Todd's Blog

 Well, despite a lot of weird setbacks this year, we've finished another mostly smooth and successful Origins conference.  This is our second year with the Creation Theology Society, and it's been a blessing to have those guys with us giving us good biblical guidance.  That's their interdisciplinary panel discussion in the photo above.  I've been very encouraged by all of their work. There was a lot of emphasis on baraminology and especially baraminology methods this year, and that was also exciting.  Regular readers might remember that there's been criticism of baraminology over the past few years (some of it good and some of it not so good), and despite my work showing that the methods aren't as bad as everyone says, it's definitely nice to see a real effort to diversify. As always, the conference has also been a fertile time for good ideas.  I talked to folks about the historical Abraham and what that means for our understanding of creation, the language...

    Today was the last day of Origins 2022 (sad), and I presented some of the work we've been doing at Core Academy.  First, we talked a bit about our work with human fossils and origins.  For this presentation, we indulged a bit in speculating about the ancestral form of humanity.  It's a really difficult problem.  I would guess that most modern creationists consider our appearance as Homo sapiens to be the original form of humanity.  In other words, Noah and family looked like us (Noah is as far back as we can extrapolate with the presently known fossils and DNA).  I've long thought that was just prejudice.  We naturally assume that people are like us, so of course Noah looked like us.  The problem is that the fossil record preserves humans that don't look much like us at all.  So how should we understand their appearance?  I wish I could tell you that we had a good answer, but figuring out the ancestral human form is just a...

Give me a break. In the past couple months I've heard on more than one occasion the insinuation that somehow creationists are really evolutionists so the creation/evolution debate has radically changed.  Why?  Because Ken Ham now endorses "hyperevolution" in the Ark Encounter, and that's new!  Creationists have given up on creationism and now just accept an absurd form of evolution.  WOW!  "He's more of an evolutionist than I am!" Give me a break. I hope I can maintain a charitable attitude here, but this emerging attitude is so ludicrous I'm going to have a really hard time doing that. First of all, this isn't Ken Ham's original idea, any more than it's my original idea.  I've complained about this before ( see here ), but the true history of creationist thought is not really catching on.  There just seems to be a gut-level appeal to saying that Ken Ham is more evolutionist than the evolutionists! Except that this is a ludicrous exam...

I don't usually do a lot of cross-promotion (maybe I should?) , but today's podcast episode is a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy! Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you. Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!

  It's weird to think that I'm old enough now that students can come back to me as adults to tell me what they thought of my teaching.  Sometimes that's a nice experience, because students really took my guidance and teaching to heart and became better people and better scholars for it.  Other encounters make me wonder if I taught anyone anything.  And then there are those instances where people think I've taught them things that I never did or would even consider.  I have been thoroughly misunderstood on more occasions than I care to remember, even on issues where I made my position perfectly, crystal clear.  Some folks, even after reading a large amount of my work, still have no idea what I actually believe and think I should be tossed out with the rest of the garbage. I've been thinking about this as I've seen a lot of people lately in the creation/evolution debate wildly misunderstand and misrepresent each other.  I recently read a book on theistic...

  Last week, I had the privilege of spending the entire week with my student Peter as we worked together on his Sanders Scholarship research.  We have been studying the "postcranial" skeleton (everything from the neck down) of hominins, as we continue to learn how to recognize what is human in the fossil record.  This work flows from my ongoing baraminology research project studying the skulls of fossil hominins.  In that research, I've found repeatedly a relatively clear distinction between human and nonhuman, most of which has been described here on my blog: Homo sediba ? Let's talk about Homo naledi Recent creationist comments on Homo naledi Hominins: Was I wrong???? The lingering issue that has always bothered me is the importance of the skeleton.  It was the skeletal similarities, for example between Homo sapiens and the Nariokotome Homo erectus skeleton, that led me to strongly suspect that humans were recognizable from their skeletons.  Likewise, t...

  I'm just back from another exhausting and exhilarating  weekend with friends new and old at the 2022 Smoky Mountain Creation Retreat.  Core Academy has been hosting this event for seven years now, and this was our first post-COVID event.  I think everyone was more than ready to get back to work and life and fellowship. Our guest this year was Bob Hill, associate professor of physics at Bob Jones University and the president of the Creation Research Society.  He gave us a gentle and very basic introduction to the mind-bending world of planetary astronomy (with a little dark matter and dark energy thrown in for good measure).  I hardly even glance at this subject on most days, so it was a great learning opportunity.  On our final night together, we shared some concerns and had a spontaneous prayer meeting.  It was so very beautiful to be together again.  I am grateful. Next year, I'm hearing rumors of a geology weekend...  I guess we'll ...