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 really difficult problem.  What we ended u

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