-core racist who supported genocide. Creationists who make this assertion are lying through their teeth.
05.01.2022 From the article: God did not attempt to deceive us with nature, including the rock record. The young earth creationist positions that: 1) the earth was created 6 to 10,000 years ago and that 2) much of the rock record was deposited as a result of Noah’s flood just do not fit the evidence. This does not mean that the Bible is untrue but that the YEC interpretation does not fit the evidence.
03.01.2022 A recently-discovered Paranthropus robustus skull has provided palaeoanthropologists insight into microevolutionary change in the species. From the article abstract: "Paranthropus robustus is a small-brained extinct hominin from South Africa characterized by derived, robust craniodental morphology. The most complete known skull of this species is DNH 7 from Drimolen Main Quarry, which differs from P. robustus specimens recovered elsewhere in ways attributed to sexual dimorphi...sm. Here, we describe a new fossil specimen from Drimolen Main Quarry, dated from approximately 2.041.95 million years ago, that challenges this view. DNH 155 is a well-preserved adult male cranium that shares with DNH 7 a suite of primitive and derived features unlike those seen in adult P. robustus specimens from other chronologically younger deposits. This refutes existing hypotheses linking sexual dimorphism, ontogeny and social behaviour within this taxon, and clarifies hypotheses concerning hominin phylogeny. We document small-scale morphological changes in P. robustus associated with ecological change within a short time frame and restricted geography. This represents the most highly resolved evidence yet of microevolutionary change within an early hominin species." The article lies behind a paywall but the article below provides a lay-friendly overview of the significance of this find.
02.01.2022 It's been around for over twenty years, but "In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation" is still touted by creationists. Palaeontologist Colin Groves' review therefore is worth sharing to those who may have had this book recommended to them.
