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Freshman astronomy books typically include a timeline outlining the major events of the universe over the past 13.7 billion years, from the appearance of our universe to the present. Most timelines put a question mark at the very beginning to reflect the incomplete state of our knowledge about how the universe got started. We don’t know what lit the spark that launched the grand adventure of our universe, despite millennia of wondering and decades of intriguing progress. Remarkably, we know a lot about what happened a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. We have robust theories that have...

Heavy Metal Clocks, Pb-Pb Dating Model: Radioactive Dating, Part 8 by Vernon R. Cupps, Ph.D. * …that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting. (Ephesians 4:14) This final article of the series examines the common-lead method of radioactive dating, sometimes referred to as the Pb-Pb method. This method reaches the pinnacle of radioisotope dating methods in terms of complication and convolution. Since we do not want to be tossed to and fro by every teaching that cunning...

Remembering Mount St. Helens 35 Years Later by Brian Thomas, M.S. * The volcano’s main 1980 eruption filled in an entire valley with hundreds of feet of sediment. Another smaller eruption event deposited more material on top of that, and then a third deposition occurred in 1982. Later, a catastrophic flood of snowmelt water and muddy debris tore a gash through those fresh deposits, revealing sharp and flat contacts between each earlier deposit. It also showed that fast-flowing currents can lay down multiple layers thinner than a finger width. Mount St. Helens revealed to the world that both thick and...

Clever Construction in Rorqual Whales by Brian Thomas, M.S. * A few years ago, scientists discovered a unique sensory organ in the jaw of a rorqual whale—the world's largest creature. Rorqual whales, which include the blue whale and fin whale, feed by ballooning out folds of tissue that bag gobs of krill from fertile ocean waters. Some of those researchers recently described the unique bungee-cord-like nerve construction that illustrates clever and intentional design.

Raymond Damadian, Inventor of the MRI by Jerry Bergman, Ph.D. * Evidence for Creation Dr. Raymond Damadian is the “father of the MRI” (Magnetic Resonance Imaging). MRI is widely recognized as “one of the great medical breakthroughs of the 20th century” and has saved and enhanced countless lives.1 While studying violin at the world-famous Juilliard School of Music, Damadian competed with nearly 100,000 applicants and won a Ford Foundation Scholarship. He was only 15. This enabled him to complete a mathematics degree at the University of Wisconsin. He then earned his medical degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine...

An international team of astronomers led by Yale University and the University of California-Santa Cruz have pushed back the cosmic frontier of galaxy exploration to a time when the universe was only 5% of its present age. The team discovered an exceptionally luminous galaxy more than 13 billion years in the past and determined its exact distance from Earth using the powerful MOSFIRE instrument on the W.M. Keck Observatory's 10-meter telescope, in Hawaii. It is the most distant galaxy currently measured. The galaxy, EGS-zs8-1, was originally identified based on its particular colors in images from NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space...

Heavy Metal Clocks, U-Pb and Th-Pb Dating Models: Radioactive Dating, Part 7 by Vernon R. Cupps, Ph.D. * The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. (Psalm 19:1-3) The heavens do indeed declare the glory of God, but some people choose to believe that the heavens appeared by random chance out of nothing—a stance for which they are “without excuse.” Paul so forcefully points out in Romans 1:18-20 that who God is...

Researchers have been able to map how the Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation are distributed in three-dimensional space for the first time, using new data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Given the tremendous size of this section of the Eagle Nebula and its distance from Earth (around 7,000 light-years), researchers previously thought we were unlikely to ever see the shape of it in anything other than two flat dimensions, as in Hubble's famous photograph.

Three-Dimensional DNA Code Defies Evolution by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * Scientists have long been baffled as to what actually tells proteins called transcription factors (TFs) where to bind in the genome to turn genes off and on. However, new research incorporating the three-dimensional shape of DNA has revealed an incredibly complex system of interacting biochemical codes.1 We know that genes are turned off and on across the genome by intricate networks of transcription factors which bind to DNA in strategic places in and around the genes. But discovering what tells the transcription factors where to bind has proven extremely...

Order! Order in the Universe! – A Meditation on the Wisdom That Creation Reflects By: Msgr. Charles PopeIn a courtroom, the judge can bring an unruly outburst to an end by shouting, “Order! Order in the court!” I often feel the same urge in the debates of our time about God’s existence and His role in the created universe. It is not so much that the debates can get unruly, but that I, with the  insistence of a town crier, want to shout, “Order! Order, there IS order the universe!” And I want to ask everyone to be quiet and listen to the universe herself...

No Salamander Evolution Evidence, Past or Present by Frank Sherwin, M.A. * Scientists in Portugal unearthed a "super salamander" which, although "weird compared to anything today," is still very much a salamander.1 The fossilized bones of the six-foot (two meter) animal were discovered on a hillside dig "chock-full" of bones and declared to originate from the "Upper Triassic" period, some 200 million years ago according to evolutionary dating. While evolutionists like to claim that variations in traits within a species are proof of evolution, salamanders have always been salamanders regardless of their size.

Saturn's Enceladus Looks Younger than Ever by Brian Thomas, M.S. * The more we learn about Enceladus, the younger it looks. Stated another way, the more that our space probes discover about this fascinating little moon that inhabits Saturn's tenuous E ring, the more challenging it becomes for conventional origins to explain. A new discovery adds to the list of young-looking Enceladus features. The most stunning feature of Saturn's sixth largest moon is undoubtedly its water-ice plumes. The Cassini spacecraft passed by Enceladus several times in 2005 and captured amazing images of these continuous jets. They discharge material and send...

Does it matter whether or not matter is eternal? Peter J. Leithart, who writes a regular blog on the web site of First Things, definitely thinks it does. According to Leithart , who is a Protestant theologian in the Reformed Presbyterian tradition in the United States, if matter is eternal, "creation can only be control, limitation, ordering." Then God could only be a master craftsman, working with already existing material to form the universe. If matter is eternal, "creation cannot be a gift; . . . cannot be the bestowal of existence, a grant of being." Finally, if matter is...

No Evolution Is Proof of Evolution? by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D., Tim Clarey, Ph.D., and Jason Lisle, Ph.D.* Scientists recently discovered a community of fossilized sulfur-metabolizing bacteria that are alleged to be 1.8 billion years old.1 Surprisingly, the microbes are virtually identical to their modern counterparts, yet the study authors claim that the microbes are proof of evolution.

Another Horizontal Gene Transfer Fairy Tale by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * As the genomes of many new creatures rapidly fill the public DNA sequence databases, the problems for the grand evolutionary story are becoming overwhelming. One issue is the fact that different creatures have unique sets of genes specific to their kind with no apparent evolutionary history. To explain this glaring problem, evolutionists have resorted to the myth of pervasive horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) is the process whereby genes are transferred from one type of creature to another without sexual reproduction. Earlier in my career, I...

Rare-Earth Clocks, Sm-Nd and Lu-Hf Dating Models 2: Radioactive Dating, Part 6 by Vernon R. Cupps, Ph.D. * This series has summarized radioisotope dating models, their assumptions, and how those assumptions mistakenly lead to a “deep time” picture of our universe.1 Secularist scientists want us to accept their circular arguments and improbable assumptions as scientific fact, despite the fact these same scientists often push aside the scientific method itself. Using the various types of radioisotope decay as clocks does not produce consistent results, nor are those results verifiable by observational evidence. If these methods do not properly date rocks of...

Paleontologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new arthropod. Yawunik kootenayi was swimming around oceans in Canada in the Cambrian period, 508 million years ago. It's thought to share a common ancestor with today's spiders and scorpions. The arthropod had four eyes and arms lined with both tiny claws to help it feed, and long antennae to sense its surroundings. The study's lead author says species today don't have limbs that function like that. "This dual function is very, very special, because it does not appear in modern forms. If you take insects as an example, they have a...

Dinosaur Moth: An Evolutionary Enigma by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * Scientists discovered a tiny moth on Australia's Kangaroo Island and gave it the name Enigmatinea glatzella. The name is quite descriptive, as Enigmatinea means "enigma moth" in Latin.1,2 But why is this moth an enigma to evolutionary scientists? Today's living representatives of this moth have "basically the same features" as their ancestors, which evolutionists claim lived forty to fifty million years ago.3 Hence, virtually no evolution has occurred in all that supposed time! Ted Edwards, one of the scientists tasked with describing the new moth family said, "It's really quite...

Spiders Have Always Been Spiders by Frank Sherwin, M.A. * A University of California Berkley graduate student has discovered two beautiful new species of peacock spiders in southeast Queensland, Australia.1 The student, Madeline Girard, named the two colorful creatures "Sparklemuffin" and "Skeletorus," both of the genus Maratus. They are noted for their ornate mating dances that many viewers find amusing. Are these splendid specimens highly evolved species or have spiders always been spiders?

National Geographic claims creationists are at war with science by Lita Cosner and Keaton Halley Published: 19 March 2015 (GMT+10) National Geographic (NG) is a respected popular science magazine with millions of subscribers. So it is unfortunate when they use that platform to promote anti-creation propaganda under the guise of science. The cover of the March 2015 issue is “The War on Science”, and the featured article by science writer Joel Achenbach, “The age of disbelief”, intends to explain why so many people doubt the scientific establishment on a range of issues—from global warming to vaccines to the Apollo moon...