Within a Darwinian framework, this means that all genes shared by humans and sea urchins must have been present in a common ancestor shared sometime before Cambrian strata, which contain both chordate and echinoderm fossils, formed. Published in Origins n. 60.
Is God real? Is the Bible true? What about all those amazing stories in the Bible? Specifically, what about the Genesis stories? Did God really create the world and all that is in it in a literal week? Did that Creation occur only some 10,000 years ago? How could all these biblical accounts be true when so many brilliant scientists advocate otherwise?
Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection was inspired not primarily by his observations of the natural world, but by Thomas Malthus's theory of scarcity.
Review of Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. Published in Origins n. 58.
Ever since it was discovered in 1861, Archaeopteryx lithographica has been a controversial fossil. Its remarkable finding has provided certain credibility to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Archaeopteryx has a mixture of characteristics found in birds, reptiles, and theropod dinosaurs, and for that reason, scientists are divided regarding its origin, flight capacity, and position in the alleged evolutionary sequence from reptiles to birds.
Poor design in Rubisco can now be added to the growing list of failed Darwinian arguments from ignorance.
The world is not divided into the good creationists and the bad evolutionists. Many scientists have never had opportunity to see reasonable alternatives to a materialistic evolutionary process. Many scientists, though convinced by the evidence for evolution, are unwilling to give up on God and/or are searching for some meaning in life. Do we want to draw these people to us or drive them away?
In this article, the multivariate technique of classical multidimensional scaling is introduced to baraminology. Published in Origins n. 57.
Whenever religion and science have a dispute about some question of fact, religion always loses. So goes a common belief. The implication is that religion should never make any factual claims, as it has no contact with reality. For some religions, such an assertion is irrelevant, as these religions do not make any claims about the physical universe. But for biblical Christianity, such an assertion would be fatal.
Many models have been proposed that tend to blur some of the contrasts between the biblical and naturalistic theories. A number of attempts have been made to develop intermediate models in which elements of the biblical story of creation are mixed with elements of the scientific story of origins. All of these models share the biblical idea that nature is the result of divine purpose and the “scientific” idea of long ages of time, but all suffer from serious scientific problems or are entirely ad hoc and conjectural.
Darwin’s view of God is contrary to the biblical view of God and should give Christians pause before buying into Darwin’s naturalism and attempting to wed it to the supernatural in a theistic evolutionary synthesis.
The goal of this essay is to assess the compatibility of Adventist theology with deep time and the evolutionary reconstruction of the origins of earth history.
A collection of short commentaries on scientific papers published in 2003, covering topics such as frog biogeography, moas, the hoatzin, magic bullets in creationism, intelligent design, gene duplication, snail variation, Cambrian lagerstatten, extraterrestrial impacts, hotspots, carbonates, mitochondrial Eve, pseudogene function, mutations in bacteria, fossil diversity patterns, feathered dinosaurs, the fossil Microraptor, intermediate fossil Ichthyostega, problems with the evolutionary tree, and mitochondrial DNA differences. Published in Origins n. 58.
The known history of birds appears consistent with the idea that they were created. These new and spectacular avian fossils suggest is that the original creation produced a much greater variety of birds than previously imagined.
Revelation, rather than reason, is the source of explanation and truth for those who believe in God and his revelation in Scripture. The Bible's words and inner logic, however, still need interpretation. That is why we need to place all Christian theologies, including Adventist theologies, under careful methodological criticism to make certain we understand biblical thinking on its own terms and not from hermeneutical presuppositions defined by philosophy, science, and culture. Only then can we say in practice that the Bible is the foundation of truth.
A review of the book, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. Published in Origins n. 55.
Creationism is a robust paradigm, fully capable of undergirding the scientific enterprise in the new millennium. Wider acceptance of creationism by the scientific community in the future will depend, in part, on how well theologians can convince scientists of the priceless value of revealed information.
While Christians may be convinced that design in nature points to a Creator-God, the general scientific community has not been persuaded. Perhaps more scientifically respectable work on intelligent design of the kind done by Behe and Dembski will encourage evolutionary scientists to look beyond purely naturalistic mechanisms to explain the complexity and meaning of life.
The molecules of life suggest no need for Christians to become sycophants to materialistic philosophy posing as science. On the contrary, science liberated from the artificial constraints of materialism provides an elegant mechanism for study of the creation and logically points to a wonderful Creator.
Animals can change in small or even large ways to adapt to their surroundings, but humans were created as God’s perfect climax to all that had thus far been created.
