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sometimes it takes a lot of work to find an alternative to the naturalistic approach that assumes the Bible is wrong or outdated.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.

I recently watched a very good video called “Behemoths Buried Alive.”  The video is a lecture by creationist Michael Oard and it is produced by Creation Ministries International (CMI)  I would like to summarize some of the main points of the presentation and comment. It has to do with what happened to dinosaurs in Noah’s Flood.  I would recommend the video.

Evolutionists have challenged creationists by bringing up evidence regarding dinosaurs that they see as incompatible with the idea of a global Flood, like the Noahic Flood described in Genesis.  One problem with evolutionist’s attempting to challenge creationists on the Flood is that they seldom look at all the relevant current research from creationists.  They tend to attack ideas that are not necessarily believed by creationists anyway, or which are simply out of date.  Another problem with evolutionists challenges to creationists on the Flood is that Noah’s Flood was a much more complex event than they envision.  It is true that creationist scientists do not all agree on every detail about how the Flood took place.  Neither do evolutionists agree on every detail about how evolution took place or how Earth’s surface features came about.  The facts are often challenging to explain from either point of view.  But creationists have made more progress in geology than they are given credit for.

Evolutionists have brought up various facts that give evidence of dinosaurs that were alive in some setting prior to fossils or fossil footprints forming.  So the argument is that since the evidence has dinosaurs making footprints it could not have been during a Flood.  Evolutionary thinking often views fossils in terms of how dinosaurs normally lived.  So though it would have been some local catastrophe that caused the fossils to form, it would not point to a global Flood.  Also, since according to evolutionists, the evidence suggests normal circumstances such as dinosaurs laying nests of eggs, it does not suggest a global Flood but just points to occasional events that happened in Earth history, such as volcanic eruptions or impacts for instance.

As an example consider the dinosaur footprints in the Paluxy river, in Texas.  There is a long dinosaur trackway of fossil footprints in cretaceous rock South of Fort Worth.  There are many other examples of fossil footprint trackways around the world also.  The fossil footprints at the Paluxy river are found in sedimentary rock, most of them are large three-toed footprints of Acrocanthasaurus.  These footprints are on top of many layers of sedimentary rock that creationists would say formed in Noah’s Flood.  So how is it that there were live dinosaurs making tracks in the mud that became these rocks?  There are different views on this from creationists.  But I suspect many creationists with a geology background would say these footprints were made early in the Flood.  Mike Oard argues for this very well I think.

The Genesis account describes 40 days and nights of rain, but that does not mean the Earth was covered in merely 40 days.  The entire Flood event, as measured by the time Noah and family were in the Ark, was a bit over a year.  Mike Oard takes the view that the peak water depth of the Flood was around the 150 day mark.  I think this is possible but I would prefer to put that somewhat earlier in the Flood year.  At any rate, this means that it may have taken somewhere between 2 and 5 months for the Earth to be totally covered with water.  It has been argued both from geological considerations and even from Biblical details that the water rose in an unsteady, possibly oscillatory manner.  There are a number of possible physical causes of this, such as tectonic uplift and subsidence of the continents, lunar tides (which may be more pronounced in a global ocean), tsunamis, and Flood ocean currents.  These effects could make waters deposit sediment (mud) on the continent, then the water could retreat, allowing animals not yet dead to temporarily escape the waters, only to be buried later when the water rises again.  So before the Earth was totally covered many things could have happened as animals, including dinosaurs, were trying to get away from the rising waters.  Dinosaurs and other animals could have survived in areas for some weeks possibly before being finally killed and buried.  Oard also says that dinosaurs that left fossil footprints are more likely to be better swimmers.  Waters “coming and going” rising in an oscillating manner could also explain the repeating sedimentary rock layers that are common.  For example, there may be hundreds or thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks that oscillate between sandstone and clay for instance.

There is also evidence of dinosaur eggs on many places around the world.  These eggs and nests are on top of sedimentary rocks that had to have formed in the Flood, yet they are evidence that dinosaurs were alive at least long enough to lay the eggs.  Oard makes some good points on the dinosaur eggs.  Actual dinosaur nests are relatively rare, compared to the eggs.  The eggs are often laid on flat plains where there is no evidence of vegetation around them.  In other words the eggs are often found in locations that would not be a good location for a dinosaur to lay it’s eggs.  A nest for dinosaur would be a shallow depression so that it would hold moisture to keep the eggs from drying out.  Vegetation would also be packed around it.  Yet the fossil eggs often do not have intact nests, though there are some nests.  Dinosaur eggs are very porous and so if they are not kept moist the embryo will die.  Yet the eggs are often found in a circle or half-circle on what was flat ground.  This suggests the dinosaurs sometimes were laying their eggs under stress, not in normal conditions.

Then there are a number of examples of bone beds, also called fossil graveyards, where thousands of animals and/or dinosaurs were buried together.  What would cause there to be as many as 10,000 dinosaurs to congregate in one area and then be buried together, if not a massive catastrophe?  In these bone beds, there are few baby or juvenile dinosaurs.  (Juveniles would likely be killed easier and possibly be scavenged more.)  The bones do not have evidence that they were exposed to the air or to normal decay for a long time before they were buried.  Yet, in some cases, the bones have been broken into many fragments by violent water action and are mixed in mud with other bones and rock.  These bone beds sometimes cover a wide area.  Well known sites include areas in Montana and Colorado, for instance.

Oard makes a number of other good points.  The part on polar dinosaurs is quite good I think.  Evolutionists don’t have a good explanation for polar dinosaur fossils because they use the present to try and understand the past.  But what if the Earth and the life on it were once very different and it was changed by God’s judgement?  Believing that there was once a global Flood makes a lot more sense than most people in the sciences think.