Articles » Intermediate

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 »

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 »

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 »

Secular scientists usually do not like to mention discoveries or achievements of people who support Biblical creation. Recently however, some creation supporters have come to the attention of many scientists and even the secular media.

Mark Armitage, for example, recently published an article on soft un-fossilized tissue in one of the largest Triceratops horns ever found in Montana. Mr. Armitage had found the dinosaur fossil himself in 2012. Then in February 2013 he, along with biologist Kevin Lee Anderson of Arkansas State University-Beebe, published a technical article on this find in a mainstream European scientific journal Acta Histochemica (115, 603-608, 2013). Entitled “Soft sheets of fibrillary bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus.” The article established this find as “the first report of sheets of soft tissues from Triceratops horn bearing layers of osteocytes [bone forming cells], and extends the range and type of dinosaur specimens known to contain non-fossilized material in bone matrix.” (p. 603) Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever had a discussion about creation vs. evolution in which you were asked, “How about the fossil evidence of Neanderthals and the other half-man, half-apes like Lucy?” Read the rest of this entry »

The experiment with fruit flies was basically uncomplicated. Any university student could have carried it out providing they could identify and count the various mutant forms. But there was more to the issue than mere counts of fruit fly offspring. The study was supposed to, and had long been considered that it in fact did, support a key idea of Charles Darwin. More than sixty years had passed since the fruit fly work was published. Subsequent to publication in the new journal Heredity in 1948, few people paid much attention to the study until it was quoted favourably in 1972 and 1994 as supporting Darwin’s idea of sexual selection. Those references conferred celebrity status on the work and many citations followed. But then in 2012 a study was published which questioned not only the 1948 work, but also a major component of Darwin’s theory of evolution. However the reasons and issues surrounding the new study are not what we might hope or expect. It is important to remember that scientists draw conclusions in keeping with their world view and there is more diversity in world views in science than one might imagine.

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In high school biology courses, it soon became apparent to Angie that among her fellow Christians, there was a diversity of opinions about origins. So, she consulted the HeadStart program about the impact of world views on the relationship between faith and science. She read information on the gap theory, the day age theory, the framework hypothesis, theistic evolution, neo-Darwinism, methodological naturalism, intelligent design and creation. Now she better appreciates why this whole website is devoted to creation.