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Hillsong Church has, over the years, hardly avoided the limelight, often finding itself at the center of hotly-contested debates. Now one of its biggest leaders is running headlong into the creation debate. Joel Houston, eldest son of the Sydney-based church’s founders, lead musician in the worship band Hillsong United, and co-pastor of Hillsong Church in New York City, tweeted Monday that “evolution is undeniable.”

Landmark new research that involves analyzing millions of DNA barcodes has debunked much about what we know today about the evolution of species. In a massive genetic study, senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel geneticist David Thaler discovered that virtually 90 percent of all animals on Earth appeared at right around the same time. More specifically, they found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. "This conclusion...

Who would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge? ------- The study's most startling result, perhaps, is that nine out of 10 species on Earth today, including humans, came into being 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. "This conclusion is very surprising, and I fought against it as hard as I could," Thaler told AFP.

We have Charles Darwin to thank for opening our eyes to the forces of natural selection so useful today in medical research, healthcare, and technology. But Darwin also did us a great disservice, all too blithely extrapolating from observable "bounded" evolution to his Grand Theory of microbe-to-man "unbounded" evolution. In a nutshell, Darwin speculated that, since there is evolution within well-defined species, then all species must surely be the result of evolution. Logical enough, but simply wrong. Darwin's extrapolation is fraught with a host of problems, at least one of which—in three particulars—is fatal to his Grand Theory.That fatal flaw?...

I live along the Front Range of Colorado and I frequently hike in the foothills with my trusty dog. It is a common experience to look east onto the plains and on the horizon be able to clearly discern the curve of the earth. For those who have never had this experience, it can be quite an epiphany. Right there before your eyes you can actually see the curve of the globe of this wonderful place we call home.

"Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. Pope Pius XII declared that ‘the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions . . . take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—[but] the Catholic...

Humans may be evolving an 'ultimate hangover' gene to protect against alcoholism. That's according to a new study that looked at a variant of a gene that makes booze intolerable to the body. Scientists claim this gene variant is being favoured by evolution - and, in time, could stop us from drinking alcohol in the future.

Religion is not hostile to learning; Christianity has been the greatest patron learning has ever had. But Christians know that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" now just as it has been in the past, and they therefore oppose the teaching of guesses that encourage godlessness among the students. Do bad doctrines corrupt the morals of students? We have a case, Mr. Darrow, one of the most distinguished criminal lawyers in our land, was engaged about a year ago in defending two rich men's sons who were on trial for as dastardly a murder as was...

The president and founder of Kentucky’s Creation Museum in Petersburg and the Ark Encounter in Williamstown has been dropped as a speaker at the University of Central Oklahoma after a LGBT group objected. Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, had been scheduled to speak March 5 at the public university in Edmond, Okla. Stockton Duvall, student body president at the university, took responsibility for the decision to rescind Ham’s invitation after learning of the opposition to his visit. Duvall told The Oklahoman newspaper that a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning group opposed Ham’s visit because of his view...

Creation vs Evolution: The Bombardier Beetle Challenge February 8, 2018 | David F. Coppedge Bombardier beetles made the news again this week. Creation scientists have long used them to challenge evolutionary theory. Can the Darwinians fight back? Watch a funny video on National Geographic of a barfing toad. The toad made the mistake of sneaking up on a bombardier beetle and snatching it with its tongue before the beetle could fire its weapons. It’s not hard to imagine what happened inside the toad’s stomach, because a few minutes later, the toad gags and vomits out the beetle, practically turning its...

Researchers have identified the remains of the earliest known modern humans to have left Africa. New dating of fossils from Israel indicates that our species (Homo sapiens) lived outside Africa around 185,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than the previous evidence. Details appear in the journal Science. The co-lead researcher, Prof Israel Hershkovitz, told BBC News that the discovery would fundamentally alter ideas of recent human evolution. "We have to rewrite the whole story of human evolution, not just for our own species but all the other species that lived outside of Africa at the time," the researcher, from...

I have written three rather lengthy books about discrimination against scientists who dared to question the validity of Darwinism, more commonly known as Darwin Dissidents.[1] C.S. Lewis predicted that Darwinists would become totalitarians when he was alive, and history has proved him correct.[2] One recent case is that of the distinguished paleontologist, Dr. Günter Bechly, a world expert on fossil insects, who was forced to resign [a tactful way to say he was fired] as curator for the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. Then, as a result, he was censored from Wikipedia. The editors at Wikipedia attempted...

Of all the Western nations, Americans are the least likely to believe in evolution, according to a recent survey. Still, some applauded when even more recent statistics apparently showed that support for creationism had dropped below 40% in America. Still, at 38%, one has to wonder how precise those numbers are. America has had a history of fundamentalist Protestantism. The Puritans were not like the wavering Anglicans whom they fled. Nor would they take suggestions from the Pope. This streak has informed our country from its inception. And, contrary to present disdain, that influence was often for the good....

It has become axiomatic that life naturally evolved out of nonliving materials billions of years ago. Given enough time and the chemical opportunity, living cells self-assemble.However, the experts on the development of complex molecules from simpler ones, the synthetic chemists, do not know how this process actually occurs. There are no known pathways to create the components that make up a living cell from nonliving matter. They have no idea how amino acids (the building blocks of proteins and enzymes), nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA), saccharides (also called carbohydrates or sugars, the scaffolding for DNA and...

(Photo: Ken Ham Facebook video screencap)Six days of creation slide at Ken Ham's Cedarville University speech on September 15, 2016.Less than 10 percent of British people, and only 15 percent of Canadians believe in the Creationist view that God created humans in their present form, a survey has found.The Newman University/YouGov survey, released on Tuesday, noted that 71 percent of people in the U.K. and another 60 percent of respondents in Canada accept evolutionary or theistic evolutionary accounts of how species on Earth came to be.When it came to the Creationist position that "humans and other living things were created...

Modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are not just incrementally superior to any other hominid or animal; we’re qualitatively different, both as the only known technologically-intelligent species and by virtue of dozens of unique abilities. It is not a claim but a demonstrable fact that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are vastly superior to every other form of life and, for whatever reason, all the genetic mutations that make us unique and confer over 40 traits and behaviors that result in evolutionary advantages over every other animal, occurred within a short period of time, within just one genus, and nowhere...

* This may be the most intact primate fossil skull ever discovered. * The fossil comes from a little-known period of primate evolutionary history. Source: Fred Spoor This is Alesi, the skull of the new extinct ape species Nyanzapithecus alesi (KNM-NP 59050). ================================================================================================================================ A group of scientists have found what may be the most intact fossilized primate skull ever discovered, and the find could shed light on the common evolutionary heritage shared by apes and humans. The lemon-sized skull was discovered in Kenya by an international team of researchers, and was dated to the middle of the Miocene era, a...

The 2001 discovery of the seven million-year-old Sahelanthropus, the first known upright ape-like creatures, was yet more proof of humanity’s place among the great apes. And yet Mike Pence, then a representative and now US vice president, argues for the opposite conclusion.For him, our ideas about our ancestors have changed, proving once more that evolution was a theory, and therefore we should be free to teach other theories alongside evolution in our classrooms. How to respond? The usual answer is that we should teach students the meaning of the word “theory” as used in science – that is, a hypothesis...

When and how the first humans made their way to Australia has been an evolving story. While it is accepted that humans appeared in Africa some 200,000 years ago, scientists in recent years have placed the approximate date of human settlement in Australia further and further back in time, as part of ongoing questions about the timing, the routes and the means of migration out of Africa. Now, a team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years...

Which is the real delusion — love or selfishness? This isn’t just a rhetorical question. It’s a question that gets at the heart of Western civilization’s moral and existential confusion. Are you most in sync with reality when you seek your self-interest first or when you “count others more significant than yourself” (Philippians 2:3)? Is love, and its resulting virtues, truly the highest moral good for humans, or is it really a grand illusion created by our genes to get us to behave in ways most likely to result in our genetic survival? In other words, does love really exist?...