Todd's Blog

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . While browsing in a local antique mall in Dayton recently, I stumbled upon a bookcase full of old textbooks. To my delight, I found George William Hunter's 1907 Elements of Biology , the predecessor to his 1914 textbook A Civic Biology that featured prominently in the famous Scopes trial. Best part? It was only $2. I love a good bargain. I've only briefly skimmed the book, but it appears that the concept of evolution occupies a much lower place in this volume than in A Civic Biology . That's not to say that the later textbook covered evolution in great detail. Evolution appears briefly in A Civic Biology when classification and heredity are discussed. In Elements of Biology , evolution appears to be barely mentioned. On page 7 of the introduction we read, "In the second half year the so-called evolutio...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . This week's book is an extraordinary look into Sir Richard Owen's understanding of design. The volume it appears in is titled Lectures Delivered before the Young Men's Christian Association, in Exeter Hall, from November, 1863, to February, 1864 . Owen's lecture is titled "On Some Instances of the Power of God as Manifested in His Animal Creation." There is also a longer book form of this lecture, but I haven't been able to obtain a copy. This condensed version still contains quite a powerful argument. And that makes me sort of sad. As I read this essay, I thought about the ID debate and my evolutionary creationist brothers in Christ, and I wished any of them could write anything remotely as compelling as Owen had. He almost convinced me... but not quite. The lecture is divided into roughly t...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . Longtime readers will recall my ambivalence towards mendelian models of speciation: Mendel is not enough Mendel is REALLY not enough Very briefly, the model posits that God created organisms with a fixed set of alleles (gene versions). As time went on and the populations began to spread out, certain combinations of alleles became fixed in certain populations, and those populations became species. As I wrote previously , This model is still quite popular with creationists for what I consider to be mostly psychological or apologetic reasons: (1) It does not require the generation of new attributes or "genetic information" (whatever that is) after creation. (2) All changes can be perceived as degenerative, since the originally created heterozygous condition is broken up and disturbed as species separate out alleles...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . The full title of this week's book is Noe Architectus Arcae in Diluvio Navarchus Descriptus et Morali Doctrina Illustratus . It was written by a German Jesuit named Jeremias Drexel and published in Antwerp in 1640. Our copy is a first edition. Drexel was quite well-known in his own time. He wrote thirty different books (nine published posthumously), and during the last twenty years of his life, more than 150,000 copies of his books were sold. I'm highlighting this book not because I've read it (which I haven't - it's entirely Latin), but because it exemplifies an interesting historical trend on Noah's Ark. In 1554, a French monk named Johannes Buteo published a pamphlet that attempted to analyze the logistics of Noah's Ark, its structure, how it was built, how many animals it carried, how much ro...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . During the heyday of Bryan's antievolution movement, there were plenty of opponents of Bryan's crusade. It's easy to think of non-religious or even anti-religious individuals (like Mencken or Darrow), but there were plenty of religious folk upset with him too. One such opponent was Edwin G. Conklin. Conklin was a developmental biologist and professor at Princeton. He was president of the American Society of Naturalists and eventually of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1922, he wrote a little leaflet for the American Institute of Sacred Literature called "Evolution and the Bible." It is an archetypal anticreationist tract. All the major arguments I hear again and again are already there. Here's a few quotes you'll find familiar: It is a dangerous thing for defenders of t...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . I was searching online the other day for nineteenth century comparative anatomy books, and I stumbled across this title. I'd never heard of it before, but I couldn't resist. An anonymously authored book on the comparative anatomy of vertebrate forelimbs published by the American Sunday-School Union? That's right up my alley. Fortunately, such an obscure work was not expensive. According to WorldCat , the original book was published in England around 1848 by the Religious Tract Society. Its unnamed author was one William Charles Linnaeus Martin , onetime curator of the Zoological Society's museum and author of many nature books for general audiences. When I saw the title, I wanted to know whether the book would follow the pattern of Richard Owen's roughly contemporaneous On the Nature of Limbs or Charles Bel...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . Anyone who's anyone in the creation/evolution debate thinks they know where young-age creationism came from. Some think it originated very recently from the book The Genesis Flood by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb. Others (slightly better informed) place its origin in the context of the fundamentalist movement and especially the Scopes trial. Even better informed people (like Ron Numbers) blame George McCready Price and ultimately SDA prophetess Ellen G. White. All are proceeding under the assumption that creationism is a relatively recent aberration, properly understood in the context of religious reaction to Darwin's Origin of Species . I think that's quite wrong. I strongly suspect (and have for some time) that the young-age creation position has sort of been the default for most Christians for a long, long time....

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . While I was home for Christmas, I visited my favorite antiquarian bookstore in East Lansing to find that it had been remodeled to about half the size it used to be and the bookstore cat died last year. Bummer. Then I found Rastus Agustus Explains Evolution , a first edition in pristine condition, and that sort of made up for the lack of a kitty rubbing against my leg while I browsed. RIP, Moe the cat. Rastus Agustus Explains Evolution (1928) was written by B.H. Shadduck, an Ohio pastor and author of such bizarre propaganda classics as Puddle to Paradise and Jocko Homo Heavenbound . Rastus Agustus has to be one of the worst antievolution pamphlets I've ever seen. Imagine Jack Chick's Big Daddy , only a thousand times more tasteless and offensive. Rastus included an advertisement for other pamphlets written by Shaddu...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . I first read Frank Marsh's Evolution, Creation, and Science about nine years ago, and I was amazed. I kept thinking to myself how "mature" it was, by which I meant that it seemed advanced for a book more than 50 years old. I'm not sure if that's a testament to Marsh's abilities or a commentary on the state of creationist biology at the time. The book is by no means perfect, however. Marsh has more than one agenda here, and sometimes those agendas clash. He tries to be naturalist, apologist, and Bible scholar all at once, sometimes leading to puzzling and contradictory claims. Overall, however, the book was an influential step in the development of modern creationist biology. In my own book Understanding the Pattern of Life , I portrayed Marsh as a great innovator. Having done a lot of reading since t...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . Several years ago I began a project to study the history of creationist thought regarding the origin of species. My aim was to understand how Frank Marsh arrived at his ideas about "created kinds." That work led me to a number of obscure and now poorly-known books on the subjects of creation and antievolution. One of those books was Evoluion Criticised by T.B. Bishop, described on the title page as "Member of the Council of the Victoria Institute." Evolution Criticised , published in 1918 in England, was a peculiar work that consisted largely of quotes from evolutionary literature with very little overriding organization. Bishop cited Erich Wasmann's view of species favorably, but otherwise concentrated almost exclusively on trying to document disagreements between evolutonists themselves (a very typical ant...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . Those having any interest in the Scopes trial are probably familiar with this image of evangelist T.T. Martin's book stall set up behind the court house. From this spot, he sold copies of the latest antievolution works, including Alfred Watterson McCann's God - Or Gorilla , pamphlets by B.H. Shadduck, George McCready Price's Phantom of Organic Evolution , and Martin's own Hell and the High Schools . (Business must have been good, since Ron Numbers records that Phantom is the only book that yielded Price any royalties.) H.L. Mencken described Martin in his July 15 Scopes trial essay , A somewhat more plausible volunteer has turned up in the person of Pastor T.T. Martin, of Blue Mountain, Miss. He has hired a room and stocked it with pamphlets bearing such titles as "Evolution a Menace," "Hell and the...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . For past entries, click here . Well, it's heritage week here at Bryan College, since tomorrow (March 19) is William Jennings Bryan's birthday. I thought it would be a good time to highlight these bound New York Times volumes from the CORE library. As you know (or should know), July 1925 was the month of the Scopes trial here at the courthouse, the month Bryan died, and the month that the "William Jennings Bryan Memorial University" (Bryan College) was devised. (Notice the lack of Clarence Darrow College. Not that I'm rubbing it in or anything.) These old newspapers have more of a novelty value than anything else. For example, while the Scopes trial was going on, you could buy a new Chevrolet for less than $1500, rent a furnished apartment overlooking Central Park for $175 a month, or see Doulas Fairbanks ...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . For past entries, click here . A funny thing about collectors: We tend to get really excited over really weird things. I'm not talking about casual collectors, the kind that pick up a collectible spoon or keychain when on vacation. I'm talking about diehard collectors, obsessive, completist whackos who would gladly give up food or electricity for a month or two if only they could acquire that last item for their collection. If you've ever said something like, "You spent how much??? On that thing ?!" then you probably know one of these collectors. I am such a collector, and as I said, we tend to get really excited over strange things. So it was that I found myself digging through about two dozen big boxes of books donated to the college by one of the trustees. They were old theology and Bible study books, ...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . Seems like everyone with any stake in the creation/evolution debate knows about the year 4004 B.C. This was the year estimated by James Ussher as the year of Creation. The year 4004 B.C. (or something close to it) can be derived using the genealogies in Genesis 5 and 11. Lesser known than Ussher's work is the similar chronological work done by John Lightfoot, vice chancellor of Cambridge University. These two scholars exemplify the seventeenth century interest in biblical chronology. Lightfoot's chronological work was published in the Prolegomena of his book The Harmony of the Four Evangelists among themselves, and with the Old Testament, with an explanation of the chiefest difficulties both in Language and Sense , the first part of which was published in 1644. Our copy is from the thirteen volume Whole Works edited by ...

For those just joining us, "From the Library" spotlights interesting items in the library of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College . On December 5, 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Seventh-day Adventist science teacher and self-styled geologist George McCready Price dashed off an angry letter to fellow Adventist science teacher Harold W. Clark. Price had heard from a mutual friend that Clark had stopped using Price's book The New Geology in his classes at Pacific Union College. Price wrote, ...if you think that I am going to keep quiet when I see dangerous doctrines taught among Adventists, you have another guess coming.... I am simply asking you as a brother, and as an honest man, to tell me in some detail the grounds for your charge that my New Geology is "entirely inadequate in its handling of its problems." And until you do this, I intend to press my charges that you have been making statements about this book which you are afr...

John Wilkins (1614-1672) is not the most famous name of the Enlightenment, but he made important contributions to the history of science and religion. He was a latitudinarian English clergyman during the tumult of the mid-seventeenth century England. He was also the first author to write an English language defense of Galileo in 1638 and 1640, in which he championed Galileo's doctrine of accommodation. He later helped found the Royal Society, of which he served as one of the first secretaries. According to the doctrine of accommodation, God had to accommodate human ignorance when giving the Bible in order to clearly communicate salvation to all people. As a result, the Bible contains figurative and nonliteral language and cannot be used as a source of information in scientific debate. Galileo used the idea to argue against his opponents who claimed that the Bible taught a geocentric universe. In England, Wilkins's enthusiasm for the doctrine fit well with the growing popularit...

As I pondered starting this blog, I needed to make sure that I actually had enough to post about. I'm not really a talkative guy. One idea I had was highlighting items from the CORE library. Our original library was accumulated over a lifetime of collecting by Kurt Wise. Tragically, nearly all of that library was lost in a fire that destroyed the Bryan College administration building in February of 2000. Since then, we've been rebuilding the collection a little at a time, with occasional help from foundations and donors. Since becoming CORE director, I've tried to make library development a priority, and we've added significant items to our collection. This seems like a perfect forum to share some of them. The library currently consists of over 3000 items, mostly books and a substantial collection of periodicals. The books cover 400 years of publication (our earliest book is a Jesuit commentary on Genesis published in 1608). We have a large selection of Bible a...