Todd Charles Wood, Young-Earth Creationist, on the death of Glenn Morton, ex-Young-Earth Creationist

Todd Charles Wood is a young-earth creationist, perhaps the most significant scientist who believes that the earth is not very old. He has had helpful discussions with old-earth creationists, as well as other young-earth creationists. His blog is must reading for me. He recently published a tribute to Glenn R. Morton, who died a few days ago. Morton was a young-earth creationist geologist who came to doubt young-earth creationism because YEC explanations didn't explain the geology he found as a petroleum geologist. Not only that, but Morton asked other practicing geologists, trained by the Institute for Creation Research, as he had been, if there was anything they were taught there that actually helped them in their work. None of them could name one fact or phenomenon that did so.

In his tribute, Wood laments the treatment of Morton, whose Christianity was frequently questioned, as he began to be more open about his doubt of  YEC. And, says Wood, he's been there, although he is a staunch proponent of YEC. A prominent YECer called him a heretic last week, apparently for questioning some part of YEC doctrine.

Says Wood: There's something really defective in a group that deals with disagreement by demonizing the opposition and excommunicating people who think differently.  That's how cults work.  That's how con artists work.  But I think it's even worse than that.  If you say you can only be a good Christian if you believe in young-age creationism, you just added something to the gospel.  That makes the you the actual heretic!

Beliefs in origins are secondary to the gospel, and Christians should remain in fellowship with others who differ in their beliefs on this subject, as Wood tries to do.

Thanks for reading!

 

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Added August 15, 2020: The Panda's Thumb, a mostly anti-creation blog, has published a tribute to Morton.

Sunspots 681

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

The Arts: Relevant celebrates the products of Pixar studio.

Christianity: Sojourners says that we worship the rich.

Relevant has some good advice for married couples who don't engage in sex very often.

Christianity Today warns churches that the church, itself, may be groomed by sexual predators.

Health: It really is harder to think in summer heat.

History: Listverse on the origin of 10 common articles of clothing.


Politics: (or something) Domino's pizza has decided to start fixing roads, so that their pizzas won't be damaged during delivery. Really.

Science: Gizmodo reports the honeybees may be able to comprehend zero -- the absence of something. Ancient human mathematicians didn't seem to comprehend this, by the way.

Gizmodo also explains (as far as we can, at the present) why some scientists believe that there is dark matter, and what that matter might be.

Todd C. Wood, a respected young-earth creationist scientist, reacts to a recent scientific article that claims that all species of animals are about the same age. Wood is not convinced.

Thanks for looking!

Image source (public domain)

What Todd Wood would like to hear an evolutionary creationist say, and what Dennis Venema would like to hear a young-earth creationist say

That's a long title!

I just found two interesting articles, both quite readable, and neither too long for the average reader who is interested in the subject, and neither requiring special background in science or theology. Both of these articles were written for the Colossian Forum.

Todd Charles Wood is a committed young-earth creationist, and a believer. He has sound scientific credentials. (See here for a summary of the information on him. I'm pretty sure that he is no longer at Bryan College, however. Here's his blog.) I have been reading his blog for a few years. He has written an article on what he would like to hear from an evolutionary creationist. Dennis Venema is a committed evolutionary creationist, and a believer. He has sound scientific credentials. (See here for a summary of the information on him. That link also leads to Venema's writing for the BioLogos Forum.) I have been reading his posts in the BioLogos Forum for a few years. He has written an article on what he would like to hear from a young-earth creationist.

So what do they say? Well you can, and should, read the articles. But I can sum it up simply -- each author admits that "his side" doesn't know everything, and should be properly humble about it, and understand that Christians may differ on some issues and still be Christians, and hopes that the representative of the other side will do the same. In the case of Venema and Wood, they have. Unfortunately, that is not always true, and Christianity is worse off because it isn't true.

We don't know everything about origins. We do know that God was involved. Thanks for reading. Read Wood and Venema.

Natural selection is a fact

Today's Greenville News, in an article on page 7a, has published a report from the Associated Press. That report says that South Carolina State Senator Mike Fair "says natural selection should not be taught as fact." Mr. Fair has made more news on this sort of topic recently, as he at first opposed the adoption of a South Carolina State Fossil, because of his belief in a six-day creation a few thousand years ago. He withdrew his opposition, because the proposer was an eight-year-old girl.

Mr. Fair is entitled to his beliefs, and they are, perhaps, more nuanced than suggested by the nine words quoted in the report, but this post takes them at face value, and refutes them.

Natural selection is a fact! Why is that so?

First, artificial selection works. Humans have selected breeds of dogs for various traits, and done similar selection with other animals. Plants, grown as crops or ornamentals, have also responded to the selective work of humans.

It is true that keeping track of butterfat production by cows, and deciding which bull to use in fathering the next generation, based on the production record of his daughters, is not exactly natural selection. But much selection of animals and plants, over the millennia of domestication, was simply looking at various characteristics, and deciding which seed to plant, or which animal to use in breeding. It was very low-tech, presumably operating without even written breeding or production records, and, we have reason to believe, worked very much like natural selection has.

Second, natural selection works in humans. No doubt Mr. Fair believes that all humans descended from an ancestral couple. If that was the case, how can we explain the differences between various groups of humans? Some of the differences may be due to chance,  but some of them, probably most of them, are due to natural selection. The Wikipedia article on "Human skin color" begins with these two sentences: "Human skin color ranges in variety from the darkest brown to the lightest pinkish-white hues. Human skin pigmentation is the result of natural selection." The article refers to solid scientific evidence for that second statement.

Third, and less obvious, but more compelling, natural selection works in the ordinary reproduction of organisms, including humans. Not in selecting for new forms, but in selecting so that current well-adapted forms persist. You may have seen an albino animal in the wild. I have. They are rare, but they do exist. Why are they so rare? Because Darwin's common-sense description of natural selection does, indeed, make sense. Organisms that have a tendency to have offspring that differ much from the norm are less likely to have their genes passed on to succeeding generations. A rabbit, in the wild, that can produce an albino offspring, is a rabbit that is less likely to produce surviving offspring than a similar rabbit that cannot produce such offspring.

God may, indeed, have created the first humans from scratch, or created the "kinds" of living things in separate special creative acts. But, even if both of those are true, He built natural selection into the system, just like He built gravity into the system, and natural selection, like gravity, influences the way things are, and serves to maintain God's good creation.

Mr. Fair should have read this post by a committed Young-earth creationist with solid scientific credentials, who says that evolution (by which he means natural selection) is not up for scientific dispute.

Thanks for reading.

Tapeworms before the Flood? Scientific evidence for that

Todd C. Wood is a firm believer in Young-Earth Creationism. Unlike some Young-Earth Creationists, he is familiar with the scientific literature, and accepts most of it. He also engages with scientists who do not believe like he does.

In a recent post, Wood comments on a report that indicates that there were tapeworm eggs in fossilized shark dung. (Tapeworms are commonly passed on by eggs in dung, which is eaten, accidentally or on purpose. Fossilized dung is fairly common. Such fossils are called coprolites.)

Wood doesn't argue about it, but he does not accept the date of approximately 270 million years ago for the fossil. He believes that this fossil was formed during the flood. Either way, the fossil indicates that tapeworms existed before the flood. If the date given is correct, they must have existed, not only before the flood, but before the Fall. 

If they did, as the evidence indicates, then their must have been parasites before the Fall. This, as Wood well knows, would raise some interesting questions for Young-Earth Creationists. (There are other kinds of Creationists. See here for an example.)

In this post, I speculate on dung, and also about organisms that probably existed before the Fall, such as bacteria and mosquitoes.

Thanks for reading. Read Wood.

A Young-earth creationist on the debate (among Christians) about origins

Todd Wood is a good scientist, and a young-earth creationist. He is a young-earth creationist not because he thinks science supports that view, but because he thinks the Bible should be interpreted in that way. Others, of course disagree. He (along with a so-called evolutionary creationist) was recently profiled in a Christianity Today article.

Wood has posted his reaction to the article. The most important, and unfortunate, thing that he said was this: "A lot of folks may be too far gone to participate in fruitful discussion." In other words, a lot of Christians haven't been acting, or thinking, like Christians should, whatever their views on origins, and have become bitter toward those with other views, and close-minded about their own.

I'm afraid he's right, and I hope I'm not one of those "folks." I don't think Wood is.

Thanks for reading. Read Wood.

Christianity Today article on Todd Wood and Darrel Falk

Christianity Today has published an article on Darrel Falk, an evolutionary creationist who is part of the BioLogos Foundation, and on Todd Wood, a young-earth creationist from Bryan College. I don't know either of them personally, but I have read quite a bit of their writing, and they are good representatives of their views. In my view, the article is fair to both Christian scientists.

Dembski, Falk and Wood: Wood criticizes Intelligent Design

I have recently posted on an exchange between Darrel Falk, of the BioLogos Foundation, and William Dembski, one of the pillars of the Intelligent Design movement (ID) on the question of whether Darwinism is theologically neutral. This is the latest post in my series.

I also posted about what Todd Wood, a Young-Earth Creationist, had to say about the exchange. He has written more about the exchange, and he claims, in this latest post, that ID is pretty much without important content.

Thanks for reading. Read Wood.

Dembski, Falk and Wood: Is Darwinism Theologically Neutral, part 2

In a previous post, I referred to a debate on origins through posts to the BioLogos Forum's blog. William Dembski, a mathematician, philosopher and theologian, and a proponent of Intelligent Design, wrote a position paper, at the request of the BioLogos Forum. In it, he argued that Darwinism is not theologically neutral. Darrel Falk, an official of that Forum, and probably best classified as an evolutionary creationist, responded. Todd Wood, a young-earth creationist, also reacted, in his own blog. I consider Wood's response in this post.

I suppose that I ought to say that one can believe that God is intelligent, and a designer, or creator, without agreeing with all of the positions of the Intelligent Design movement. The ID movement argues that it should be possible to find scientific evidence that God not only created life, but there is what Michael Behe has called irreducible complexity -- there are processes, or structures, that are so complex that they could not have arisen by natural selection, but that God must have intervened during their development, if they arose over a long period of time. (Some ID advocates also believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old, but some are not convinced of that. See here for information on ID, and here for some contrasts between ID and young-earth creationism.) ID scientists have actually not really come close to proving scientific evidence of God's intervention. They have, instead, tried to show that natural selection couldn't have produced some structures, or processes. Behe and Dembski are tow of the most important scientists who have attempted this. Their work has been seriously criticized by other scientists, Christian and not.

Dembski's paper is in two parts, here and here. Falk's response is also in two parts, here and here. Wood's reaction is here and here.

I first repeat the heart of Dembski's presentation, what he says are four non-negotiables of Christianity, and four of Darwinism:

Non-Negotiables of Christianity:

• (C1) Divine Creation: God by wisdom created the world out of nothing.
• (C2) Reflected Glory: The world reflects God’s glory, a fact that ought to be evident to humanity.
• (C3) Human Exceptionalism: Humans alone among the creatures on earth are made in the image of God.
• (C4) Christ’s Resurrection: God, in contravention of nature’s ordinary powers, raised Jesus bodily from the dead.

Non-Negotiables of Darwinism:

• (D1) Common Descent: All organisms are related by descent with modification from a common ancestor.
• (D2) Natural Selection: Natural selection operating on random variations is the principal mechanism responsible for biological adaptations.
• (D3) Human Continuity: Humans are continuous with other animals, exhibiting no fundamental difference in kind but only differences in degree.
• (D4) Methodological Naturalism: The physical world, for purposes of scientific inquiry, may be assumed to operate by unbroken natural law. 

Wood has trouble with both sets of non-negotiables.Wood says that there is no mention of man's fallen, sinful nature, and that C2 and C3 are "weird." He thinks C3 is negotiable -- it is possible to believe we are in the image of God, and arose by evolutionary mechanisms. He also points out that there are differences among Christians as to what the image of God means, or is. On C2, he believes that it would be possible to believe that some aspects of creation were so ruined by the Fall that they don't reflect God's glory. Wood has even more trouble with the other four non-negotiables. He points out that Darwin, himself, was not convinced of D1 -- he thought there was more than one common ancestor. (Not thousands or milllions, by the way.) He goes on to say that D1, D2 and D3 are not so much presuppositions, as they are derived from evidence.

Wood also believes that Dembski has misunderstood methodological naturalism, D4, and confused it with philosophical naturalism:
Methodological naturalism is an epistemological position that recognizes reasonable limitations to human abilities to sense the supernatural. In other words, methodological naturalism is a limitation on what I think I can know. How can that possibly "tie God's hands?" A consistent methodological naturalist when confronted with Christ's resurrection (or any miracle) could only say that science is extremely limited in such cases to understand what happened or how. There is no way that methodological naturalism could rule out the miraculous. That's what philosophical naturalism does.
See here for the Wikipedia article on Naturalism, which includes a discussion of methodological naturalism.

Perhaps most importantly, Wood is familiar with the writings of Darwin, and although he doesn't claim that Darwin was a Christian believer, he believes, and presents evidence to back it up, that Darwin was, like Einstein, sympathetic to the view that there was a Creator. Wood quotes from a letter Darwin wrote:

I can see no reason, why a man, or other animal, may not have been aboriginally produced by other laws; & that all these laws may have been expressly designed by an omniscient Creator, who foresaw every future event & consequence. But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.

I hope to deal with Falk's reaction to Dembski in a later post. Thanks for reading.

What Todd Wood would like to hear an evolutionary creationist say

Todd C. Wood is an articulate young-earth creationist, who, unlike most young-earth creationists, has impeccable scientific credentials, and engages regularly with academic scientists who are not young-earth creationists, or Christians at all.

Wood has recently (no date given) had an essay published by something called The Colossian Forum. In his essay, Wood pleads for a little humility in discussions about origins among Christians. He points out some scientific challenges to young-earth creationism, and admits that he does not have the answers. He also points out that Christian scientists who agree that young-earth creationism is wrong don't agree on much else, including what to call themselves, or the nature of Adam and Eve. It's not just those who don't believe young-earth creationism, Wood writes. Young-earth creationists also have a lot of important issues that they don't agree on.

"I don't know," is the right answer to a lot of questions, and it should be used much more often. Wood uses it.

Thanks, Todd Wood.

Young-earth creationist astronomy has a long way to go

Todd Wood is a young-earth creationist, and makes no bones about it. However, he is far from endorsing every argument for the truth of his position. Wood is a scientist, with impeccable credentials, and, in my opinion, his blog is required reading for anyone seriously interested in the problem of origins, and at least interested in supernatural explanations, whether such a reader is willing to accept them or not.

Wood is a biologist, not an astronomer, but he previously criticized two papers on astronomy, in Answers Research Journal, an on-line publication of Answers in Genesis, a young-earth creationist organization, saying, basically, that they didn't explain anything, just reported it. Wood has now written a comment on a new article in the same journal. The new article, which does not explain anything, either, does set forth a list of phenomena which are well explained by mainstream astronomy, and which must, if young-earth astronomy is to become credible, be equally well explained by astronomy with such presuppositions.

Wood commends the new article for its list. It also discusses something that we usually take for granted, that is, what an explanation is, and how to tell if an explanation is really explaining something.

I have my doubts about young-earth astronomy. But the author of the new article, James Upton, seems to have done a good job in setting forth a blueprint for where young-earth astronomy has to go if it is to ever become truly scientific.

Thanks for reading.