I have discovered that the three-year anniversary of this blog was yesterday. Oops.
In past years I’ve written an awful lot more than that, about how I never expected to be at this for more than a week etc etc etc, but considering how much I’ve posted lately I think the above is all I deserve.
Much more interesting though is my (accidental – I haven’t been paying much attention lately at all) discovery of a new ICR project: URCall. Continue reading
Here’s a nice bait-and-switch, courtesy of Frank Sherwin via Your Origins Matter:
Let’s address this issue by first defining our terms. Although many definitions have appeared, science can be described as what we really know to be true mainly through observation. The late G. G. Simpson of Harvard stated in Science magazine that “it is inherent in any definition of science that statements that cannot be checked by observation are not really about anything . . . or at the very least, they are not science.”
But the origins debate centers around macroevolution, and macroevolution has never been observed. One of the architects of neo-Darwinism agrees: “It is manifestly impossible to reproduce in the laboratory the evolution of man from the australopithecine, or of the modern horse from an Eohippus, or of a land vertebrate from a fishlike ancestor. These evolutionary happenings are unique, unrepeatable, and irreversible” (Theodosius Dobzhansky, American Scientist, December 1957).
Here’s a question that everyone seems to want an answer to: how did freshwater organisms survive a salty flood? A recent article at Your Origins Matter, Flood Survivors – derived from an Acts & Facts article by John Morris from 2011 called Fish in the Flood – tries to offer some solutions. After first acknowledging that survival would have been very difficult, and that most didn’t make it, Morris produces his first idea:
In the complex of events and conditions that made up the Flood, certainly there were pockets of fresh water at any one time. Remember, it was raining in torrents, and we can expect that the rain water was fairly fresh. Many studies have shown that waters of various temperatures, chemistries, and sediment loads do not tend to mix; they tend to remain segregated in zones. It would be unlikely for any one area to retain such zones for very long during the tumult of the Flood, but on a worldwide scale, some such segregated zones would have existed at any given time.
Apologies for the impromptu hiatus (I’m really bad at doing that, aren’t I?) – I had exams, and decided that it was best if I didn’t do anything here for the duration. They’re over now, and so it’s time for the lesser 2013 catch-up.*
From what I see, which is mostly their online stuff, the ICR has not been all that busy in the meantime. The That’s a Fact site, for example, has not only not published a new video but they have in fact ceased to provide information about when the next episode will appear. The Your Origins Matter site, meanwhile, hasn’t published a new post in a week. One that they did post during my hiatus was a short interview with Brian Thomas in which he talks about fossil biochemistry (i.e. soft tissues). Because it’s been long enough since they originally posted it the video has also been uploaded to youtube, meaning that I can embed it below: Continue reading
The second in the series of YOM interviews with ICR employees has been posted. This one is of Frank Sherwin, talking about human evolution, and is quite a bit shorter than the previous one with Nathaniel Jeanson. Because it’s so short I’ve been able to reproduce a full transcript below, interspersed with commentary.
The interview is broken into three parts, separated by title cards (bolded). Continue reading
A new video has been posted at Your Origins Matter called “College & Science: Nathaniel Jeanson.” I can’t find it on youtube anywhere (at least not yet) so you’ll have to click over there to view it. Jeanson is one of the ICR’s researchers, and the video is about 13 minutes long and covers the following:
- Who are you, what is your specialization, and what does your current research look like?
- When did you decide you were destined for a career in science?
- What background do you have in science and the study of creation?
- What advice do you have for prospective college students – science and non-science majors?
- What words of wisdom do you have for the Christian student in both Christian and secular universities?
The college advice portion is the longest, and perhaps the most interesting. In summary, Jeanson wants you to first ground yourself thoroughly in creationism. You should then go to a secular university, on the grounds that hearing a fellow Christian talk about “unbiblical” ideas will be more likely to persuade you than if it’s a non-believer talking, and take a course in science but not one that’s evolution-centric. Once you’ve got “credentials” you can investigate the issues you were originally interested in. If you’ve heard much about Jeanson before you might recognise his advice as being, in effect, “do as I did,” but it’s also quite similar to what Jake Hebert said in December.
Jeanson also recommends that you commute to university to avoid the debauchery (so that’s what I’ve been doing wrong – damn trains), to live either alone or with fellow believers, and to be suspicious of potentially compromising campus groups. And there’s plenty more where that came from – go watch.
The infamous Ray Comfort (“Bananaman”) is a fellow Kiwi, but one that we’ve persuaded to leave and inflict himself on the rest of the world – after all, if he’d stayed he would have been a big fish in a rather small and derisive pond. At the ICR’s Your Origins Matter blog there’s a post up today called “Ray Comfort Answers Atheists, Part 1,” one of a number of guest posts that have appeared there in the last few months.
Readers of the Sensuous Curmudgeon blog should be familiar with Comfort’s “atheists ask” series, which is only new to YOM. Indeed even today’s specific questions should be familiar, as the most recent SC post is about a Comfort article on World Net Daily that includes both of those at YOM and a number of others. WND claims that this series is “exclusive,” but it doesn’t look like this is the case. Continue reading
Monday (February 25) was the 7th anniversary of the death of Henry Morris, the founder of both the ICR and the modern creationist movement in general. To commemorate the date of “our founder’s passing into glory” Your Origins Matter posted an article, which included some quotes: Continue reading
Your Origins Matter have uploaded the following video, encouraging pastors and their flock to come to YOM’s conferences. (Go to 1:30 to skip the intro.)
The speaker would appear to be Randy Guliuzza. His first point boils down to “if God is not the Creator, then how can he claim to be God?” Then, he claims that people leave the faith because they no longer believe the “stories” in the bible, and noone is able to answer their questions. He’s talking in front of Mt Rushmore – or some kind of picture thereof, it’s not immediately obvious – and so he naturally makes the Paley’s watch “what would you think if I claimed that this was formed by natural processes of erosion” argument. There’s plenty like that in there, but nothing concrete.
A new YOM post asks “which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
This age-old question really has a simple answer. However, attempts to answer it and to get around implications of the simple answer are often quite convoluted.
Yes, there is an answer: the egg was first, because there have been animals laying eggs for longer than there have been chickens. It’s simple, at least so long as you don’t specify that it must be a chicken egg. But for reasons that have been rather poorly thought out, the ICR insists the opposite was the case: Continue reading
Eye on the ICR 