Articles » Intermediate

Evolutionists have long had a difficult time trying to account for the development of cells with nuclei. The first step, of course, is to agree on a suitable ancestor. The popular choice is bacteria (prokaryotes) which typically have only a single circular chromosome lying free in the cell. Unfortunately there are numerous structural and metabolic differences between the assumed ancestors and presumed descendants. Various theories have been proposed to explain how this new cell type might have developed, but none has proved extremely satisfactory. Thus the old theories tend to get recycled. An explanation is accepted for a while and later falls into disfavour as another old theory is retrieved from mothballs. The problem is that none of these theories fits the observed facts very well at all. Read the rest of this entry »

CSAA’s featured speaker for Creation Weekend 2011 was well known creation apologist Dr. Jerry Bergman. Large numbers of people came to hear one or more of his lectures and all declared themselves delighted with his genial, non-confrontational manner and his interesting material. In that Dr. Bergman’s area of expertise is biology, chemistry and medical anatomy, the issues he discussed were quite different from the geological topics which we have considered in recent years. This material demonstrated anew that the issue of creation is broad and encompasses all aspects of nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Astronomer Halton Arp (1924-2013) represents an excellent example of how mainstream scientists protect their favoured explanations against anyone, no matter how qualified or prestigious, who dares to question the majority position. We see how actual observations made by Arp and colleagues, were/are not allowed to call the Big Bang origins theory into question. Read the rest of this entry »

“Everybody” knows, one might suppose, that evolution is about facts and the creation model is about belief. Certainly this was the message of the recent PBS TV series entitled “Evolution” which aired in September 2001. Indeed information sent to all the PBS stations stated this very thing: “All known scientific evidence supports evolution…. New discoveries over the past 150 years have all supported the validity of the theory of evolution.” (PBS Internal Memo. 2001. The Evolution Controversy: Use it or Lose it. Evolution Project / WGBH Boston. p. 5. June 15.) The memo further defined a scientific theory as a “higher level of understanding that ties ‘facts’ together.” (p. 5). As to the creation model, the memo dismissed it as “not science. It is part of a religious belief system…” (p. 6). Such statements and other similar ones over the years have convinced many among the public that science in general and evolution in particular are based on observations from the natural world and thus they are empirically or factually based. The interesting thing is that this is not the modern understanding of science among scientists themselves. They have long since abandoned much concern for actual data. Read the rest of this entry »

Geologist Dr. Steven Austin has promised to provide Albertans with some fascinating and exciting information when he comes to Edmonton for the November 6-7 weekend. On the Friday evening, November 6 (Millbourne Alliance Church), he has promised to discuss “Mount St. Helens : Explosive Evidence for Creation.”  Since the eruption of that volcano in 1980, Dr. Austin has presented this material to many audiences and the response is always very positive. Read the rest of this entry »

While Kurt Wise’s original field of expertise is fossils, readers of his book Faith, Form and Time will discover that he is also very familiar with mathematics, astronomy, biology and of course, Scripture. This is what makes him so interesting to listen to. Read the rest of this entry »

Fashions come and go. Everyone knows that. Sooner or later today’s “cool” youth find themselves wearing the “geeky” designs that their parents had modeled so many years before. While modern youngsters formerly declared they would not be caught “dead” in such outfits, now that the recycled designs are the new “in-thing,” youth happily look much as their parents did. It’s fun to laugh at these quirks and foibles of human nature. But fashions are not the only thing that we recycle. Scientific explanations have a habit of reappearing just as frequently as old discarded fashions. Explanations concerning mass extinctions are a case in point. Read the rest of this entry »

The ability of fireflies to glow in the dark, delights those who have seen these insects in action. It really seems like a special talent. However a recent issue of National Geographic (March 2015) declared about bioluminescence: “Evolving to make light seems to be relatively easy — it has happened independently in at least 40 different lineages.” (p. 84) Just because we find a special talent in a number of very different creatures, does not mean that the talent was easily developed by chance. National Geographic is not aware that this unusual ability is much more reasonably explained as the choice of God, the creator. There are many examples where we can see the problem for evolution of special talents in very different creatures. And the camera eye is an ideal example. Read the rest of this entry »

Kurt P. Wise. 2002. Faith, Form, and Time: What the Bible Teaches and Science Confirms about Creation and the Age of the Earth. Broadman and Holman Publishers. Nashville, TN. Paperback. 287 pages.

Few Christians in science today are as qualified as Kurt Wise to talk about origins theory. His field of expertise is fossils and he obtained his Ph.D. in this discipline from Harvard University. His research director was none other than arch-evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould who well understood that Wise was a creationist. After graduation Dr Wise accepted a position in a small Christian college in Tennessee. There he has encouraged a nucleus of like-minded scientists to cooperate on highly technical research of relevance to creation. He does not appreciate superficial efforts. Indeed he has made himself unpopular in some circles through his insistence on high standards in scientific research and in the drawing of conclusions. Thus one might expect his new book to deal with science but it only lightly touches on the issue. What this book does is to provide a Scriptural defense of the creationist position. Read the rest of this entry »

Not everyone appreciates desert landscapes, however most people will admit, when pressed, that there is an awesome grandeur to some dry lands. The scablands in the northeast section of the State of Washington, are a case in point. Does one like drama? Does one appreciate deserts? The State of Washington has it all. Read the rest of this entry »

The importance of the mineral calcium phosphate to living organisms can hardly be overstated. It is used by many organisms, including humans, to build their bones and skeletons.  This is especially true for fish, crustaceans, and some brachiopods.  Besides that, and even more importantly, phosphate ions are required for major building blocks of life, such as DNA and RNA.  It is also required for the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)—the molecular fuel of living cells (Brady, Tostevin and Tosca 2022).

Evolutionists struggle to explain how life could have arisen from non-life—a concept known as “abiogenesis” or “spontaneous generation.”  One of the problems is the importance of phosphate ions for biological molecules and the prohibitively low concentrations of phosphates in nature for those molecules to form spontaneously.  There just isn’t enough phosphate.  Phosphate minerals tend to be insoluble under most conditions, so only trace amounts exist as dissolved minerals in seawater.  In fact, on average, seawater contains only about 0.071 parts per million of phosphorous (Simandl, Paradis and Fajber 2012).

October 24 & 25, 2014  in Edmonton

Ever since Dr. Steve Austin earned his Ph.D. in coal geology from Pennsylvania State University, he has shared his expertise with Christians eager to understand how nature expresses what the Bible tells us happened in the past. Indeed, when it comes to geological research, Dr. Austin’s resume goes on and on, all of it exciting! Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to persuade young people (or anybody for that matter) to read useful or improving literature? If it isn’t on the course, and if it doesn’t count for marks, few people will even open a book’s cover. An obvious choice to counteract that attitude is the comic book. Comics are certainly painless to read. A marginally interested individual is more likely to dip into such a book, and to proceed farther, than a person might in a book with prose and illustrations. The operative question then is whether such a format can usefully communicate information to teenage and twenty-something age readers. Read the rest of this entry »

Some years ago, I had occasion to collect a water sample from a small pond south of Lake Manitoba. The fun part was going back to the lab and looking at a drop of the sample under the microscope. I was sampling lakes and ponds every day, but on this occasion I screamed at what I saw. There before my wondering eyes were relatively large, brownish algal cells with fierce looking spines. They were spinning slowly as I watched.

An old song runs over and over through my head: “We’re off to Alaska, land of the midnight sun!” Indeed this attractive feature of the far north attracts scores of tourists. However like many situations, this one involves good news and bad news. The good news is the endless summer days. The bad news, of course, is the endless winter nights. All living creatures thrive in the north during the summer. Plants grow quickly and animals rise their young. The winter however is not only dark, but also very cold. How, one wonders, would organisms fare there if the climate were still dark, but not cold? That’s an interesting question because there is scientific evidence for such a situation in the past. Some of the evidence is Canadian and some is American. Read the rest of this entry »