Todd's Blog

The following is an open letter to a theologian friend who recently asked how he might sort out his own views on fossil hominins.  I thought this might be of interest to others, particularly theologians or pastors who have regular contact with those in the sciences, so here are my thoughts on the subject.  Enjoy! First of all, thanks for asking.  I find too many theologically-trained individuals either disinterested in the many questions raised by fossil hominins or intimidated into a simplistic response.  For those of us Christians working in the sciences, fossil hominins are among the most challenging issues that we might face.  It's always struck me as so very odd that the source of so much anxiety in believing scientists is shrugged off as uninteresting or unimportant by theologians who are supposed to be trained to help.  Your question is already a glimmer of hope.  Now if only more theologians would ask such questions! So you want to know about h...

Just before Christmas, a surprising announcement acknowledged that famous Christian preacher and apologist Ravi Zacharias was guilty of longstanding sexual harassment and misconduct .  The announcement came from the multimillion dollar ministry that he left behind when he passed away in May 2020, which is what makes it so surprising (at least to me).  Even this small honesty is sadly uncommon in recent years. When Zacharias passed, I was still on Facebook fairly regularly, and my feed was full of adoring eulogies for this man.  This morning I poked around on Facebook a little bit looking for public reactions from those same eulogizers.  I found mostly silence. Then again, what do you say?  The guy evidently duped a lot of people.  If you were a fan and believe the allegations, you have to feel at least a little gullible, and if you still don't believe the allegations, it's hard to argue with the ministry he left behind admitting that he did it.  It's h...

Just a quick note to ask for your support.  If you've enjoyed my work or the work of Core Academy, please consider a last-minute gift for 2020.  We're still looking for about $8,200 (we've had a few contributions since I made this video). Whatever you can do for us, we greatly appreciate.  You can give by clicking that donate button at the bottom of this post.   Thanks! 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!

In just a few days, 2020 will be a memory, and I'll be glad for it.  COVID will still be a threat, but vaccinations should go a long way to dulling its impact.  Life should return to something resembling normal by summer time, I hope.  The sting of loss will linger for years, decades even.  But the present pain will be over.  I am thankful. Meanwhile, Core Academy still has $11,000 to raise to end the year entirely in the black.  I realize it's a lot to ask, and I want to be realistic about it.  I also know that God's not broke, and he's promised  to provide our needs.  Sometimes that means the miracle of last-minute donations, and sometimes that means providing in other ways.  I'm ready for whatever he wants, and I'm always grateful for his provision. If you'd like to be part of that last minute miracle, you can click that Donate button below, or visit coresci.org/donate to find out how to donate in other ways.  Thank you. Feedbac...

This has been a grueling year.  As I write this, I have a friend who will very likely spend Christmas in the ICU from a combination of COVID and pneumonia.  Nearly a third of a million Americans are dead from this virus, and the global death toll just passed 1.7 million.  That’s a lot of suffering for one year.  Along with all the direct impact, the public efforts to cope with the virus have caused their own chaos.  Jobs were lost.  Countless small businesses were destroyed.  Study after study reported a massive increase in mental disorders, from garden variety anxiety to addictive behaviors to suicidal ideation to the trauma of domestic abuse.  Infected or not, our entire culture suffers from this pandemic. Neuroscientists have made a lot of strides over the past century, and we know more about the biochemistry of mental disorders than we ever have before.  Effective medications and treatments have been discovered and developed that can help...

In 1972, an excavator working in the Bulgarian city of Varna on the western shore of the Black Sea unearthed some metallic artifacts while digging a ditch.  He saved the item in a shoebox and later showed the dirt-encrusted pieces to a former teacher, who alerted a few archaeologists about a “treasure.”  Despite their skepticism, the archaeologists came to look at the objects and were astonished.  The objects were true archaeological treasure.  They were all gold, more than two pounds of gold!  We now know that these were the first pieces of the oldest collection of worked gold ornamentation ever discovered. The excavator showed the archaeologists where he found the objects, and the archaeological excavation soon began.  The source turned out to be an ancient cemetery with about 300 graves dating from the earliest known farmers in Europe.  More than 3,000 gold objects were taken from just 65 of those graves, all of them either graves of male skeletons ...

It’s said that no two snowflakes are alike, which as far as we know is mostly correct, but it belies the simplicity of the crystalline structure of snow.  For example, snowflakes are always six-sided, and the branches appear at regular angles.  The temperature and humidity of the cloud determines the growth of the crystal, which in turn determines its form.  Only at certain temperatures do you get what physicists call plates, those flat flakes with six spokes radiating from the center.  Equally likely are needles or columns, in which the snowflake grows up the axis of the crystal’s center rather than radially outward.  A single snowflake is technically clear, but the facets of the crystal surface reflect light when observed from the correct angle, giving a mass of snowflakes the appearance of white. Growing up in rural Michigan, I was very familiar with snowfall in my younger days.  Besides just the possibility of canceled school, my family loved a good sno...