Creationism

A few weeks ago I wrote about theologian Marcus Borg's classification of four types of faith. One of these types, assensus, is a faith of the intellect only. It involves believing something to be true in the absence of evidence. The next two—fidelitas and fiducia—involve actions of the will. These can be summed up by the English words "faithfulness" and "trust", respectively. The last one, visio, is best understood as a new way of seeing.

Dr. Jason Lisle, who really should know better, claims the consensus age of the universe is based on circular reasoning.

In the previous post I looked at Jason Lisle's attempt to demonstrate how we could see old starlight in a young universe, appealing to arcane cosmological concepts such as gravitational time dilation and an anisotropic synchrony convention. How does Lisle tie this hypothesis to Genesis?

One of the biggest problems for young-earth creationism (YEC) is the light from distant stars. Because light travels at a constant rate, if we can calculate the distance to another galaxy, we can determine how long its light has been traveling to reach us. The existence of galaxies whose light has traveled thirteen billion years would seem to be an insurmountable problem for YEC.

The creationist organization Answers in Genesis, not content with denying the truth of evolution, is also taking on climate change. Dr. Alan White, introducing the topic in an editorial titled The Globe Is Warming, But It's Not Your Fault!, tries to give the appearance of balance.

I wrote back in March about a creationist "fossil expert" who insisted a trove of fossil snails found in Tyler, Texas had been buried during Noah's flood. Why are the rest of the world's geologists not convinced?

In the last post, we looked at old-earth creationist Fazale Rana's attempt to use the existence of language to discredit evolution. Analyzing a PLOS ONE paper by Noam Chomsky, Ian Tattersall, and others, Rana concluded:

Dr. Fazale Rana of the old-earth creationist Reasons to Believe Ministries, thinks he has found a serious problem for evolutionary theory. Reacting to a PLOS ONE paper written by linguist Noam Chomsky, paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, and others, Rana says:

Theology professor John Walton presents an analogy for the Bible's creation stories.

The cosmic calendar is a way of visualizing natural history by compressing the entire history of the universe into a single year. In this calendar, the Big Bang occurred at midnight on January 1, and the present time is the last milliseconds of December 31. The Milky Way galaxy was formed in mid-May, and our solar system in September. Multicellular life appeared in early December, the first vertibrates on December 22, dinosaurs on Christmas Day, humans in the late night hours of New Year's Eve.