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Evidential or Presuppositional Apologetics?

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by Cowboy Bob Sorensen Although I have written on a similar topic before (" Presuppositions and Fallacies in Evolutionary Science "), I wanted to develop the subject further and provide some resources. Both articles are mainly written to edify Christians. The word apology has somewhat devolved over time so that common usage means someone is sorry: "I apologize for stealing your horse and shooting up the town". Simply put, apologetics is the branch of Christian theology that deals with giving a reasoned defense of the faith . We have to be careful to distinguish the word's usage, since there are atheist apologists, Mohammedan apologists, Roman Catholic apologists, and various non-religious apologists as well. So from here on out, I'm discussing Christian apologetics. There are various schools of apologetics.  Perhaps some people choose an apologetic method because they admire celebrities that use a particular version. I've seen from three to

Geology, Floods, and Fear of the Bible

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There's an area up state of Washington way that's unaffectionately known as the Channeled Scablands.  Kind of dismal area, really. The Scablands and several other areas were carved out in the great Lake Missoula Flood . J Harlan Bretz is the fellow who came up with the name for the area, and proposed that the Scablands were made by a catastrophic flood. (Secular geologists didn't cotton to referring to a flood, that's too Bible-ish, I reckon.) He received a great deal of ridicule for having the audacity for making such a suggestion. Dry Falls image credit: NASA / Goddard / Harrison Smith Image usage does not imply endorsement of site contents Bretz was attacked since the 1920s because of a uniformitarian anti-biblical bias against catastrophism (even though this flood happened after  the Genesis Flood), but new research has vindicated him. There is also speculation that fast-moving water is more powerful than previously thought, and may give insights into other g

Mammals Evolved Faster after the Dinosaurs Died?

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The expression, "When the cat's away, the mice will play" applies to the hands at the Darwin Ranch, when the foreman goes into town on business. Well, evolutionists are proposing something similar: when the dinosaurs took a dirt nap, mammals felt free to evolve faster. Of course, there was also a large amount of mammalian extinction going on as well. Scientists examined fossils of certain mammals, then presented a hypothesis based on their presuppositions of Earth being mighty old, evolution as a fact, and others. They neglected other areas of "rapid evolution" that conflict with this hypothesis, and included the too-common conflation between change  and dust-to-dinosaur evolution.  If they had cognated on actual speciation and bothered to look at the much better Genesis Flood models of creationary scientists, they'd have a much better idea of what happened, and that it happened much more recently than they'll accept in their worldview. In a recen

Evolutionists Admit They Have Serious Problems

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Although some fundamentalist evolutionists try to insist that there is strong evidence for their beliefs, especially in the area of genetics, other scientists admit that they have a heap of trouble. Scientific advances are showing that evolution is breaking down, even though the faithful keep making excuses for bad "theories" . Worse for them, biblical creationists are being shown correct all along.  Traditional Darwinism of natural selection being the key to evolution has been largely abandoned in favor of combining natural selection with mutations (neo-Darwinism). That's being disproved left and right, and some are seeking a "third way" of evolution . There is no evidence for evolution, old son. Instead, the evidence supports creation. On the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA, science writer Dr Philip Ball wrote an article in Nature saying, “we do not fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level.” Ball referred to

The Mane Question

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Did you ever stop to ponder that of all the great cats, only lions have manes? Mountain lions (cougars, catamounts, panthers) pretty much ruled the Americas, but are mainly in the West and parts of Canada. No manes on them. Why is that feature confined to lions? Daniel's Answer to the King , by Briton Rivière, 1892 Although it's mainly (heh!) the males that have manes, sometimes females have them, and they vary by location. Bruce Patterson did some serious research on lion manes and came up with some interesting results. The biological chemistry shows the handiwork of the Designer. Kind of makes it difficult for evolutionists to explain, too. A male lion in his prime with a grand and bushy mane rarely fails to impress. Ancient peoples carved lions onto stone walls, and prophets spoke of lions in the Scriptures. But of all the cats found around the world, why do only lions grow manes? Lion researcher Bruce Patterson from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago ha

Cosmologists Hunting Space Ghosts

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It's been sarcastically said that Christians believe in something even though you know it isn't true, which is a straw man definition of biblical faith. If you study on it, however, that same definition may rightly be used for evolutionary cosmologists. They have a whole heap of blind faith. Image credit:  NASA / WMAP Science Team modified with Clker clipart. Use (or abuse) does not imply endorsement by anyone for anything anywhere around these parts.  One of the most famous ghosts of space is dark matter. It hasn't been detected, but secularist Big Bang cosmogony requires its existence. "Evidence" has been presented, but that is based on materialistic presuppositions, inferences, and ignoring other possible explanations for what is observed. Another ghost is antimatter. This, too, is elusive, so some scientists are trying to get help from recalcitrant neutrinos. The irrelevant thesis  fallacy was invoked: "It could all have been so different. When

Did Some Dinosaurs Re-Evolve?

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The United States had a federal program called the Works Progress/Projects Administration for employing people from 1939-1943. (I knew a guy who had been on it, and he referred to the WPA as "We Putter Around".) They did mainly construction work such as roads, but some excavated fossils. In 1940, an odd dinosaur fossil fragment was found by WPA folks, and it was reexamined recently. Modified image of an ankylosaurus postage stamp from Central Africa in my collection. It was called ankylosaurus because it would bite you on the ankles, making them sore. The fossil had a dome head like several others, and had significant features in common with them. But the fragment was separated from its cousins by millions of Darwin years. Many other similar body types have been found separated by layers, so the idea is that they evolved more than once, or "somehow re-evolved". Not hardly! If these scientists bothered to look at the geologic evidence of the Genesis Flood, t

Plucking the Spider Strings

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We may not always appreciate spider webs, especially when walking into them unexpectedly, but they are actually marvels from abilities given to the critters by their Creator. They are strong , and have different kinds of threads for different purposes . Further analysis of the webbing has shown some additional fascinating details, including how webs are similar to musical instruments. Spiders adjust them like a musician tunes the strings of an instrument, gaining a great deal of information. Two reports are discussed in the link below. The first one is a nice change, scientists doing science, but the second has baseless homage to evolution. Amazing how God gave spiders the ability to make such intricate webs, isn't it? Spider webs are so finely-tuned, they are like musical instruments that the creatures can strum or listen to. Here’s an article showing how science can be reported without Darwinese. In “Tuning the instrument: Spider webs as vibration transmission structure

Mammoths and Creation Science

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Mammoths were big elephant-like critters that lived way up north during the Ice Age, got quick-frozen and were encased in ice a zillion years ago. One was heroic but cranky, named Manfred. At least, that seem to be the public perception. Actually, there were several different beasties that looked like elephants. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons / Honymand / CC BY-SA 4.0 There were varieties of mammoths, one of which was the woolly mammoth — not to be confused with the larger mastodon, and not to be confused with the Christian rock band Mastedon ("video" below). Mammoths are a bit of a puzzler for proponents of muck-to-mammoth evolution, as are modern elephants, since evolution is presumed, not demonstrated. Another area of stress is the Ice Age. Uniformitarian views are unable to explain it, but biblical creationary scientists have plausible models based on the Genesis Flood. The aftermath of the Flood, genetics, speciation, natural selection, the biblical created k

Naturalism is not Conducive to Science

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Secularists have been somewhat effective in portraying a "war between science and religion" and giving the impression that if someone is going to be a scientist, he or she must have a worldview that is rooted in naturalism. That is, no non-atheists need apply. Such propaganda utterly false, and one example is the dishonest use of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" . Image credit: NASA (use does not imply endorsement of site contents) If you study on the propaganda and do a little research, you'll see that it's ridiculous. The founders of modern science were Christians, and many of those were biblical creationists . Science depends on methods that are repeatable, testable, observable, and so forth. An atheistic worldview is incoherent, with random processes of evolution as one of it's main foundations. You can't do science that way. Meanwhile, there have been and still are many people who believe the Bible and do science quite well. Many people today