Researching Creation

January 18, 2010

Geology / Earth's Catastrophic Past is Available!

JB

Snelling has just released a new two-volume set called Earth's Catastrophic Past.  I've been waiting for this for well over a year, and I know some have known about it for even longer.  Anyway, it is now available for order from ICR!

This book is supposed to contain a summation of the incredible amounts of geological research that has been done by creation geologists over the past half-century, and provide a framework for understanding geology in the context of the Biblical flood.

Thanks to Paul Garner for letting us know!

January 06, 2010

Geology / Archaeology of Sodom and Gomorrah and Other Videos from Recent Conference Available

JB

The Northwest Creation Network recently published the videos from their 2009 conference on their home page.  There are many good videos in there.  One in particular was Steven Austin's discussion of the archaeology of what he believes to be Sodom and Gomorrah.  I'm going to have to rewatch the video, since I missed a lot while cooking breakfast this morning, but it was fascinating.  Steve has done a lot of work with archaeology of Biblical events, and we reported here on an earlier paper he did on the archaeology/geology of Amos's earthquake. Anyway, all the videos are great and worth watching.

December 02, 2009

Geology / YEC Research at the Geological Society of America

JB

It looks like young-earth creationism made a decent splash at this year's Geological Society of America meeting.  ICR's Steve Austin led a field trip of Mt St Helens (Also, if you're interested, Steve also has a book on Mt. St. Helens).  This is one of many official premeeting field trips, but one of the few which completely filled up.

Here are the presentations that were given by known YEC'ers at the GSA:

Steve Austin wrote up an article at ICR's website which discusses a lot of the events at GSA.  Keep up the good work, guys!

HT to Paul Garner

May 19, 2009

Geology / Ariel Roth Discusses the Flood's Impact on Geology

JB

I'm a huge fan of Ariel Roth.  Recently, he gave a presentation to the Creation Science Fellowship of Costa Mesa discussing Noah's flood and its impact on the geological record.  It's kind of slow-going (it's two hours and fifteen minutes!) and he doesn't hit any real evidences until after about a half an hour.  This video combined with Mike Oard's video on geomorphology presents a pretty good lay-level overview of how Noah's flood affects your outlook on geology.

April 13, 2009

Geology / Paul Garner and The New Creationism

JB

Paul Garner, an excellent Creation Geologist from the UK, has a new Creationism blog out, and it is fantastic reading.  He also has a new book out, which I have not yet read, called The New Creationism: Building a Scientific Theory on a Biblical Foundation.  Some posts of interests from his blog:

Anyway, Paul Garner is a first-class researcher.  I got the opportunity to meet him at the 2006 BSG meeting, and again at ICC last year.  I am so glad that he is blogging now!  [Hat tip to Todd Wood]

April 03, 2009

Geology / Spotlight on Marcus Ross

CMI has an interesting profile on paleontologist Marcus Ross.  Check it out!

March 25, 2009

Geology / Evidence for a Pre-flood Floating Forest

JB

I just ran across a video of Kurt Wise talking about his floating forest hypothesis regarding the origin of coal seams.  From memory, his main lines of evidence for this are:

  1. Coal too flat (top, bottom, and benches in the middle) to have been formed from a gradual process
  2. Plants in coal have a different root system from modern plants - the only similar root system are plants which grow entirely in water
  3. Fossil sequence similar to sequence of habitats in quaking bogs - smaller moving towards larger, and semi-aquatic moving towards amphibians in animals
Anyway, I think he was only referring to certain coal beds, not all coal beds.  Nonetheless, based on the biomass, he was estimating that there was an entire pre-flood continent-sized floating forest which got buried.  It is very interesting!

Here's part 1 and part 2.

March 20, 2009

Geology / Interesting Political Implications of Creationism

JB

John Hawks has an interesting look at the recent return of skeletons to a Native American tribe for reburial.  This is really interesting because it indicates that there are more implications for our thoughts/ideas/theories than we realize.  Hawks is an anti-Creationist, so he thinks the connection between the bones and modern tribes is ridiculous.  I'm not aware of current Creationist thinking on biogeography of human remains, so I don't know whether or not a modern Creationist would agree with Hawks or with the tribe, but nonetheless it is an interesting intersection of ideas with the reality of politics.

While I appreciate Hawk's desire for administrators to administer based on principle rather than on money, I think he leaves out one additional component that may be worth considering - one that John West brought to my attention a few weeks ago - that public decisions have valid interests besides experts.  Experts have been wrong - even whole communities of experts, and on matters of public policy, everyone has to live with the consequences, not just the experts.  Therefore, the public has a say, too.

So, while it is very likely that Hawks is correct - the University president is probably most interested in money, one possibility that should not be overlooked is that, even though the University president is not a Creationist, the University president recognizes that there are other valid interests which include people and groups that the University president doesn't agree with.  Being respectful to these groups and these ideas, even when they are in conflict with your own or experts, is wise, not spineless, though it should always be done with care.

March 19, 2009

Geology / The Folding of Rock Layers

JB

AIG has an excellent article posted which shows how folded rock layers fit into a creation model.  They point out that there are several instances of rocks in which a series of rock layers are folded but not fractured.  This indicates that the rocks had not yet hardened when the folding occurred.  When the folding occurs across multiple rock layers, that means that none of the rocks could have been hard when the folding occurs.

February 27, 2009

Geology / Interesting Facts about Water

I'm in OKC for the Ruse/Dembski debate, so I thought I'd wade through OU's library.  I don't often have the time/access to large libraries that I'd like so it's fun just to browse and see what one can learn.  I found a book called Marine Chemistry by Horne which listed the following interesting facts about water (pg 15):

  • Water has the highest heat capacity of all solids and liquids except NH3 - this prevents extreme ranges in temperature, and allows heat transfer by simply moving water
  • Latent heat of evaporation - highest of all substances
  • Latent heat of fusion - highest of all substances except NH3
  • Thermal expansion - the temperature of maximum density dereases with increasing salinity - helps control temperature distribution and circulation in lakes
  • Surface tension - highest of all liquids - helps in physiology of the cell and other surface phenomena
  • Dissolving power - dissolves more substances and in greater quantity than any other liquid - obviously this helps with aqueous biological phenomena
  • Dielectric constant - water has the highest of all liquids
  • Electrolytic dissociation - small - allows it to be neutral but still contain both H+ and OH- ions
  • Transparency - relatively great - important in biological phenomena
  • Conduction of heat - highest of all liquids

Anyway, I thought that was interesting.