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Intelligent design theories gaining steam in scientific circles By: Dr. Granville Sewell12/16/2013 04:34 PM The debut at #7 on the New York Times best seller list last July of Stephen Meyer’s new book Darwin’s Doubt is evidence that the scientific theory of intelligent design (ID) continues to gain momentum. Since critics often misrepresent ID, and paint ID advocates as a fanatical fringe group, it is important to understand what intelligent design is, and what it is not.Until Charles Darwin, almost everyone everywhere believed in some form of intelligent design (the majority still do): not just Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but...

Report on the 2013 International Conference on Creationism by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * In August, 354 creation scientists and supporters from nine different countries attended the 2013 International Conference on Creationism (ICC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dozens of authors presented their peer-reviewed papers—nearly all of them technical in nature. Well represented at this year’s ICC, the Institute for Creation Research sent its entire science staff, several of whom presented a number of papers, which are also available for online viewing at www.icr.org. Geologist Tim Clarey discussed gravity-driven “overthrusts,” showing that these geological features (in which older strata are found on top...

A trip through a major Holocaust museum will tell you most of what you need to know about the mindset of the fiends who murdered millions in the middle of the last century. Poster-size images of death-camp inmates – all staring blankly – attest to the monstrous worldview of the prisoners’ tormentors. What, though, really explains the Nazi capacity for murder? How could “regular people” slaughter children? What possessed – pun intended – Hitler’s willing executioners to butcher women and old men? I think Jerry Bergman has figured it out In a new book, “Hitler and the Nazi Darwinian Worldview,”...

Express-Lane Magma Indicates Young Earth by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Magma can really make tracks according to a recent study published in Nature that has significantly upped the perceived speed limit of magma movement in the earth.1 Philipp Ruprecht and Terry Plank examined rocks generated from the most recent, 1963–1965 eruption of the Irazú volcano in Costa Rica and found indications that the magma traveled at 150–300 feet per day and possibly as fast as several thousand feet per day. These findings present problems for old-earth theories that are based on sluggish magma movement. Key factors in the study were...

Epigenetic Study Produces 'Backwards' Human-Ape Tree by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A recently published study in the epigenetic modification of DNA regions similar among humans and three different apes not only provided a completely mixed up picture of evolution, but one that was entirely backwards.1 Epigenetic modifications are chemical tags that are added along chromosomes in specific patterns that control how genes are expressed. At present, 12 different types of gene regulating modifications (i.e., chemical tagging) to histone proteins that package the DNA molecule are well-documented in the human genome.2 In addition to the modification of histones, the DNA molecule...

Atheists have long argued that atheism is not a religion as they deny the existence of God or any other form of deity. Atheists, starting with Madalyn Murray O’Hair, are the ones that led the efforts to remove the Bible, prayer and all aspects of Christianity out of the public schools, government buildings and property. Christians have long argued that atheism is a religion as it is a belief in no God and that by removing Christianity from schools established atheism as the official religion of the public school system. It is impossible to have a vacuum of religious belief...

We look back in time, and say the universe is 15 billion years old. But as every scientist knows, when we say the universe is 15 billion years old, there's another half of the sentence that we rarely bother to say. The other half of the sentence is: The universe is 15 billion years old as seen from the time-space coordinates of the earth. The key is that the Torah looks forward in time, from very different time-space coordinates, when the universe was small. Since then, the universe has expanded out. Space stretches, and that stretching of space totally changes...

Is Biblical Creation a Distraction to Evangelism? by James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D. * The Institute for Creation Research and other biblical creation ministries are sometimes criticized as distractions from the ministry of evangelism. The alleged concern is that the promotion of biblical creation as taught in Genesis creates controversy by derailing the evangelism process—distracting people from learning about who Jesus is and trusting Him as their Savior. Does teaching biblical creation truth interfere with a proper presentation of the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior? Before that question can be squarely answered, consider the context of the controversy. Dr....

We openly grant that the accusation represented by the title of this article is true, at least for many individuals today. But not for all. “Blind Faith”—Many Have It What is “blind faith”? What is meant by the accusation? The idea behind “blind faith” is that a person chooses to believe in something or someone (namely, God) without any supporting evidence. The portrait painted in our minds is that of a person who puts on a blindfold and steps up to a ledge. He cannot see what is beyond the ledge. He has no idea how far down the drop...

New Fossil Book Won't Showcase Obvious Catastrophe by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Not just horses and fish, but—like a whole ancient zoo buried together—lizards, alligators, stingrays, snakes, squirrel varieties, bats, long-tailed turtles, lemur-like primates, birds, frogs, insects, and sycamore, palm, and fern leaves were all fossilized in Wyoming's Green River Formation. A new book showcasing some of the more spectacular fossils provides secularists another opportunity to reinforce their ideas about how these diverse creatures were encased in what became a giant rock formation. Commonsense observations refute their slow-and-gradual scenario, however, and point to a more violent explanation. Lance Grande collected...

Remembering Dr. Duane T. Gish, Creation's 'Bulldog' A mixture of sorrow and thankfulness comes over the Institute for Creation Research family as we note the passing of Dr. Duane Gish on March 6, 2013. Dr. Gish has been a champion of creation at ICR for decades, and we will miss him. Born in Kansas and educated at University of California, Los Angeles, he later received his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He joined the ICR faculty in 1970, after a fruitful career in biochemistry at the Upjohn Company in Michigan. Soon after the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961,...

During an Advanced Placement biology course in Easton Area High School, Jennifer Estevez's teacher sped through the large chapter on evolution, focusing on one formula for the AP exam and the basics: survival of the fittest and natural selection. In those high school years in Northampton County, she also would attend a Baptist leadership retreat where a speaker denounced evolution as false, unproven science. Seemingly unimportant and even discredited, evolution fell off her radar. So the Easton student, who is a Baptist, arrived at Duquesne University last fall considering herself a creationist, a person who generally believes God created the...

Is Mankind Getting Dumber? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Do today’s children have lower I.Q.’s than yesterday’s? Yes, according to measurements of intellectual and emotional strength gathered from different countries and contexts. The results show the same basic decline and resist the notion that public or other forms of education are to blame. Could the cause instead lie within? Stanford University professor Gerald Crabtree thinks so. He published a pair of essays in the journal Trends in Genetics, citing new discoveries that show why the human intellect is “surprisingly fragile.”1 This biblical creation-friendly notion didn’t sit well with the authors...

Coelacanths: Evolutionists Still Fishing in Shallow Water by Timothy L. Clarey, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A recent report, published in Nature,1 on the genome sequence of the so-called living fish fossil, the African coelacanth, has some evolutionists scrambling to defend their story. This is because the coelacanth's DNA is similar to other types of fish and not land animals, thus forcing the evolutionists to postulate that the coelacanth evolved slowly.1 Although modern coelacanths are found in water about 500 feet deep, Axel Meyer, a member of the study team believes that ancient coelacanths may have lived in shallow...

This book describes Dr. Martin's personal journey from an evolution-trained scientist to a Bible-believing creationist. Dr. Martin examines many of the claims and theories of prominent evolutionists, comparing their often incredible, inconsistent, pseudo-scientific explanations of origins to the clear and simple description of the Creation as depicted in the Bible. The result is the realization that evolution, just like creation, is in fact a faith system - in other words, it takes just as much faith, perhaps more, to believe in the Darwinist theory of evolution as it does to take as simple, profound truth the Bible's clear explanation of...

Striking It Rich with 'Instant Gold' by Timothy L. Clarey, Ph.D. The lure of gold has caused many to drop everything and rush off in search of the "mother lode." But where exactly do these precious gold deposits come from? An explanation for the origin of gold deposits has long eluded and perplexed prospectors and even geoscientists. But one new study may have unlocked just the right clues. Two Australian scientists, whose work was published in Nature Geoscience1, found that gold deposits can form almost instantaneously during faulting events and their associated earthquakes. According to the authors' calculations, repeated faulting...

A California creationist is offering a $10,000 challenge to anyone who can prove in front of a judge that science contradicts the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis. Dr Joseph Mastropaolo, who says he has set up the contest, the Literal Genesis Trial ...

Intelligent design is just another form of creationism, creationism is profoundly unscientific, and such unscientific views do not belong in public classrooms. This, in a nutshell, is the argument of activist Zack Kopplin, a student at Rice University who began his battle against a Louisiana academic freedom law (the Louisiana Science Education Act) while in high school. He is the 2012 winner of the “Troublemaker of the Year Award.” “Well, this law allows supplemental materials into our school biology classrooms to ‘critique controversial theories like evolution and climate change,’” said Kopplin in a March interview on the Bill Moyers show....

For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for teachers to introduce creationist textbooks into the classroom. Outraged, he wrote a research paper about it for a high school English class. Nearly five years later, the 19-year-old Kopplin has become one of the fiercest — and most feared — advocates for education reform in Louisiana. We recently spoke to him to learn more about how he's making a difference.

A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomprehensible, a team of physicists at the University of Washington has come up with a potential test to see if the idea holds water. The concept that current humanity could possibly be living in a computer simulation comes from a 2003 paper published in Philosophical Quarterly by Nick Bostrom, a philosophy professor at the University of Oxford. In the paper, he argued that at least one of...