Todd's Blog

You probably already heard about the big announcement from Origins 2020, if you follow social media at all.  This year, after much prayer and hope for decades, we have a Creation Theology Society as a sister society to the Creation Geology Society and the Creation Biology Society.  The new CTS president Jeremy Lyon announced the society on the first day of the conference, and the response was very, very positive. We creationists live in a world of constant integration between scripture and science, and most of us do the scripture part as near total amateurs.  I've tried to interact with theologians over the years, with varying levels of success.  What I often find is that the theologians get distracted with deeper questions than the more superficial things I want to know.  Alternatively, they're content refuting someone like John Walton but leave aside many challenging questions.  So I am delighted we have a nucleus of theologians committed to working towar...

For my plenary at this year's Origins conference, I was inspired by Joel Duff's paper  Dissent with modification: how postcreationism’s claim of hyperrapid speciation opposes yet embraces evolutionary theory , which was recently published in Evolution Education & Outreach .  In my circles it made kind of a splash, and there have already been rebuttals posted and other rebuttals are being composed.  And there's plenty to be mad about I suppose, mostly because I don't recognize myself in this paper at all. But I was inspired mostly by the name "postcreationist," because it first made me laugh but it also made me start thinking.  How do modern creationists relate to their forebears of recent memory?  I recall meeting Henry Morris and Duane Gish, but my take on creationism is definitely a bit different from theirs.  As I thought about it, I realized my generation grew up after all the disputes of the early twentieth century.  I never gave day-age creat...

The weirdness of 2020 continued last week with our first Origins conference conducted entirely online.  It was my first time in 20 years that I didn't travel somewhere and meet up with people for this conference, but this was a pretty decent facsimile all things considered.  I need to pause here and give a gigantic thank you to CBS president Matt McLain and his army of students who pulled this thing off in basically a month.  We were scrambling to get everything edited and recruit speakers, and frankly, it turned out well.  It was far and away the biggest attendance we've ever had at an Origins conference!  I was very encouraged by the whole thing, even though I missed the personal time hanging out and talking about anything and everything. The format was pretty simple.  There was a regular schedule of pre-recorded lectures that was punctuated by meetings and Q&A sessions conducted on Zoom.  So we'd meet in the morning on Zoom (usually about 40-50%...

Core Academy rare books Core Academy recently expanded our rare book collection with a set of extremely rare nineteenth century books on scriptural geology and natural theology.  We spent some time at the end of last week re-organizing our entire rare book collection.  I'll be posting more about those books in the near future. I've highlighted our rare books and archives in previous blog posts, but I think it's always important to emphasize the value of the history of creationism.  Believe it or not, our history is just as contentious as everything else about creationism.  Many individuals want to dismiss young-age creationism as a modern aberration, an intellectual accident, that emerged from Seventh-day Adventism in the early 1900s.  Standing against this is a record of creationist ideas that stretches back for centuries. Sometimes these assertions border on the downright bizarre. Last year, I read a book on creationism in the early church, where the author as...