What good is a virus?

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2020/04/ask-creationist-about-viruses.html

Human Genesis

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/09/yes-im-working-on-new-book.html

Todd Wood is writing a new book. Working title Human Genesis. He tells me it will model human origins from a creationist, biblical, theological, and scientific perspective. Wood is one of the most sophisticated and independent YEC scientists on the scene, so this should be a landmark contribution when published.

Kabwe

Worth watching the whole video (all 7 minutes):

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/09/fossil-focus-kabwe.html

Among other things:

If it's human, what's it doing way down in Africa at such an early radiometric date (around 300,000 years ago)? That's considerably before the earliest signs of civilization that we see in the Middle East…What does this mean for dispersal after the flood.

On a YEC or OEC paradigm, humans originate in the Middle East. Regarding how Kabwe-type humans migrated to African and how that antedates civilization in the Middle East by however long, perhaps there is no good YEC explanation.

However, depending on where we put the last ice age in relation to man, that would have a highly disruptive effect on civilization so that after the thaw, humans might have to start from scratch. Pre-ice age civilization would be largely lost and forgotten. That might fit into an OEC timetable, don't know about a YEC timetable. 

There's a stone age, bronze age, iron age, age of writing timetable that's post-ice age. But humans are capable of independently developing the same technology. So Gen 4 doesn't have to be intercalated into that timetable. 

Bipedal apes

The cranium, known as MRD, is noticeably different from known A. afarensis skulls.  MRD is smaller with a much more projecting face.  Down the center of the skull runs a sagittal crest for attachment of jaw muscles.  The skull is longer and narrower than A. afarensis skulls.  To my eye, MRD looks more like a living ape like a gorilla than A. afarensis does.

The existence of bipedal animals that look so similar to us raises many questions about God’s design and their relationships to each other.  How many created kinds of upright apes are there?  In past analyses, Paranthropus seems well-separated from other australopiths, and A. afarensis and A. africanus are also very distinct.  Are these patterns merely the result of a sparse sample of species?  Will we eventually find that all bipedal apes belong to one created kind, distinct from humans?  What can this new skull tell us about even less well-known fossils like Ardipithecus or Sahelanthropus?

https://humangenesis.org/2019/08/28/a-face-for-australopithecus-anamensis/

i) I'm not quite sure what Todd means by bipedal animals that look so similar to us given what he says about MRD. However, that may be tangential to his main point. 

ii) To consider the question in general, Darwinians and atheists will take this to be yet another example of how science continues to put the squeeze on Christianity. There's increasingly less that makes human beings unique. Science keeps chipping away at human exceptionalism. One theological outpost after another falls to the invincible march of evolutionary biology. Christians are constantly in retreat. Constantly ceding ground to evolution. At least that's how it looks to Darwinians and atheists.

iii) But is that the case? Even in Gen 1-2, it's clear that humans share much in common with the animal world. That's because we're embodied agents and earthlings. Ancient Jews and Christians could see that humans have animals bodies. Physically, our bodies function like other animals. It's not as if modern science provides a revolutionary perspective in that regard. Prescientific observers could see that just fine. 

iv) I don't see that bipedal apes pose any greater threat to human exceptionalism than animals with forward-facing eyes. It's my impression that different body designs maximize an organism's ability to exploit a particular niche. Obviously we've never seen bipedal apes in action, but that presumably enables them to take advantage of certain opportunities their environment presents that quadrupedal apes cannot exploit. 

But there are tradeoffs in any body design. Gains in one respect are offset by losses in other respects. Leopards lack the power of lions, but that's offset by their superior tree-climbing ability. Cheetahs can outrun prey that's too fast for leopards and lions, but that's offset by weaker jaws and lack of razor-sharp claws. 

v) There's the question of what makes something unique. It is a single unique feature or a unique combination of ordinary features? 

vi) What makes humans unique isn't primarily our bodies but our minds. Suppose a wolf had a human body. That wouldn't make it human. A lupine mind in a human body would be a disastrous mismatch. It wouldn't survive. It has the wrong kind of intelligence to operate with a human body. 

vii) This doesn't mean human bodies are unimportant to human identity. But they are secondary in the sense that human bodies are instruments of human minds. A human mind requires a body that enables it to do human things. A human mind in the body of a dolphin would be stultifying and maddening. 

If you hand a mediocre tennis player the racket of a world-class tennis player, that doesn't make him a world-class tennis player. Conversely, a world-class tennis player can beat a mediocre player with an off-the-shelf racket–no matter how good the racket the mediocre player has. Same thing with pool. It isn't the cue or the balls that make the difference. Although Heifetz plays better with a Guarneri or Stradivarius, handing that violin to a mediocre violinist doesn't transform him into Heifetz. Imagine what Newton could do with a computer. 

A body is just a medium. It's generally a necessary medium for humans to develop their potential and exercise their humanity, but it's what the operator does with it that's special, and not the medium in itself. 

Like animals, we produce offspring and raise offspring, but human parents and their offspring both get far more out of the experience than animals because we have more complex minds. Lower animals may not even have minds. If they do have minds, they have very simple minds. Like animals, humans engage in sex, but we get far more out of the experience because we have more complex minds. There's so much more we can take in. 

viii) It's like science fiction stories about extraterrestrials. What kind of bodies does the writer give them? If they rely on advanced technology, they need body parts that enable them to build and operate fancy gadgets. They require bodies suitable to their alien intelligence and alien proclivities. 

Looking ahead to Africa

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/08/looking-ahead-to-africa.html

What is the creation model?

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/08/what-is-creation-model.html

The dispute over evolution and theology is asymmetric

I think the dispute over evolution and theology is not a symmetric one, as my friend Paul Garner would say.  My own efforts to understand God's creation from a creationist perspective could very well be wrong.  But if I am wrong, I have made mistakes about science because of my adherence to what I believe to be the Word of God.  On the other hand, if BioLogos and their followers are wrong, that seems to be a more serious matter.  They offer us a rather radically different vision of the Bible and the Christian message of sin, its source, and its consequences.  These strike me as far weightier matters that warrant great fear and trembling rather than cavalier enthusiasm.

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/04/my-visit-to-biologos.html

Paradigm shift

The doctrine of creation runs deeply through Scripture and Christian theology. It may not be the gospel itself, but creation is entangled with the gospel through Paul’s teaching on Adam. How we understand creation is also intertwined with how we understand the rest of Scripture, from which we Protestants gain most of our theology. Changing my view on creation requires a reconfiguration of a large part of my understanding of theology, which is not something I take lightly.

You might argue that the science of evolution is entangled with the very foundation of biology and geology and that science cannot be science without evolution. Obviously, I don’t agree with that at all. I see a great deal of flexibility in science, which you do not. Over the centuries, many theories that seemed so obviously true were abandoned for better models, and I have no doubt that trend will continue. Humanity has barely begun to explore God’s creation. We can hardly imagine what discoveries are coming right around the corner.

I also won’t change my mind because I have lingering doubts about this or that issue. I don’t want to adopt a position merely as a way to escape intellectual anxiety. That’s not faith at all. That’s acting in doubt. Every position has unanswered questions. No one gets to understand it all here and now.

http://henrycenter.tiu.edu/2019/02/a-letter-to-the-heretic/

The duty of readers

Finally, if you just read this book because you're looking for an argument, and you only want to assess the argument, then you have missed the point and you are the main person who needs to read the book.  The point is that this isn't just some argument.  There are real people in this debate with hopes, desires, loves, and fears.  If you don't care about all that, that's the problem.

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/02/reacting-to-fool-and-heretic.html

That's rather patronizing and ill-conceived. On the one hand, a classic mistake reviewers make is to fault a book as a failure because it didn't address a question important to the reader. But of course, authors write about what's important to the author. So I understand why authors find reviews like that aggravating.

On the other hand, a reader has a perfect right to read a book with an eye to what's important or interesting to the reader. He shouldn't blame the author if the book doesn't share his priorities, but by the same token, the reader isn't obliged to share the author's priorities. 

For instance, I read lots of stuff by atheists and Roman Catholics. Their intention is to persuade the reader to be an atheist or Roman Catholic. I, by contrast, read their stuff to spot flaws in arguments for atheism and Roman Catholicism. My motivation for reading their stuff is diametrically opposed to their intentions, but it's perfectly legitimate for a reader to have a different agenda than the author. 

Iconoclastic science

1. Recently I read The Fool and the Heretic (Zondervan 2019). It's a dialogue between young-earth creationist Todd Wood and theistic evolutionist Darrel Falk. I haven't read the sections by Falk. I bought the book for Wood's contributions. I think the book would be better without the patronizing, handholding interludes by Rob Barrett. And that would free up more space for Wood. 

To judge by what he said in a post:

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2019/01/about-that-book.html

I was expecting Wood's side of the dialogue to be rather concessive. Instead, he was quite confrontational–which is refreshing.

2. I find Todd's hermeneutic rather roughhewn. However, he's right about the big picture issues. He stresses the ad hoc way theistic evolutionists treat Gen 1-9 as pious fiction or allegory–while they don't treat other narratives in Scripture the same way, even though other narratives in the Pentateuch or Gospels have the same supernaturalism. 

3. Theistic evolutionists complain that young-earth creationists drive people away from the faith by positing a false dichotomy. And there's certainly a danger of alienating people from the Christian faith if we make a particular interpretation of Scripture identical to what Scripture means–assuming that's just one possible, and possibly mistaken, interpretation.

At the same time, we can't be Christian unless we commit to certain interpretations. Moreover, the danger cuts both ways. Belief in evolution drives many people away from Christianity, even if young-earth creationism didn't exist. 

4. A common objection to young-earth creationists is that they only believe it because they believe the Bible. They don't begin with the scientific evidence but the Bible. They don't have any positive evidence for their alternative. They are just poking holes in the standard paradigm. 

Even if that rather jaundiced characterization were true, science benefits from having sharp, rigorous, relentless critics who spot weaknesses in the prevailing scientific orthodoxies. 

In addition, scientific progress is strategically driven by gifted mavericks. Sometimes their theories are blind alleys, but sometimes they make midcourse corrections or original, fundamental contributions to science as an ongoing research program. 

Compare Todd Wood to Dennis Venema. As a probing, intellectually dissatisfied scientist, Wood has the potential to make original, fundamental contributions to science that a company man like Venema lacks. Science requires balance between creative iconoclasm and stability. It's useful to work within a paradigm. Exhaust the paradigm. But it's sometimes necessary to question the paradigm. 

It's easy for scientists to become prematurely settled in their ways. They stop asking questions because they think they know the answers. Sometimes they discount evidence to the contrary as anomalous. But the mavericks keep extending the frontiers. Ironically, some scientists lack intellectual curiosity. They are satisfied with the received answers. 

Wood objects that commitment to evolution results in losing an amazingly fruitful and exciting avenue of scientific research that goes deeper than Darwin (36).

5. Some of what Wood writes might foster the impression that he isn't only a creationist because he believes the Bible, and not because he thinks there's any evidence for creationism. But based on cluster analysis, he thinks there are patterns in nature that evolution can't explain (154, 200). 

Likewise, he thinks the evolutionary explanation for the PAM matrix (i.e. protein similarities between disparate species) has it upside down (60-62). He wouldn't be motivated to consider the issue from a different angle unless he was motivated by creationism. Scientists who lack that motivation neglect to consider what might be a superior alternative explanation. 

6. It's also important to emphasize that this isn't just about raw natural evidence. The debate over methodological atheism demonstrates a key philosophical component. The mainstream scientific paradigms treat nature as a closed system, a machine. They interpolate and extrapolate, reconstruct the past, fill in the evidential gaps, based on that secular philosophical postuate. 

And it's true that nature is machine-like. But what if creation is dualistic rather than materialistic? What if there's interaction between mind and matter? What if there are discarnate agents who sometimes intervene, who sometimes contribute to the outcome? Incidentally, there's empirical evidence for that.

In that event, secular science isn't simply following the evidence wherever it leads, but disregarding inconvenient evidence and superimposing an artificial filter on what science is allowed to discover. So it's simplistic to frame the issue in terms of one side having the evidence while the other side has dogma. 

There's a certain tension in science because scientists like things to be predictable. They like to be in control. But what if there are uncontrollable variables due to factors like mental causation, discarnate agents, miracles, the efficacy of prayer, and paranormal phenomena (for which there's tremendous evidence). What if that's actually a part of reality? Then, like it or not, that imposes certain limitations the ability of science to achieve mastery over the material world. It will be frustrated in its godlike quest to know and manipulate the world around us.

And that's beneficial. Science is marvelous and dangerous. It has enormous potential for good and evil. We should be grateful for barriers that curb the power of science. 

7. Suppose Gen 1-9 was obviously true. Suppose there was abundant evidence for Gen 1-9 (or the Exodus, to take another example).  

That would make it easy to believe. And that wouldn't leave room for faith. Conversely, that would make it much tougher to be an atheist.

But what if God made a world that's ambiguous in some respects? Where Gen 1-9 isn't obviously true or obviously false? 

Now a critic might object that I'm guilty of special pleading. Yet that's not unique to Genesis. In Scripture, faith is hard. Faith is meant to be hard. That's a principle which antedates the "conflict" between science and Scripture by centuries or millennia. 

On the one hand there's overwhelming evidence for Christianity. On the other hand, there are perennial emotional, physical, and intellectual obstacles along the walk of faith. That's always been the case. It didn't begin with the advent of modern science.

Although there are many lines of evidence for Christianity, it's difficult to be a Christian. God could make it a lot easier. He doesn't. 

So the creation/evolution debate is just one more test of faith. That's nothing new. Generations of Jews and Christians before us had obstacles to overcome, and generations to come will face their own obstacles. The Christian pilgrimage is demanding. A winnowing process. Some pilgrims drop out before the finish line. 

The Quest

Recently I read The Quest: Exploring Creation's Hardest Problems (Compass Classroom 2018), by Dr. Todd Wood. He's an interesting thinker. Something of a maverick. One of the brightest minds in young-earth creationism. In a way he's too smart for his own good, which will get you into trouble. I don't mean that as a putdown. Independent thinkers don't make good team-players.

It can take heroic dedication and personal sacrifice to be a creation scientist. While there's a strong theological constituency for that position, it doesn't translate into comparable financial patronage. Unless you're one of the lucky ones who lands a job at a fundamentalist university or creationist organization, it's hard to eke out a living–as Wood and Kurt Wise both know from personal experience. 

Years ago I corresponded with Walt Brown, which made me aware of rival factions within young-earth creationism. That also makes it harder to have a career as a creation scientist. And not just young-earth creationism. Look what William Dembski was subjected to. 

Who are the creationists?

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2018/05/who-are-creationists.html

From Adam to Hobbits

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2018/04/seafaring-cavemen-imagine-that.html

Why did God make harmful things?

A YEC perspective:

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2018/04/video-lecture-natural-evil-why-did-god.html

The Quest: Faith, Science, and Creation in the 21st Century

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2018/03/video-lecture-quest-faith-science-and.html

Table games

There are plenty of things that evolution explains quite well that creationism struggles with.  For example, why are there australopiths?  Why not make humans extremely distinct from the mammals?  Why even make primates at all?  Evolution explains primates as the distant relatives of modern humans, and australopiths fit in that model very well.  Creationism (of any stripe) doesn't really explain that very well. 

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2017/02/is-genesis-history-q.html

i) One problem is the question of coherence. If humans were extremely distinct from mammals, we wouldn't be human. 

ii) Let's take a comparison. Humans like to play games. Some games are very different from each other, viz. chess, Go, Backgammon, roulette, Yahtzee,  scrabble, Monopoly, Mahjong, pool. 

You also have different games that use the same deck of cards, viz. Poker, blackjack, Bridge, Baccarat. Finally, you have variations on the same game, viz. seven card stud, five card draw, Texas Hold'em, Omaha High. 

What accounts for the similarities and differences? On the one hand, humans like to play very different games. That accounts for dissimilarity.

On the other hand, humans like to explore the range of possible variations within tighter limitations. Consider how many different card games we could devise if we restricted ourselves to the same deck of cards. 

There are different ways to illustrate intellectual creativity. One way is through dissimilarity. Inventing things that are very different from each other. Another way is through similarity. In a way, it's a greater challenge to produce interesting variations with fewer options. 

One creationist explanation for the spectrum of biological similarity and dissimilarity is a demonstration of God's creative ingenuity. And that's something which human creativity mimics. 

Modularity

One of the challenges to creationism is explaining similarity between different species. 

The evolutionary explanation is generally that they are similar because they share a common ancestor. Mind you, the evolutionary inference is not that straightforward since evolutionists also believe that some similarities developed independently. 

Alternative creationist explanations include common design and common function. Both have some explanatory value, but they are too generic to account for certain kinds of similarities. 

Between about 20-33 min. in this presentation:

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2017/06/igh-conference-monday.html

Todd Wood reviews the stock explanations, then offers a different proposal. He draws an analogy between genomic modularity and language. 

If you compare two texts in same language, they will share many similarities. Is that because they have a common ancestor? Generally, that's not the explanation.

The reason, rather, is that a language has limited characters (alphabet) and limited vocabulary. Likewise, it has a standard syntax. As a result, two texts have many repeated words and grammatical forms. 

By analogy, genomic modularities are not homologies. Not intermediates but mosaics.

Wood uses a linguistic analogy, but we could also use a musical analogy. Two composition by different Baroque composers will have many similarities because they employ the same rules of musical composition. A common scale, notation, instruments, musical forms, &c.  

Creationist biology

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2017/06/igh-conference-monday.html

Why I'm still a creationist

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2017/06/igh-conference-why-im-still-creationist.html

Hanging out with geocentrists

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2010/11/hanging-out-with-geocentrists-part-1.html

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2010/11/hanging-out-with-geocentrists-part-2.html

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2010/11/hanging-out-with-geocentrists-part-3.html

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2010/11/hanging-out-with-geocentrists-part-4.html