Since the early 1960’s creationists with a science background, and a few others from other disciplines, have done research. What is research? I don’t mean the kind of research you do when you want to find out where a certain shop or restaurant is. I don’t mean the kind of research done by a college freshman to get a research paper done for a class, though that is getting closer. Since science has been misguided and off track regarding origins because of evolutionary and naturalistic thinking, the science of origins has been in need of being rethought and reworked from first principles. So the kind of research I’m talking about is original scholarly research on a technical level to deal with many challenging questions about origins from a truly Christian perspective. The answers that are based on unbelief in God’s word are not satisfying. But sometimes it takes a lot of work to find an alternative to the naturalistic approach that assumes the Bible is wrong or outdated. Doing original research can take different forms but it is often a slow difficult and sometimes tedious process and it usually gets no recognition. It is something you can’t expect most people to understand, most of the time. But it is necessary and creationist research has paid off, though it has not been perfect.

This summer in Pittsburgh, PA at the International Conference on Creationism (ICC) the Creation Research Society celebrated it’s 50th Anniversary. The ICC conference was well attended, over 400 people there. The evenings are open for anyone to attend and there are four full days of meetings with lecture followed by question and answers. This year it was also broadcasted over the internet via live Webinars. So questions came in from the internet during the Q and A time, which was great.

The Creation Research Society Quarterly has been publishing a peer-reviewed journal on creation research for 50 years! The CRS Quarterly is a great resource. Before new findings on creation can be communicated to the public they need to be published on a technical level by the author and scrutinized on a scholarly level. This is how there is some accountability and refinement of new ideas before they are more widely disseminated on a more popular nontechnical level. If ideas presented on a nontechnical level have not gone through this kind of peer-review scrutiny, it may not have much impact or may be a disappointment. I have often observed that the sensational new ideas are usually not important and the important new ideas are not sensational. So to find the really important research you have to learn where to look. Sometimes there are well-meaning efforts that turn out to be misguided or mistaken.

I have presented at four of the ICC conferences in the past, but this time I just attended without presenting. I did review one paper. I have been on both sides of the peer-review process, as author and as reviewer. Being a reviewer is a quiet thankless job but very important. The ICC is perhaps the best venue for creationists to share and critique each other’s research. There are always important new findings. It’s not that all the papers presented are totally right all the time, or in total agreement with each other. But over time there is progress in understanding from the efforts.

I was encouraged by new important findings such as the soft tissue found by creationist scientists in a Triceratops horn. There is a project called iDino that is researching this tissue. There are absolutely amazing microscope images and results from it. It severely challenges evolution and old age thinking. Then there was the research from Timothy Clary, now a geologist at ICR, about overthrusts and superfaults. This is some of the best evidence of a really catastrophic global Flood I’ve ever heard. Really great work. In genetics there is now important research being done by creationists on the differences between human and chimpanzee DNA. It has always been misleading to say Chimp DNA is 98% like human DNA. Now it is just so far wrong as to be absurd. Such a number may still be quoted but is very out of date and was always misleading. There has also been progress in creation biology on identifying the Biblical “kinds” or “baramins” as they have been called. The research clarifies what has happened to life in Noah’s Flood and since the Flood. I think it also underscores that God intervened into Earth history to carry out his purposes.

At the ICC Russ Humphreys presented a great paper about the problems with Earth magnetic dynamo theories. This is an important area that I’ve studied. It serves as the basis of understanding planetary magnetic fields also, even though it hasn’t been very successful in planetary science. Humphreys young age creationist approach is much more realistic in my opinion. There were other papers relating to Egyptian history, biology, geology, and cosmology. Some very interesting new ideas sometimes. The Creation Science Fellowship of Pittsburgh will produce discs that that have the proceedings papers and another disc of the presentations.

There was a panel discussion on impacts from space and Noah’s Flood at the ICC this year. Such a panel discussion, done for all the attenders during the day, had not been done before. This was very significant to me since I have done some ICC papers on the subject. I was not part of the panel up front. The discussion showed that there were different views on when impacts from space could happen in a young age view of Earth history. There was a lot of discussion of whether to have impacts occurring in the Creation week or not. There seems to be an acknowledgement of the possibility of impacts during Noah’s Flood but there’s a wide range of opinions on how many impacts and their significance. Some ideas on impacts and the Flood presented at the ICC confirms certain things in my papers but there are still a number of puzzling questions. There is radioactive decay data, impact crater data, and magnetic data and creationists have not come to a consensus on how to reconcile all these types of data. We need God’s help to figure out these puzzles.

Young age creationist scientists have a lot more good solid research than the evolutionists know. There are many exciting evidences from creation research that confirm the truth of the Bible. There are also many questions raised by new findings that show we are finite creatures who don’t have all the answers.