Todd's Blog

I'm really excited to announce that this year's Midsummer Celebration on June 20 in Chattanooga will feature guest speaker Paul Garner of Biblical Creation Ministries in the UK.  Since we launched Core Academy as a primarily online ministry, I've been eager to move our ministry to live events, and this will be our first big one. The main attraction will be Paul Garner's presentation The New Creationism: Building a Creation Model at 7 pm.  This presentation is FREE to the public and will be an excellent introduction to Core Academy's approach to the creation/evolution debate.  Model building seeks to create new understandings of science in light of the scripture, and it has yielded some of the most exciting advances in creationism of the past 25 years.  Paul will give examples of exciting progress from his own research.  This will be a great presentation for anyone interested in science and faith. MIDSUMMER CELEBRATION WEBSITE For those who want t...

Last week, I wrote an article about my on-going conversations with Darrel Falk .  He suggested that he might write a follow-up, and I agreed to have a look at it.  It's well worth reading, so with his permission, here it is. It was with considerable enjoyment that I read Todd’s recent blog in which he explores what a person should do when one’s “mortal enemy”—me, it turns out—asks for help.   I appreciate how as he sought an answer to the question—he turned to Scripture and Jesus instruction, which, it turns out, is that we are to love our enemy (Matthew 5:44) and that we are to bless those who curse us (Luke 6:28). I also liked the fact that Todd suggested that talking with me was better than the alternative: he didn’t want to take any chances on being swallowed  by a great fish.  So Todd, using Jonah and Jesus as his models, agreed to a little “cross-cultural” ministry.  He began to help me understand how a very smart biologist could hold a...

What do you do when your mortal enemy asks for help? I suppose we Christians could duck the question by pretending that we don't actually have any enemies.  I think that's a convenient and common excuse for why Christians hold grudges.  We just try to convince ourselves that it's not really a grudge or it's not really unloving.  That person I don't like isn't really my enemy.  I just don't like him.  I can love someone without liking them, right?  I think it's really interesting in the gospels that when Jesus says to love your neighbor, He's asked almost immediately to explain who my neighbor is, but when He says to love your enemies, no one has to ask who that is.  We all know who our enemies are. Back to the uncomfortable question: What do you do when your mortal enemy asks for help?  Maybe not just the person you don't like, but maybe the person who is actively campaigning against the work you feel God has called you to do.  May...

This might be a little bit late for a reminder, but abstracts for Origins 2015 are due tomorrow.  See the call for abstracts for more information. www.creationbiology.org/origins2015 Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com.

I'm just back from Core Academy's Smoky Mountain Creation Retreat in Beech Mountain, NC.  Pictures from the weekend can be seen on our Facebook page .  The biggest surprise of the weekend was the four inches of snow that fell the night we got there.  Everyone got in and out safely, so the snow was just fun to watch. I would love to tell you exactly what we talked about, but most of it was pre-published work in progress.  I talked a bit about Ian Barbour's religion/science taxonomy, and I got a lot of good feedback on my ideas.  That was very helpful.  Jud Davis talked about Hebrew cosmology and the "firmament," which was really exciting and frankly a little shocking.  I'm hoping to see more of this work in the very near future.  Marcus Ross reviewed a pair of contributions he's written for a new book project, and I was pleased to see how much work he had done to make his arguments as good and as modern as possible.  Finally, Lee Spencer...

A while back, a reader asked me this interesting set of questions: Did Adam and Eve need their immune system before the fall?  If they didn't, then was it pre-designed just for the post-fall world? Or was it created after the fall?  If they did need it, what for? Were there natural evils for which they needed immunity? Will there be these evils also after the resurrection? I don't know about after the resurrection, but I've thought a lot about before the Fall.  It's a lot more complicated than you might think, mostly because of our expectations. Today we live in a world dominated by the germ theory of disease, which works very, very well.  The idea is that specific infectious diseases are caused by specific agents: microbes, bacteria, viruses, what the public calls "germs."  An example I mentioned last week is cholera, which is caused by Vibrio cholerae , which is transmitted through contaminated water.  Other examples might be malaria, which is cau...

You might remember my comments on National Geographic 's cover story on the "War on Science."  Recently, content writer Brad Kramer posted a response on the BioLogos website.  For those who don't know, BioLogos is the leading evangelical organization that advocates acceptance of evolution (and an old earth and an old universe).  As a young-age creationist, we don't really see eye to eye on that subject, but I was encouraged to read most of Kramer's article. Kramer also noted the odd tone of the National Geographic article, as it swerved back and forth between an honest appraisal of science and insistence that science yields TRUTH.  Kramer and I disagree in the end though because he views science as generally reliable in the long run .  Science can have missteps here and there but eventually the hard work of many scientists converge on the truth.  I tend to think that science can get stuck for a long time in spots where scientists think they've got the...