Posts

Venerating Lucy

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For those who don't follow our podcast  Let's Talk Creation , I wanted to let you know that the first episode of Paul and Todd's Czech Anthropology Adventure is now available. In that episode, my co-host Paul Garner and I have quite a conversation about the "veneration" of these fossils. We draw some very explicit parallels between the long lines and many foreign visitors coming to this exhibit and medieval people going on religious pilgrimages. Being in that room with the fossils, where the room was dark and the bones were in coffin-like exhibits, there was definitely a hush over the crowd, almost a reverence. (Then there were the noisy creationists yammering on about anatomical details.)  We had an interesting conversation about science vs religion and how modern museums have become our cathedrals. Check out the episode for more. In a fun little coincidence, Paige Madison has a piece in  Smithsonian  magazine on the exhibit, and she confirms that reverential a...
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Impressions on my first ETS meeting

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  I've been in or around Christian academia for 25 years now, and I have never attended the annual conference of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) until just last week. Why not? A mix of things. It's not my field. It's expensive. With travel days, it takes out a whole week. As someone entrusted with donor money for Core Academy, I have spent very, very little on conference travel for myself. This year a donor supplied the cost for attending the ETS meeting in Boston. "You have to go. It's important that creationists be there." Who can argue with that? Especially when I'm not footing the bill! So that's how I found myself on a very early flight to Boston last Monday morning. For those unfamiliar, ETS is the main organization for theologians and Bible scholars on sort of the conservative end of the theological spectrum. These would be folks who affirm the inerrancy of Scripture for example. The conference resembled other academic conferences I...
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Paul and Todd’s Czech Anthropology Adventure!

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Paul Garner and I just got home from a week in Czechia where we did a little whirlwind tour of anthropology sites and museums.   We were very busy pretty much all the time, either viewing and touring places or recording video for our podcast Let’s Talk Creation (find it wherever you get your podcasts).   I’m happy to report that everything went mostly according to plan.   We recorded 100+ Gb of video, audio, and photos, with enough material for three full podcast episodes, which will take a couple months to edit and release, so look for those coming in January.   We also shot some shorts for the New Creation blog, and those will come out whenever the New Creation guys post them.   I don’t want to spoil everything from those videos, but I did want to give a little written update about our journey. Thanks especially to the Genesis Fund at the Nehemiah Foundation for sponsoring our trip.   They were very generous to go along with our little scheme on such s...
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Origins 2025 and the FUTURE!

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As always, Origins 2025 was a great time of sharing and scholarship, this time on the campus of Bryan College commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial. In addition to our usual roster of technical talks on everything from pre-Flood ecology to fly created kinds to behemoth and leviathan, we also had special plenaries from Randy Guliuzza, Jeremy Blaschke, and Steve Austin.  The conference concluded on Wednesday with a special tour of the Rhea County Courthouse, where the Scopes Trial took place 100 years ago, led by yours truly.  I owe a huge thank you to everyone who attended and volunteered and to our kind hosts at Bryan College.  We couldn't have had such a successful event without you! What's next for Origins?  As usual, another one!  Origins 2026 will be held on the campus of The Master's University in Santa Clarita, CA in June, 2026.  As always, abstracts will be due in the spring, and we hope you're giving some thought to what y...
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What if we just didn't fight?

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At the start of this year, I fully intended to write up some thoughts and reflections on the centennial of the Scopes Trial, which took place right here in Dayton, TN in July of 1925.  I also agreed to give a presentation on the history of creationism for the Scopes Centennial symposium "Evolving Conflict," so it wasn't just a matter of writing up some thoughts.  I had a deadline! Now, I've lived here in Dayton for 25 years, always less than five miles from the courtroom where the trial took place.  I've read more about the trial than I can even remember.  I met people who were there and descendants of people who were there.  Core Academy has its own historical archives related to the trial.  I've given more tours of the courthouse than I can count.  To say I'm familiar with the trial is kind of an understatement.  Surely I would have something thoughtful to say about it after all these years! Then I found myself quite simply at a loss.  I wa...
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Face to Face at Last!

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It was a big week last week, but you might have missed the news amidst all the other troubles of the world at the moment.  A fifteen-year mystery was finally resolved thanks to a bit of DNA recovered from some dental tartar on an old skull from China.  The story of this discovery began years ago hundreds of miles away in southern Siberia at a place called Densiova Cave. Just a small cave, as far as caves go, Denisova Cave opens to roughly the southeast, just above the right bank of the Anuy River.  The main chamber today is defaced with recent graffiti, but the sediments excavated from the floor of the cave yielded remarkable discoveries from ages past.  Stone tools and hundreds of bone fragments have been recovered.  The bone fragments testify to the enduring use of the cave by predators, but the stone tools hinted that people had been there too. With the advent of ancient DNA technology and molecular archaeology, the first really startling report came of a com...
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Rising Star Burials Revised

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Longtime readers will remember my obsession with the discoveries in the Rising Star Cave in South Africa, where thousands of bones of a hominin dubbed Homo naledi have been recovered over the past dozen or so years.  By itself, that's not terribly shocking (there are lots of hominin fossils), but various features of the cave where they were found led researchers to suggest the bones were deliberately placed there.  More recently, there have been a series of claims and pre-prints that have introduced some fascinating new dimensions to the work ( fire , burials, tools, and engravings ), but there has also been criticism of these findings that reflect some of my own misgivings about a few of the claims .  Some of my concerns:  The claims of fire evidence remains undocumented, and it's been nearly two and a half years now.  I know in archaeology that it's somewhat common to make big announcements about discoveries with the research articles coming much later, but I...
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